The benefits of social media marketing can’t be overemphasized. The covid-19 pandemic was an eye-opener to most of these benefits.
You could boost your ROI with the use of social media.
If you’re not already using social media for business, this guide will show you things that you are already missing.
Social media marketing is a term used to define the advertising and marketing practices of different brands and entrepreneurial enterprises through various dynamic social media platforms, like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, Wattpad, Tumblr, etc.
With the avid technological advancements all around the globe, it is impossible to imagine a present-day world without social media engagement, especially among the youth.
This mass involvement in the virtual world has been of extreme support for brands and companies looking for online exposure to reach a global audience.
Consumers and target customers can be located within minutes, just through your social media posts, provided your brand entices the prospects with virtual makeovers.
However, it is not easy to create merchantable commercial posts, having conviction enough to make customers out of the visual audience.
Using a social media marketing strategy requires creative skills, including creative writing, graphic designing, editing, blog posts or videos, audio tracks, or sound automation.
Immense dedication is required to create a brand image via something as volatile as social media, where quality is judged by number of likes or shares, which change by the minute, with a flick of a finger.
Examples of top social media platforms
A little insight into the numbers that define the following social media platforms must help anyone trying to understand the reason for using social media marketing for business.
Facebook is the largest social media platform with 2.23 billion monthly active users (MAUs), covering almost one-third of the world population.
It allows all kinds of content to be published, from audio, videos, live videos to texts and stories.
The new Facebook algorithm makes content with huge interactive and engaging elements to reach more people, especially friends, and relatives.
It, however, may be a matter of concern for advertisers and marketing managers, as their reach might be reduced to a smaller range.
To cope with the situation, social media managers now concentrate on the quality of the posts rather than the quantity.
More personalized and conversational content are being created to understand the distinctive qualities of different consumers.
Also, another important contributing factor to promotional purposes includes content optimized to use on mobile as 94% of Facebook users connect from the mobile app.
YouTube
YouTube is a video-centered platform with around 1.9 billion MAUs.
The site owned by Google is the second-largest social media platform and the second largest search engine after Google. Million and billion of hours of videos are watched on YouTube every day.
You can create a YouTube channel for your brand and use it to post advertisement videos of your products and gain consumer engagement through subscribers, and their consequent likes, shares, and comments.
However, another way to utilize this platform is via Youtubers or entrepreneurs who own independent YouTube channels, focusing on various trade genres.
For example, there are beauty bloggers, fashion bloggers, travel bloggers as well as food bloggers who can review the concerned products via entertaining videos and make it reach billions of their faithful subscribers.
The regularity and quality of content are of utmost importance to create a community on YouTube.
Advertisements can also be done through YouTube Ads which come up frequently in between content and capture the attention of interested viewers.
WhatsApp is the third largest social media site with 1.5 billion MAUs.
Although it is a messaging app designed for personal use. Around one hundred and eighty (180) countries worldwide use it daily.
This social media platform has gradually become an easily available means of communication with individual customers, attaining their distinct choices and preferences.
For example, students can get their hands on academic purchases from independent publishers and small shop-owners in the current pandemic situation, apart from the eminent e-commerce portals like Amazon or Flipkart.
Whatsapp enables users to build business accounts, create proper business profiles, provide adequate customer support, and share updates to customers about their purchases.
It has two different wings for business accounts, one for small businesses, the WhatsApp business app and for medium and large businesses, the Whatsapp business API.
Messenger
Messenger is another messaging app featured on Facebook that has approximately 1.3 billion MAUs. Since 2011, Facebook has made Messenger a standalone app, expanding its features to new lengths.
In advertising content and other marketing requirements, your enterprise can now opt for creating chatbots, sending newsletters, and more of such features to enhance your sales.
You can use the Facebook messenger to drive leads and sales to messenger ads, redirect your prospects to a messenger conversation with the chatbot, and answer a series of questions.
The customer can avail a real sales representative too.
A recent survey showed that social media is becoming a one-to-one channel rather than a one-to-many service.
Hence, Messenger helps deliver quality content exclusively to the users and providing enticing advertising campaigns.
Another similar app is WeChat, which has 1.06 billion MAUs. It’s mostly popular in China and Asia.
WeChat offers a myriad of services, including online shopping, money transactions, booking taxis, and so forth.
