What Is Social Media Marketing? How SMM Works?

Calvyn Lee
4 min readJul 9, 2021

Imagine old days, if you looking to release a book and set up a blog, you’ll sure that you’ll be successful!

But you only worried about one thing, you don’t know how to ensure that your book reaches the right target audience who could enjoy your book.

During that period, however, there were only a few forms of advertisement available, like print ads, billboards, radio, direct mail, direct sales and the television.

These options were pretty expensive, their effectiveness couldn’t be accurately determined, and they didn’t let you advertise your content to the appropriate audience, your book would never find the audience it deserved.

Can Digital Marketing Help You?

Now let’s have a look at the same scenario in the present day!

Alongside traditional forms of advertising, you would have access to digital marketing, a form of marketing that’s a lot more lucrative, inexpensive and configurable;

A marketing that would enable marketers to advertise their audience digitally using channels like search engines, websites, social media platforms, emails, etc.

Among these types, social media marketing (SMM) may catch your eye!

What Is Social Media Marketing?

Social media marketing would give you the opportunity to take advantage of social media platforms to advertise your content to a highly targeted audience.

It would help more people learn about your book, increase the interaction with your audience, it’s relatively inexpensive unless you go into advertising, and will help you get marketplace insights that might help in understanding your audience preferences better.

FREE Social Media Certification

You may start by taking up some free digital marketing course and certification such as eMarketing or HubSpot Academy, to learn more about social media marketing.

Since you were already familiar with the concept of social media marketing, your next step was to learn about the different content you could post on social media.

Some of the most common forms of content that you could post would be images, text posts, polls, and videos

Social Media Advertising

Yet, over time, you noticed fewer people were being exposed to your content.

You needed to advertise your content for that you would need to use the advertising options provided by the social media platforms.

Like Facebook ads, Instagram ads, YouTube ads, LinkedIn ads, and Twitter ads.

And you’ll have to spend money on these ads, to spread your content, or to attract potential clients to your book. All these options are great.

Image Ads

Most advertising platforms offer users with several options like image ads, these ads involve the use of single or multiple images that are attractive and have the optimal amount of text.

It also has a call to action that encourages user interaction. You could use images from your book, advertise websites that sell your book and more.

Text and Post Ads

There are text and post ads, these ads could advertise posts or excerpts from your blog or your book, further garnering interest from an interesting audience.

Text ads are the most popular and cost per click, and they only charged you when someone clicks on the ad. This is a great option for bloggers who want to promote a new blog post.

Video Ads

You could also use video ads, you could use video ads that feature favorable reviews, customer testimonials to advertise your book, show your book trailer & to drive traffic to your book website so you can use it as a lead generation mechanism.

You Video Ads can placed on premium sites like YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok and many more.

Lead Ads

You could also use lead ads, through which you could collect information from users who are interested in a weekly newsletter or regular updates from your blog.

How do lead ads work? Lead ads are clickable ads that take users to a landing page where they can sign up to receive information from your company.

What else on Social Media?

But that wasn’t the only thing you could do with social media platforms.

You could create a brand for yourself and drive audience interest to it, engage with them, create an identity engage with content, finding content that works for you.

Social media platforms also allowed you the opportunity to target audiences based on demographics like their age, location, gender, and much more.

In time you saw an increase in the number of viewers coming to your social media page and by extension your blog.

You also saw an increase in the number of people who bought your book, skyrocketing your audience.

Here are some things you learned:

  1. To set goals that were quantitative, smart and follow a constant deadline.
  2. To understand his audience by engaging and connecting with them.
  3. To set up a social media calendar to plan competitions, polls surveys videos and more
  4. Using tools like BuzzSumo, IFTTT, Buffer and more, for lead generation creating email lists, setting buyer personas and more.
  5. To perform visual storytelling with the help of images and videos.

But do you know what is social media marketing and how you can get so good it?

You can take up my lead generation using social media marketing course.

This course will enable you to have the skills to get good at social media marketing.

Checkout one of our free mini course, we give an introduction to all the major concepts of social media marketing.

Originally published at https://www.calvyn.com.

--

--