A social media marketing service is where someone manages your social media accounts for you, driving followers, creating content, implementing a content and growth strategy, increasing engagement and sales and more.
Oftentimes, it is a social media marketing agency or a freelancer that provides these services for businesses.
Social media marketing (SMM) is the process of leveraging social media platforms, like Facebook, Instagram and TikTok for example, to grow your business through increased brand awareness and sales.
The goal of social media marketing is to increase followers, video views, post engagement, website traffic and ultimately, leads and sales.
A social media marketing agency consists of a team of social media experts who create and execute a social media marketing strategy custom-made for your business.
This usually includes a follower growth plan, a content strategy and calendar, a paid ad strategy and a designer or creator to actually create the posts in a way that’s on-brand and aesthetically-pleasing to your audience.
There are 3 main ways that business benefit from social media marketing:
Relationship-Building
You hear a lot that social media helps with “brand awareness,” but what does brand awareness really mean?
People cannot buy from your business if they don’t know that it exists; we know how brand awareness helps in that sense in that it literally makes people aware of your brand.
Beyond that, however, you should think of brand awareness as a means of relationship-building.
When you start to acquire followers, think of them as real people entering your marketing funnel as opposed to just a vanity metric.
When you do this, it’ll make you want to cultivate a strong relationship with your followers instead of just increasing them for the sake of increasing them.
Social media gives consumers a direct line of communication with brands, so use that to your advantage! Ask them questions, answer their questions and have an open dialogue with them.
Learn about your customers directly from the source. The more you understand about them, the better you can create content that’s actually helpful and valuable to them.
Vice versa, the more value they receive from you on social media, the more likely they are to purchase from you over competitors.
This is how you can use social media to create meaningful relationships with potential customers.
Brand-Consumer Trust
A byproduct of building relationships with social media followers is increasing brand-consumer trust.
Statistically, trust is one of the top most important things a customer needs to feel in order to buy from a brand, especially a new or smaller brand.
Trust could look like a few things:
- They need to trust that your business is real and not a scam that is stealing their information at checkout.
- They need to trust that your product or service is as described or pictured (we’ve all seen those Amazon product photos that are clearly photoshopped where the real product looks nothing like the picture!)
- They need to trust that your product or service is actually going to help them by accomplishing a goal they have or solving a problem they have.
Social media allows you to build consumer trust in all three of those areas with video product or service demonstrations, customer reviews and testimonials, direct messaging and free value in your posts.
Increased ROI
At the end of the day, your social media marketing efforts are done in the hopes of increasing ROI.
If it’s not contributing revenue at a profitable cost, you may need to reevaluate your strategy.
Social media can increase your ROI in two ways:
- Organically: In this method, you are organically attracting followers and engagement via strategic, free value in your posts, filling the top of your marketing funnel with new people.
- Paid: In this method, you are spending money on sponsored posts and paid advertisements to target your exact audience and send them to your website to convert.
Either way, you have the opportunity to use social media as a tool to attract new customers and increase your ROI, whether it’s via long-form organic methods or via direct paid methods.
While agencies that offer social media marketing services, like LYFE Marketing, offer a custom strategy for every business, there is a general blueprint on how social media marketing works.
Social Media Marketing Funnel
When you think about the bigger picture of your marketing efforts, you need to think of it in terms of a funnel.
At the top of your marketing funnel, you have the awareness stage where people are entering the funnel.
They are just starting to learn that your brand exists and hear about what you offer for the first time.
Then, you have the consideration stage, where people are engaging with your brand, signing up for your email and text lists and understanding how your offerings help them.
Then, you have the conversion stage, where people buy your product or service, refer other people to it and buy from you again if applicable.
Social media marketing is meant to fuel the top of your marketing funnel and then nurture them throughout until they become a customer.
SMM Strategy
Once you have the basic framework of your marketing funnel nailed down, you can start to arrange your social media marketing strategy accordingly.
You want to attract the right customers, and then nurture them appropriately until they convert. Here is a general SMM strategy that you can use and build upon:
- Clarify what your business goals are and choose SMM goals that align with those objectives (ex: brand awareness = followers, sales = website traffic).
