Many brands look at social media marketing as just another strategy along with their other traditional methods of marketing. But when you know that worldwide social media users have reached 2.34 billion and is expected to grow to 2.95 billion by 2020, you will definitely agree that social media marketing is not just another usual marketing method.
Social media marketing has the potential to reach to a large audience base.
As per a research, about 12 million people are scrolling through social media more than two times daily.
This data is important since it says that there is a huge chunk of potential customers on social media who are seeing social media posts, pictures and videos at some point of time in the day.
Now, are you thinking of embracing social media marketing as the best option for your business?
Do you still have doubts whether it will work for your brand? Undoubtedly the answer is YES.
Here are 17 Reasons Why Your Business Needs Social Media Marketing:
1. Social Media Marketing is Simple
Social media is highly popular due to its simple and easy operations. That explains why, just in a matter of 10 years, social media has occupied a mainstream position for marketing.
Its an uncomplicated platform where you can listen, inform, converse, engage and educate your audience, all in one single platform!
2. To Analyze Target Audience
The biggest requirement of any business is to know your target audience. Social media marketing exactly caters to this requirement by helping you to identify your audience.
By using hashtags, relevant, content, contests, and targeted advertisements, it is possible to zero down on your target audience. You can get customer insights by reading their tweets, status updates, shares, likes, their behaviors.
There are social media tools such as Cloohawk, that can assist in finding the right audience for your business.
3. To Build Relationship With Your Audience
Social media helps to build virtual connect with your customers. To build and prove your credibility, you need to constantly gain customer confidence. Social media marketing offers you a unique opportunity to establish a bond with your customers.
Show your audience that you are listening by creating and sharing content that speaks about their interests, pain points and questions. Social media marketing gives you an opportunity to create a dialogue with your audience instead of just constantly selling to them.
4. To Drive Traffic to Your Website
One of the main reasons why business should use social media marketing is to increase your website traffic. Without social media marketing, your website traffic is just limited to people who already know your product and brand. When used effectively, social media marketing can become a great source of traffic.
Your social media profiles leads people back to your website. When you start posting content and engage with audience, it becomes another opportunity for a new visitor. Enure to use attractive visuals in your social media posts, add sharing buttons so that your audience can easily share posts, engage and converse with your audience and be consistent in your social media activities.
Finally always include a link or a CTA to your website. These actions drive traffic to your website.
5. To Build Your Brand
With social media marketing you can gain followers, persuade potential customers, engage with audience, read the minds of your readers and finally, sell your products. But for all this, you should first be well known to your audience.
Social media marketing helps businesses to give their brands a unique personality on social platforms.
You can build your brand by creating profiles that depict your brands personality, interacting with audience in a way that helps to build your brand, post content that support your brand image, etc. All these social media activities will help you to build a brand that is unique to your business.
6. To Improve Brand Loyalty
Social media marketing will get you active, engaged and loyal customers. Do not run behind the follower count and huge fan base. Social media marketing will help you in getting loyal and interested customer base.
A study published by Convince&Convert found that 53% of Americans who follow brands in social are more loyal to those brands.
Loyal customers will be interested in your brand and they will follow your social posts, they will respond to your posts by liking and sharing them. They also will post reviews relating to their concerns, queries and positive feedback. When you respond to them on social media it improves brand loyalty.
7. To Create Brand Authority
Brand authority simply means you have knowledge about your product and industry above others in your field.
According to research done by Social Media Examiner, consumers depend on social media heavily to learn more about products, brands, companies, and services before they make a purchase. Hence, it is very crucial for brands to make use of social media marketing to create a brand authority around your product.
Depict your brand authority in social media posts, blog content, response to audience and response on different forums. When more people are talking about you on social media, you gain more value and authority. And further if you interact with influencers, your brand authority will surely skyrocket.
8. To Demonstrate Rich Customer Experience
Social media is no different than any other communication channels like emails or phones, only difference being that it is more public than one-on-one.
Social media marketing gives huge opportunity for a brand to show off its customer service experience on social media. When a customer raised a query publicly on social media, it is a golden opportunity where the brand can quickly turn it into an advantage for itself.
When a customer is happy and expresses it on social media, you can thank them and share the post with your followers. This gives you a ground to share the rich customer experience with others who are sitting on the edge.
9. To Offer Excellent Customer Service
Social media marketing is not just a marketing tool, It is also an effective customer service management tool.
"Customer service and social media has melded together," says Lindsay Patton-Carson, Vice President of customer engagement, PiperWai.
Brands should plan about which social platforms their customers are using, so that they can focus on these social media platforms. To have effective and successful customer service, strategy brand should be present across different channels based on the preference of their customers.
Your business strategy should involve providing such excellent customer service that they create a strong, loyal customer base that will advocate on the brand's behalf if someone has something bad to say.
10. To Extract Valuable Customer Insights
Social media marketing gives you ample opportunity to get valuable customer insights. With the help of social listening, you can easily collect information about their interests, likes and dislikes, brand that they support, influencers that they follow and much more.
