Social Media Marketing (SMM)

“Social media marketing,” or “SMM,” is when we use social media to market our company’s goods and services. Mind = blown, right? Who’d’a thunk it? But even though the term itself is pretty self-explanatory, there’s a lot that goes into this whole SMM thing.

The overarching goal of SMM is to drive traffic to our website; the overarching hope is that that increased traffic will lead to increased sales and, thus, increased revenue. Most of the time, this is kind of a three-pronged process. First, we’ve got to have a good online presence that goes beyond having a nifty website. We need to be on social media platforms. We should have accounts on Facebook, Insta, Pinterest, the Twitterverse, any platform that might cultivate some interest in our business. Second, we need to produce seriously shareable and taggable social media ads, the kind we not only watch all the way through, but also share with our squad so they can watch it too. And third, we’ve got to have good word-of-mouth-ness going on. Maybe we’ve got some Instagram Influencers out there swearing our products changed their lives. Maybe we’ve got a bunch of customer testimonials that we include in those ads we mentioned. Whatever it is, we want our crowd of potential customers to see that people just like them have used—and loved—our products.

So how is this different from normal marketing efforts? Well, in some ways it’s not. After all, we’re still trying to get more customers, promote brand recognition, and do all of the things we do with standard marketing campaigns. SMM is just a little more targeted and prescriptive than, say, a TV commercial or an ad in a magazine. Social media platforms capture so much information about us that it makes it easier to come up with a quick FB ad that will specifically appeal to, for example, single dads in the Midwest.

SMM also relies on the social aspect of social media—i.e., we like things, we share things, we go “live” promoting things, and we tend to pay more attention to things that are liked, shared, and promoted by people we know—whereas standard marketing relies more on market saturation—i.e., if enough people see this “My Pillow” commercial, some of them are bound to buy one.