SMM marketing is not a new marketing trend for a long time now. However, despite the great competition and difficult user behavior, smm-marketing remains one of the most effective ways to promote your products and services. In this article we will understand how to competently use smm-marketing, what strategies are used by the best smm-marketers and what awaits this sphere in the future.
In 2023, company marketers are actively competing with each other, and users are dramatically changing their attitudes towards brands on an almost daily basis. In order to effectively utilize social media to promote your offers, it’s important to utilize a plan that includes actionable strategies.
Now let’s take a look at social media strategies:
Videos
Video content is much more positively received among social media users. According to Sprout Social, 54% of marketers believe that video is the content that is best suited for social media posting. And according to Wyzowl, 87% of marketers confirm that posts with videos help to multiply the number of sales.
Most social networks support posting video content of various types: Stories in Instagram, live broadcasts in FaceBook, short videos in TikTok. YouTube is focused only on video content. Each social network has its own advantages when placing video content — in TikTok you can establish interaction with a young audience, in Instagram well promoted nutra offers, FaceBook is convenient to get traffic from mobile devices and so on. In addition, video content significantly increases the time users spend on a company’s account or website, which has a positive impact on audience engagement and further conversion.
Social media sales
In addition to smm-marketing, there is another subspecies of marketing in social networks — social commerce. This trend is gaining momentum extremely fast and there is every chance to believe that it will become even more popular than regular smm-marketing. Most social networks have in-app purchase features. Marketers can promote their offers without leaving the social network. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok and Pinterest have such a feature. Many users of social networks prefer to make purchases inside apps or look for goods in them for further purchase offline.
Influencer marketing
Influencers and social media are inextricably linked. When smm-marketing first emerged, promoting influencers in conjunction with a famous media personality generated huge revenues for companies. Over time, social media users have become more selective and this strategy no longer works. Now marketers are looking for micro-influencers who influence a specific, highly engaged audience that matches the company’s target audience. This generates significantly more sales than reaching out to influencers to a broader audience.
For a successful and long-term relationship with an Influencer, it is important that the promotion be organic and authentic. Otherwise, the audience will understand the promotional subtext and stop responding to such content. The best solution is to introduce advertising gradually to create a gradual improvement in the relationship between the Influencer and the company.
User-generated content
Social media advertising has become commonplace for users. Advertisements no longer elicit little to no response from the audience — they just get clicked through. That’s why applying blatant advertising and overly salesy posts is a failed strategy.
But there is another, winning strategy — using user-generated content. User-generated content is material posted by users or marketers in the guise of users. Such materials serve as proof of the quality of the product or service provided by the company. This method brings a much greater increase in sales than creative advertising with a large budget allocated for it.
It is important to incentivize the audience to make user-generated content. This can be done by providing discounts, bonuses, free giveaways of goods for posting a review of the product or service. You can also use positive reviews from customers posted as posts in the company’s account feed as user-generated content.
Customer Service
Users often take a company’s social media accounts as a means of contact when they have any problems with a product or service they have purchased. Customers leave reviews on social media with complaints or praise for the company, share their experiences of use, and contact managers for assistance.
In order not to alienate the audience, it is important to help customers with difficulties, respond to their comments and posts. It’s also worth paying attention to the speed of contacting customers who have asked for help or responding to complaints. Start a customer service team and leave their contacts on all of your company’s social media accounts. This will help strengthen your connection with your audience and gain their trust.
Regulatory oversight
While brands used to be able to do almost anything on social media, social media is now actively regulated. All companies need to be aware of the rules and regulations on a particular social network so that they don’t run into trouble. If you decide to promote your social media offers in association with Influencers, it’s important to check them for rules before collaborating too. This will eliminate the possibility of ruining your social media reputation and prevent your account from being blocked.
The future of smm-marketing
Of course, it’s impossible to predict the future of smm-marketing 100%, but due to the development of new technologies and social media marketing, we can predict a few things that are likely to appear in smm-marketing in the near future.
Application of AI
Artificial intelligence is developing at a tremendous pace – new innovative chatbots appear regularly and old ones are constantly being improved. Not surprisingly, artificial intelligence functions have started to be introduced into social networks. There are already AI-based services that create content for social networks. However, these are third-party platforms that are not built into social media. When chatbots become more commercially available, it’s quite possible that brands will start using them for their own purposes.
For example, AI-powered chatbots could be used to answer customer questions or customer service. Chatbots could also be used to provide information about a company’s product or services. Such technology can easily be implemented in social media, and it will also significantly reduce the workload of the team, freeing them up for more important tasks.
Tightening rules
In 2023, social media is trending towards stricter rules and requirements for companies on social media. Also, some social networks, such as FaceBook, are introducing paid features to disable ads and collect user data. It is quite possible that in the future, the conditions for smm-marketing will become even more severe, which will affect the effectiveness of this method of promoting offers.
Video content is becoming more and more popular, gradually displacing other types of content. This is due to many factors – the ease of processing information through video, the large number of children on social networks, and the simple laziness of users. Most likely, over time, all text posts and images will disappear, making room for video creatives.
Conclusion
Despite the fact that smm-marketing has become far from as effective as it was originally it remains one of the most promising areas of marketing. Moreover, smm-marketing is the most effective way to establish contact between a company and its audience. For smm-marketing to bring maximum results, use proven strategies and focus on new trends to always move together with the development of social networks