Based on these insights, you can easily segment content generation and distribution to cater to the likes of your customers. Analyzing customer insights proactively can help to tailor the messaging and marketing campaign more efficiently.
Customer insights around audience sentiment of a brand, helps to understand whats working and whats not. It helps to make the conversations making more engaging thereby leading to brand more personable.
11. To Start Social Media Campaigns
A social media campaign is an effort to enhance a business objective using social media platforms. Social media campaigns are not the same as your daily social media efforts. They are designed in a way to increase focus, target and ROI.
Social media marketing offers social media analytics such as clicks, likes and shares. These will help you to set the goals and measure the success of the campaign.
Social media marketing campaign expands your customer base while keeping your current customers returning. The social media analytics provide useful foundation to design the appropriate campaign based on the audience.
Tools such as CoSchedule will assist you in preparing and launching the campaign.
12. To Allow Targeting and Retargeting
Social media marketing offers an excellent opportunity to launch targeting and retargeting programs. A targeted campaign aims to maximize your exposure to your key audiences. Social media is a treasure of knowledge when combined with analytics that can give complete details of the buyer behavior unique to your company and your industry. The buyer details will immensely assist you to tailor your targeting and retargeting campaigns specific to your audience.
Social media retargeting is goes one step higher than other forms of retargeting because it exclusively uses data from the audience based on their interest, location, language, gender and all other demographics. Based on these points you can easily create audience groups for retargeting.
Facebook is a great example of social retargeting. It uses social data to reach out to the right set of people using the targeting.
13. To Gain Attention During Events
Social media marketing is a powerful tool to gain attention during your marketing events irrespective of whether youre hosting a webex call or a an expert interview.
You can use social media to promote your event by creating videos, or by going live. It creates high energy and excitement around your event. When the videos are shared with friends and other industry circles, it creates more awareness about your event.
Make sure that your events have easily downloadable content such as audio, video, text, articles, graphics and updates. When you make an event-specific hashtag, it will be easier for your audience to find content relating to your event so that they can easily follow it and share it.
14. To Decrease Marketing Costs
The often asked question about social media marketing is how much does it cost. Just like all other major factors impacting the decisions relating to marketing, cost is also a major factor.
Social media marketing is relatively cheap compared to the traditional methods of marketing. A traditional marketing campaign involves television, radio, and print, which comes at a high cost. And most of these have already seen a decline in revenues post 2009.
Whereas social media marketing is nearly free, is available on the internet 24/7 and offers unlimited reach.
According to Hubspot, 84% of marketers found as little as six hours of effort per week was enough to generate increased traffic.
For a social media marketer, spending 1 hour on social media is worth the efforts due to the significant reach and results that it offers. If you employ social media management tools, manual marketing efforts can be drastically reduced thereby saving precious time and money. The paid advertising on Facebook and Twitter also comes relatively cheaper with greater targeting and retargeting results.
15. To Fight Competition
In todays digital age its important to know your competitors and their strategy to beat or out-perform your competitors. Social media marketing is your best tool to understand the strategies of your competition.
Small or big, irrespective of the size, you need to prepare a terrific plan to stay ahead in competition using social media.
Using social media you can do a research on your competitors to figure out what they are doing differently. Find out the kind of content they create, their engagement strategies, customer service on social platforms, social campaigns, etc.
When you study your competitors and understand their strategies on social media, you will stand at a greater advantage due to the information that you have gathered. This information will enable you to take important decisions relating to your social media strategy, thereby putting you ahead of them on social media.
For example, Cloohawk is a social media management tool that offers a feature Your competitors' best posts which allows you to see at a glance the best performing posts of your competitors.
16. To Increase Conversion
Social media is a place where brands become people and they act like people to bring the human element into your marketing.
Every post that you make on social media platform is an opportunity for customers to convert. With the interactions that you have on social media, you will get new followers. You can easily have access to your current customers and simultaneously build new customers. Every single video, image, blog, infographic that you share offers you the chance to interact with your audience. This is the gateway for future conversion.
Additionally, studies have shown that social media marketing has a 100% higher lead-to-close rate than outbound marketing.
Your social media followers become your social proof thereby building trust and credibility. And trust and credibility in a brand multiplies the chances of improving conversions.
17. To Increase Sales
75 % people buy a product after they see it in their social media feeds.
This social media research data makes social media marketing critical for all brands, whether big or small, and for those who are who are trying to increase sales.
Sales Increase When You Are Marketing It Right !!
When a brand chooses a proactive social media marketing approach, it will strengthen your marketing strategy. You should learn how to engage and inform your social media audience about your products so that ultimately they will buy. Many brand have already embedded the Buy button on their sites so as to take the social media interactions up to sales.
Conclusion
There you have it, 17 awesome reasons why social media marketing is essential for your business.
As high as 90% of marketers claim that social media generates immense exposure for their brand. Hence social media marketing should become a substantial portion of every marketing strategy.
The benefits of social media marketing are so great that you will miss out on a phenomenal marketing opportunity if you fail to implement it.
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