That is a lot of benefits you can ever imagine with just a social media platform!
Instagram is an extensively used social media platform that has around 1 billion MAUs. Much like Facebook, it enables photo and video sharing primarily for personal interactions.
However, within the last decade, it has grown as a major promotional platform for many businesses, from films and entertainment to fashion, lifestyle, food, books, and academic and corporate services.
India, slowly but steadily, has seen the emerging blogger community blossom on Instagram, known as influencers or Instagrammers.
By creating a business account on Instagram, your brand can successfully engage the masses with your advertisements and sales. Instagram even has a shop feature to enable online purchases for the advertised products.
Apart from that, promotional content can be created in posts, stories, reels, IGTV videos, and so forth.
An Instagram business profile will provide insights and analytics of the profile and posts and even schedule posts using third-party tools.
There are more benefits of social media for businesses to exploit with other platforms like Tumblr, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc.
They provide simple ways to network with other businesses for collaborations or with consumers to understand their needs.
Erik Qualman, the author of Socialnomics, points out that
“The power of social media is it forces necessary changes.”
– Erik Qualman
The words say it all!
Social media is no longer just about personal communication. It has stormed and revolutionized the way we communicate today.
Brands and commercial entities have never been so close to their customers, either loyal or potential.
Social media has blurred the lines between personal and professional communication because the platform connects people to people, probably the best alternative to socializing in person and of critical essence while practicing social distancing.
Top benefits of social media marketing
The specific benefits of social media for business go beyond marketing. However, there a lot of social media benefits to know and make your business flourish globally.
In this guide, I would point out only ten benefits that are highly important to every business and individual salesperson.
You can use social media to:
Boost brand awareness
Creating a virtual brand image is necessary in a business world where most customers are tech-savvy young people, who are often difficult to convince.
Although the work is simple, you need to create an account or a channel and then post the necessary advertisement content.
However, bringing out that conviction in delivering your content and interacting with your customer would decide your brand’s online scope of visibility.
It secures constant communication with your consumers and other brands and sponsors, who would be interested in collaborating further.
Over 91% of marketers have claimed that their social marketing efforts greatly increased their exposure. Hence, just by the likes, shares, and comments, a business can elevate its presence online successfully.
Increase in inbound traffic
Social media marketing enables the inbound traffic to extend beyond the regular customers.
The social media sites incorporated in the marketing strategies will be a gateway leading to the official brand page, making it popular and relevant with constant shares in smaller networks, like in friends or family groups.
But these little contributions and exposures join hands to boost sales on a large scale on a year-round basis.
To cater to customers’ diverse tastes, backgrounds, and needs, especially the present-day millennials, who have easy access to the optimum keywords required for their favorite products, it is imperative to ensure a brand’s social media presence grows and thrives.
Search engine rankings
Search engine optimization is necessary to keep in mind while planning social media marketing strategies.
It helps achieve higher page rankings and traffic of your business website. Meanwhile, the role of a business website development becomes very crucial to hit the best metrics.
Although it is not a social media task to increase search engine rankings.
More than 58% of marketers have seen a rise in rankings than offline businesses.
Using the best keyword research practices and creating SEO-friendly blogs, posts, articles, etc., will help your brand enhance awareness virtually and keep a steady influx of regular customers.
Don’t have a blog yet?
This guide on how pro blogs are made in 30 minutes will help you.
Incorporating employee profiles, business information, infographics, case studies in your brand’s social media profile will establish its credibility and trust from customers online.
Conversion rates
An increase in brand visibility will ensure higher conversion rates for the company.
Every blog post, video, image, or comment may lead viewers to your company’s website and increase its traffic.
The actions of constantly engaging with customers via liking, sharing, commenting, or posting stories, personify your brand.
This humanization helps make your brand approachable.
Human beings like to do business with other people and not with big companies.
Hence, social media interactions fill up that vacuum of recognition and make the customers and collaborators feel at home, to do business honestly and comfortably.
Customer satisfaction
The relationship between a brand and its customer is similar to any other personal relationships we experience in life.
It depends solely on conversations and interactions.
Therefore, continuous responses from both sides are necessary to secure mutual trust and most of the company’s sales.
Social media platforms provide that space to communicate and understand the consumer better.
Investment of time and energy in creating steady connections with the customers ensures loyalty from the buyer’s side. And loyal customers spend more time with the company enabling a long-term scope of business.
