“The first rule of social media is that everything changes all the time. What won’t change is the community’s desire to network.” – Kami Huyse.
Who is not active on social media nowadays? Whether it is Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram, we check our social media accounts first thing in the morning.
Are you aware that there are more than 3.78 billion social media users worldwide? The popularity of social media helps understand that there is a bundle of benefits of social media marketing to different businesses.
A quick look at the statistics reveals that it is about the number of users and the quality of time they’re spending on social media. An average social media user has spent two hours and twenty-five minutes per day in 2021. Let us explore the multiple advantages of social media marketing for any business in detail, followed by the quick steps to start it in your industry.
What is Social Media Marketing?
“Lead people with what they want. – Lead with what they’ve already said. – Lead people from where they’re at. – Lead them with the things that concern them.” – Sandi Krakowski.
Looking Social Media Marketing (SMM) Companies? Check out Zensuggest’s list of the best Social Media Marketing (SMM) Companies.
First, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc., are the leading social media platforms and multiple other social media tools. The use of these social media portals to market your products or services is social media marketing. The customers are already there on social media and hence offer multiple benefits of social media to all businesses.
Advantages of Social Media Marketing
Source: lyfemarketing.com
The top benefits of social media marketing are based on different functionalities like branding, business growth, content creation, seamless communication, gaining insights, advertising benefits, offering ROIs, etc. Let us have a look at all these benefits one by one:
For Brand Building
Source: loyalwebsolutions.com
“People want to do business with you because you help them get what they want. They don’t do business with you to help you get what you want.” – Don Crowther.
The human touch in the brands
Gadgets surround the world, and hence it is the fundamental human connection that may separate your brand from other businesses. This human touch is ensured by introducing the customers to the owners and management of your business. This creates an excellent level of authenticity.
The improved authenticity further builds trust in the brands. This trust is the driving force that ensures brand receptiveness and creates a smooth road for opening new businesses. Thus, companies can let their customers know about the brand values and prominent members behind the organization and instantly link them to the customers.
Staying at the top of the news
Many social media users have agreed that they open their accounts many times a day, even without notification. This is due to social media’s popularity and attraction that keeps the users glued to it. As a result, social media marketing benefits for businesses stay high as they can use this power to remain at the top of the news.
Imagine the users are opening their social media and what they see at first is your business posts. Thus, businesses can go for scheduling the social media posts according to the researched timings. This ensures that your brand and posts remain at the top of the news irrespective of the competition.
Establishing a brand as a thought leader
Who doesn’t want to get connected to a brand that is a thoughtful leader? Customers are looking for businesses but are interested in gaining insights and valuable information. Many social media platforms have thus launched features for companies to present their thoughts to the customers.
The sharing of thoughts is one of the main benefits of social media for business and helps in community formation. Thus, companies can harness the power of social media in sharing their thoughts with the world. Moreover, these thoughts create the customers’ queries and keep them aligned with your business.
Improving brand awareness
One of the natural ways to increase brand awareness is to go for social media marketing. This is because your current and existing customers are already using social media. Therefore, it becomes easy to promote your business on a platform where you don’t attract customers. Moreover, many people have agreed that the different social media platforms have helped them find new products from official websites.
Further, improving brand awareness using social media is quick and doesn’t require any extra budget. You can use the posts created in digital marketing for social media, and hence it is an easy and effective way to improve your brand awareness.
For Business Growth
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“Engage, Enlighten, Encourage and especially…just be yourself! Social media is a community effort; everyone is an asset.” – Susan Cooper.
Leads generation
Any person interested in buying some product may directly place an inquiry on social media posts or websites. Thus, social media is one of the top ways to create highly qualified leads for any business. These leads have already gone through your social media channels and hence are ready for the sales proposals.
The social media ads offer all the information to the audiences that make them interested in the business. In addition, the particular promotional content options on the different social media channels make them an easy and low-commitment process to generate leads.
Influencers partnership
Many people have agreed to buy or go for the deals after only receiving recommendations from friends, colleagues, or family members. Thus, businesses can use social media to connect to the influencers who can motivate their followers to go for your services.
This word-of-mouth marketing from the leading social media influencers helps businesses get the attention of large audiences. Thus, companies partner with influencers who upload “how-to” videos and “unbox” videos for specific brands. This content from the influencers ensures high double click-through rates and increases the sales conversion rates.
Boosting sales
All businesses, irrespective of their niche, always look to increase their sales. Social media marketing platforms have become a crucial part of the sales funnel over the last few years. All leading product searches and eCommerce deals start from social media platforms.
No sales professional will ever agree that their sales process is detached from social media marketing. Whether it is about generating leads or promoting high-end services or products, social media is one of the effective ways to start the sales process. Attracting customers on social media and then offering them the best deals to promote sales at any time is one of the top benefits of social media marketing.