- Define who your ideal customer is (age, location, gender, income, job title, behaviors, likes, dislikes, industry, interests,)
- Study your competition (identify their strengths and weaknesses and what your shared target market seems to respond best to)
- Create a calendar of both organic posts and paid ads and map out which part of your funnel each is serving
- Make sure your content and ads always provide value and directly address your audience’s needs and goals
- Track your results either biweekly or monthly and adjust your SMM strategy appropriately
Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
Once you start generating leads and customers from social media, you’ll want a place to follow up with and keep track of them in their buyer’s journey.
This is where a CRM program comes into play.
What is a CRM? A CRM, which stands for customer relationship management, is a software that manages and tracks customer or lead interactions.
Customer data is valuable and should be studied to inform your SMM strategy, and thankfully a CRM makes that extremely easy to do.
You can look to see which lead magnets are getting the most engagement vs which aren’t.
You can see where people are falling out of your marketing funnel and why vs what’s causing them to purchase.
You can ensure customers aren’t getting the same messaging over and over accidentally or getting missed entirely.
You can leverage a CRM to measure not just purchases from social media, but multiple mini-goals leading up to the purchase well.
Shareable Content & User-Generated Content (UGC)
There are two types of content you want to make sure you include in your SMM strategy:
- Shareable Content: You want to create social media posts that are likely to be shared or DMed (direct messaged) to other people. This should happen organically if you are creating content that is nothing but helpful and of value to your target market. Put yourself in your audience’s shoes. What would they care about or find meaningful?
- User-Generated Content: UGC is when you repost your followers’ content of your product or service. You’ll want to ask for permission to repost it first, and most will say yes. Include UGC in your social media content will show your followers that people just like them are buying your product or service and doing so proudly. Sometimes this is also referred to as earned media.
Viral Social Media Marketing
Viral marketing refers to instances where your social media posts get viral views, such as thousands, hundreds of thousands or even millions of views and comparable engagement as a result.
If you’ve followed all of the right steps so far, you may see some of your posts go viral simply because of how helpful they are.
The most popular type of post to go viral often falls into a category called “edutainment,” from the words education and entertainment.
These posts provide value in a way that’s humorous or engaging to the viewer. Helpful, entertaining and inspiring are often the key ingredients for a viral post.
Customer Segmentation
Within your target market, you may find you have different segments of customers.
For example, if you sell coolers, you may find one customer segment includes soccer moms and tailgaters, while another segment includes outdoor enthusiasts and long term campers.
Your social media posts and ads can be used to address each of the different segments at different points in your marketing funnel.
Social media marketing agencies work to grow your business through popular social media platforms. This is how our social media marketing agency works and our process:
1. We do a deep dive into your business.
We have our clients fill out an in-depth questionnaire and we have an introductory call to understand everything there is to know about your business.
2. We identify your ideal target customers.
We create a buyer persona that outlines your target customer’s interests, demographics, behaviors and more.
3. We perform a competitor analysis.
We look at what your competitors are doing and identify any strengths or weaknesses and opportunities for your business to beat them.
4. We create a social media strategy.
We map out a plan for your organic content, paid ads or both based on the data and research we’ve acquired so far.
5. We implement that social media strategy.
We create all of the content, copy ads, videos and visuals needed to execute the social media strategy we created and get everything published.
6. We track results and pivot accordingly.
We measure the results of our efforts, and make any changes where necessary to ensure we’re hitting the goals set for your business. These results and suggested changes are presented in a monthly report that’s easy-to-read.
There are several benefits that small businesses experience when they work with a social media marketing agency. Here are a few of them:
1. You have an expert at the helm of your marketing campaign.
We hate to break it to you, but your teenage niece posting TikToks is probably not equipped to do all that’s possible for your social media marketing campaign. With an SMM agency, you get real professionals who have a track record of producing results (ROI) for businesses over and over again.
2. You have more time to focus on other areas of your business.
With experts taking social media marketing off your plate, you can focus on other parts of your business that need your attention. This still holds true even if you compare employing an agency to employing an in-house team, because you’d still have to manage an in-house team. With an SMM agency, you can be as involved as you want to be.
