Many people know of the term ‘social media marketing’, however not many people know what this process actually entails – at grassroots level. As being a social media marketing is a very lucrative career to get into these days, we thought that we’d unpack exactly what this term means.
What is marketing?
In their book entitled Marketing Management (which has now become a staple resource on marketing courses), Philip Kotler and Kevin Lane Keller define ‘marketing’ as the following:
“Marketing deals with identifying and meeting human and social needs … ‘meeting needs profitably’.”
The American Marketing Association (AMA) also has also thrown their hat into the ring when it comes to proposing a definition of ‘marketing’. The AMA states that marketing is “… an organizational function and a set of processes for creating, communicating, and delivering value to customers and for managing customer relationships in ways that benefit the organization and its stake holders.”
What’s key here in terms of our discussion about social media marketing is ‘communicating’. Marketing is all about communicating a company’s brand message to their audience so that these audience members will respond well to what is being said and will ultimately buy what the company is offering.
The crux of social media marketing
Given that the nucleus of marketing is all about communication, social media marketing is simply about using the medium of social media to communicate a brand, product and/or service message.
What’s crucial with respect to marketing on social media is that the correct channel needs to be chosen to broadcast your company’s message. If you end up disseminating your message on the wrong channel, you’ll waste the time, budget and effort that you’ve spent on developing your campaign because the social media audience won’t respond to what you’re putting out.