Increasing website traffic
Any digital marketing strategy has the ultimate aim of increasing website traffic. Social media marketing and different ads are some of the conventional ways to improve customer engagement on websites. In addition, these social channels are great ways to link your posts or blogs to the official website.
The other primary way to increase website traffic using social media is by participating in social chats. It increases business availability, gets attention from prospective customers, and showcases your expertise. All these help customers connect with the direct website of the company.
For Content Creation and Distribution
Source: outbrain.com
“Content Doesn’t Win—Optimized Content Wins” – Liana Evans.
Going viral
Who doesn’t want to go viral on social media? Going viral takes the likes, comments, and sharing to another platform that exposes the business products and services to new audiences. Thus, this sharing spreads your content across the different channels and hence attracts millions of shares globally.
It is difficult to go viral on social media without having a list of Facebook and Instagram likes and followers. The alternative is to take the help of other fans to share and like your content. This content sharing helps businesses go viral on different social media platforms. In addition, the various challenges on social media further increase brand visibility while making your content viral.
Different content sources
You may get content from different sources- ideas and materials for the post being the top two sources. Social media helps businesses to source ideas from different users by engaging them in social listening sessions. The idea is to satisfy customers. Henceforth, only such content is created that is the need of the social media users.
The second option is to source the materials for the content from social media. It can be created by organizing the contest or using user-generated content for social media sharing. These contests help businesses source content from different social media platforms.
Content promotion
Content marketing is leading the way as one of the trusted sources of digital marketing. However, it is not only about creating engaging content from different sources, and the central part is to promote the content on various platforms. It is impossible to miss the benefits of social media in promoting content.
Thus, social media marketing is an excellent benefit to promote intelligent and well-researched content on different accounts. Therefore, it becomes easy to distribute the content on social media that already hosts all possible audiences of your products or services.
For seamless communication
Source: clockwise.software
“Legendary service is one of the criteria that sets one company apart from its competitors. It’s the mark of a truly authentic company – you just can’t fake caring!” – Kim Garst.
Communication in crisis
It is not new for businesses to get into an immediate crisis. However, it may be a short-term or permanent crisis in any industry. So, will you use social media to tackle the situation in your organization? One of the best ways to communicate with customers during a crisis is via social media.
Social media marketing helps businesses to eliminate silence from the management side. The top leaders with dedicated social media accounts can communicate the crisis issues to the audience. The pre-planned social media posts or ads help manage the business communications in crisis and make them ready for any untoward incidents.
Customer support and customer services
The businesses that are not available on social media fail to generate trust in their customers. Further, many customers look to the social media accounts of the companies to have dedicated customer support or customer service team for their ready disposal. The customers are already available on social media, and it is time to offer high-end support and services to them through social media only.
While it relieves the stress on the customer support and services department, the immediate response from the company side pacifies the customers suffering from any quality issues.
Customers and audience engagement
Many customers wait for direct communication with the users that creates authenticity and offers a two-way communication medium. However, the one-way communication medium is the issues in the customer support and services best handled by the social media accounts.
The dedicated social media monitoring teams take your customer support and services department a step higher. It doesn’t only post on social media but also helps businesses answer companies’ posts. Thus, companies can stay active and respond to all possible queries and questions while solving multiple issues on social media only.
Reputation management
Having a bad reputation can be disastrous for any business. So, why not go for using social media platforms for managing the reputation of different companies. Thus, businesses are harnessing the potential of social media in creating a reputation that attracts multiple customers automatically.
Online reputation management or ORM is an internal part of many businesses. The negative comments of any customer on social media offer a chance to showcase your side of the story. Thus, social media provides end-to-end management of any business’s reputation and helps them gracefully handle negative reviews. As a result, it remains one of the preferred benefits of social media marketing.
For gaining insights
Source: bluesyemre.com
“Social media is about sociology and psychology more than technology.” – Brian Solis.
Gauging sentiment around the brands
Businesses may get to know about their brand details from social media through different analytics or insight reports. However, what matters the most is what is that the audience is talking about the business? This calls for the need to gauge the sentiment around the company.
A business may get several mentions on different social media accounts, but it all depends that these mentions are for positive or negative reviews. Thus, social media platforms are the perfect place to gain insight and input the right sentiment around the brand if required. Thus, sentiment analysis helps maintain the brand quality and hence increases the business profits.
Staying at the top of the industry news
While the social media posts and feed may keep your content at the top of the different social media platforms, staying at the top of the business news is equally important. It is great to have a virtual ear on social media platforms that enables social listening. This social listening routes the customers’ voices directly to the businesses and helps them get keen insights into their behaviors.
These insights from social media help businesses get current industry news and help them plan for the future accordingly. Thus, it ensures that no information, no matter how big or small, gets unnoticed by the marketing management.