3. You see an increase in your revenue.
While some social media marketing agencies may say they can generate results, agencies, like LYFE Marketing, will have copious amounts of reviews, testimonials, case studies and more to prove those claims. The right agency will help you increase your revenue at a rate that’s profitable to you.
One of the biggest perks of social media marketing is the ability to track and measure what you’re doing.
Unlike traditional marketing, you don’t have to guess if what you’re doing is working.
You can track everything and know with certainty if your social media marketing efforts are driving customers or not.
Most social media platforms come with their own analytics built in to the app, but there are additional social media analytics tools you can pay for for more extensive tracking.
Most social media marketing agencies will already have analytics programs that you can use when you sign up for their services.
Google Analytics (GA) is a popular, free tool you can use to track your social media marketing efforts (among the rest of your marketing efforts).
It takes a little know-how to set up, but once you have successfully set up your GA account, you can track exactly how many website visitors, leads and/or sales are coming from the various social media platforms.
Tracking your social media marketing efforts is important because you don’t want to blindly create content or social media ads and not without knowing if they’re actually driving the results you want.
If Instagram Reel A brought in 50 followers and Instagram Reel B only brought in 2, then you should make more content that shares the same topic and formatting as Reel A.
If Facebook Ad #1 brought in 3 leads at a high cost per lead, and Facebook Ad #2 brought in 10 leads at a lower cost per lead, you should put more money towards Facebook Ad #2.
All of your social media marketing decisions should be directly informed by customer data and social media data.
Businesses should consider the pros and cons of social media marketing and weigh them against what’s most important to them.
| PROS | CONS |
|---|---|
 Can help increase brand awareness and sales |
 Can be time-consuming to set up and maintain without help |
| Gives businesses mass-exposure for little to no cost |
May see little or inconsistent exposure as the algorithms change |
| Can generate instant engagement and website traffic with paid social media ads |
May see little to no results without professional help |
| Can generate positive brand-consumer interactions |
May generate negative interactions on a public stage |
What do social media marketing services include?
Social media marketing services typically include follower growth, a content strategy, an advertising strategy, message monitoring and organic engagement.
What are social marketing services?
Social marketing services are where a team of social media experts make a plan to market your business on social media platforms such as Facebook, and then implement that plan on your behalf.
What do you do as a social media marketing agency?
As a social media marketing agency, we drive followers, engagement, website traffic, leads and sales for our clients at a rate that’s profitable for them.
What does a social media marketing agency do?
A social media marketing agency drives results, such as followers and sales, for other businesses through social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram.
What is sticky content in social media marketing?
Sticky content in social media marketing means engaging content that attracts followers and customers quickly and causes them to take action (such as making a purchase or engaging) instead of scrolling past it.
What is viral marketing in social media marketing?
Viral marketing in social media marketing refers to the creation of social media posts with the hope that they will obtain viral numbers, such as millions of likes, shares and views, leading to a rapid increase of website traffic and customers.
What is earned media in social media marketing?
Earned media in social media marketing is brand exposure from efforts that don’t include paid advertising. So, this could include reviews, testimonials, UGC (user-generated content), shares and more.
What are some examples of social media marketing strategies?
Some examples of social media marketing strategies include organic engagement tactics, influencer marketing, paid advertising, user-generated content strategies, automated marketing and more.
Other Social Media Marketing Resources
Other Social Media Resources
- How To Choose The Right Social Media Marketing Agency: 9 Things To Look For
- The 5 Best Social Media Platforms To Advertise On
- How Much Does A Social Media Marketing Agency Charge?
- How To Choose A Social Media Marketing Service
- What Does A Social Media Ad Cost?
- How Much To Hire A Social Media Marketer?
- What Are The Best Social Media Marketing Services?
- How to Sell on TikTok Shop [7 Easy Steps]
- Social Media Trends 2024: Unveiling the Future of Social Media Marketing
- TikTok Metrics: Understanding Key Performance Indicators for Success