Whether replying to questions or complaints of the customers, positive reviews from them are necessary for expanding the business further.
Brand loyalty
Social media marketing secures loyal consumers globally by circulating the brands’ products, reviews, and staff interactions on the internet.
The millennial generation is famous and known for being the most loyal customers of all the brands.
Born between the early 1980s and the early 2000s, millennials are the largest generation in US history, thriving on pop culture and will soon consume the market wholly.
This segment of customers is 62% more loyal to brands directly engaging with them on social media.
Since this tech-savvy generation requires regular communication with their brands, businesses must implement social media marketing to get the attention of their most influential consumers.
Brand authority
Customer satisfaction and loyalty already contribute to the growth of a business and secure a steady market for the same, therefore establishing the authority of the brand.
When the customers experience honest and creative responses to their appeals, they share and mention the brand on their pages and others.
More people indulge in the products, and amplifying the brand impression further helps create a larger audience.
New visitors will only rely on people they know, and if those happen to be the already existing customers, the business will take off in no time.
Hence, brand authority is ensured over millions of impressionable minds, which then make purchases accordingly.
Cost-effective method
Most social media platforms are free.
Hence creating an account or posting a blog, article, video, or image doesn’t require any expenditure.
And on the few platforms where any paid promotions are required, it can be considered a small investment for the company’s future.
These are rather tiny amounts compared to other forms of promotions included in the marketing and advertising strategies.
However, social media provide large returns by extending the reach to a wide gamut of diverse people, thereby contributing to the budget set for marketing the company.
With time, however, social media strategies can be more efficient and be a lucrative means of garnering profit.
Marketplace insights
Direct interaction with the audience is possibly the best way to be well acquainted with their choices, demands, and needs.
Continuous monitoring of the activities and analytics of your business profile will help keep regular updates on consumer responses and other companies.
Social media can be implemented as an efficient research tool to keep an eye on ongoing business trends and news.
Another interesting benefit of social media marketing is categorizing the content syndication lists based on topic and identifying which types of content generate the most impressions for your business.
Leadership
Posting meaningful content on social media platforms and incorporating different advertisement campaigns prepare your brand to be a thought leader or a pioneer in the field.
Being a thought-provoking brand is important to inspire and cultivate the different messages that align with the brand and simultaneously resonate with its customers.
Hence, engaging with the customer, creating insightful yet enticing content, and keeping track of the online viability of the business provide a holistic improvement in the company’s stature.
Great efforts, combined with supportive online networking tools can produce the ultimate bee-hive of your business.
Conclusion on the Benefits of Social Media Marketing
Aside all the benefits mentioned above, social media marketing has been proven to be effective in having a competent approach towards other contemporary companies.
You can use any platform of your choice to gain insights into other marketing strategies such as influencer marketing or user-generated content campaigns.
This can be a learning experience or a business strategy creation process.
The Sprout Social Index recently reported that 50% of consumers had increased their social media usage in the last six months during the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic.
57% of the audience will follow a brand to research new products or services, and 47% will follow to keep updated on the company.
After finding and following the brand on social media, 91% of the consumers will engage in the brand’s website or app, 89% will make purchases, and 85% will recommend and review the brand to friends and family.
However, a customer may unfollow a brand on social media for the poor quality of products, unprofessional customer service, irrelevant content, or too many ads.
Social marketers often face difficulties identifying and reaching their target audience, measuring ROI, and supporting the general business goals.
Hence, social media marketing remains one of the most efficient and important marketing and advertising strategies for all companies, big and small alike.
While small-scale companies experience growth and market expansion, large-scale companies secure solid markets and impressive profit margins via virtual marketing.
With a little bit of knowledge and insight about the workings of social media and its analytics, a brand can begin, augment, and receive acknowledgments globally.
The benefits of social media marketing are manifold, thereby making it the most important advertising tool for the business world, allowing easy engagement and interactions between the brands and their customers.
Thus, businesses are built on mutual trust, honesty, and loyalty and become easily approachable for the customers, making everything they want and need available without much erosion of energy and time.
Thus, all that remains now is the initiative to get started and promote your business on social media to attain the envisioned future goals of the company.
A wise well-thought-out investment decision now, can work overtime to produce extraordinary results for your brand on a sustained basis.
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