Keeping a vigil at the competition
Businesses operate in a highly competitive world, making it more than essential to keep an eye on your counterparts. You can start it by taking a serious note of the mentions of your competitors on social media which makes it easy to get details about the customer pain points.
The close monitoring of competitor activity on social media helps create a list of the pain points you can work out. Hence, this strict vigil at the competition activity is necessary to gain market insights and is one of the key benefits of social media marketing.
Learning about customers
Surprisingly, businesses are interested in not only selling by learning about their customers. Social media platforms create enough data to generate the best real-time insights about the different customers if used sensibly. The leading social media platforms offer dedicated tools for gaining customer insights based on demographics, sales patterns, etc.
Social media platforms train businesses to get the best out of their customers from these analytics tools. But, on the other hand, the customers feel unique and valued when presented with custom-made deals and offers based on sound data collection. Thus, getting deep insights about their customers from social media patterns is one of the best uses of social media marketing.
For advertising
Source: mk0hootsuiteblof6bud.kinstacdn.com
“Social media is not only more cost-effective than advertising, but it also offers great opportunities for innovative engagement with your customers.” – Richard Branson.
Targeted advertising
The targeted advertising is one of the best benefits of the social media platform to the marketing teams. These accounts help businesses reach the right audience at the right time while saving multiple dollars in planning the targeted data segmentation.
The ad targeting options on Facebook, Twitter, and other popular social media platforms offer demographic information, languages, and geography features for making your ads reach the right audience. In addition, the pay-per-click or PPC ads on different social media platforms help businesses pay for the interested customers only. Thus, not only is targeting advertising reaching the right customers, but it is one of the cost-effective ways to promote business.
Retargeted advertising
Retargeting is the ultimate solution to shopping cart abandonment which is a burning issue for eCommerce businesses. The persons who abandon their shopping carts are the top prime prospective customers. This is because they’ve already researched the markets, visited the website, and have selected the product for purchase.
There may be different reasons for abandoning the cart, but eCommerce has no potential reason to leave these highly interested customers. Thus, social media comes to play in the retargeted advertising campaigns of businesses. The marketing teams show the relevant social media ads to the customers who’ve abandoned carts and hence help them pitch these customers once again.
For offering ROIs
Source: eclincher.com
“Social media will help you build up loyalty of your current customers to the point that they will willingly, and for free, tell others about you.” – Bonnie Sainsbury.
Reporting and analytics
Customers are savvy and always look for investments that offer a great return on investments. The social media tracking and analytics tools provide a detailed look at the full impact of the different platforms and ads on your business performance. The precise tracking of the website traffic generated from social media, email sign-ups, lead conversions, etc., helps businesses get clear ROIs from different social media channels.
The reporting and analytics are necessary for presenting the new business ideas to the management. They require detailed reports that the key decision-makers can best understand to understand the effectiveness of the social media investments.
How to Get Started With Social Media Marketing?
Source: snapagency.com
Looking at the top benefits of social media marketing may make you interested in starting it for your business. So, how will you do it?
It is not an overnight job and requires dedication and perseverance in the efforts. Thus, the quick steps to get started in social media marketing are:
- Determining the goals: It all starts by defining the goals of social media marketing for any business. Once all questions are answered, it gives clarity over the social media marketing requirements.
- Resources evaluation: Many businesses outsource their social media marketing to the top consultants, while others prefer to go for the existing resource utilization.
- Knowing the audience: Social media marketing aims to attract the audience, and hence it is crucial to have details about your existing and prospective customers.
- Content creation: Engaging and informative content is the best way to gain customers’ attention on social media platforms.
- Integrated marketing efforts: It is crucial to incorporate all different marketing strategies and complement the social media marketing strategy.
- Scheduled creation: It is crucial to create a schedule for social media marketing that is a deciding factor to remain at the top of the social media feed.
- Adopting the 80-20 rule: Social media marketing should follow the 80-20 rule that states that 20% of the time should be devoted to self-promotional activities while the rest 80% for general content.
- Focusing on the quality: It is ideal to have quality followers for any business than going for the large volumes of followers who’re not loyal.
- Sharing the control with customers: The key to sharing the power of online conversations on social media is leading the customers to interact and share their experiences.
- Keep an open ear to learning: Learning and listening to the latest trends in social media should never stop.
Wrapping Up:
Businesses can get the most out of the long list of the benefits of social media marketing. But, while creating brand awareness, earning sales, and battling the competition are the common advantages, a profound look reveals that there is nothing that social media platforms can’t do for businesses.
More than 73% of marketers agree that social media marketing is effective for generating results. The process remains simple and can be taken care of by an in-house team or outsourcing firm. Social media marketing is ideal for modern businesses facing the double brunt of demanding customers and exaggerated competition.
So, if you’re a business that is looking to get some great strategies for your business, it is time to start social media marketing for your business.
