Social media marketing has always been important in the digital industry. The impact of social media is so drastic that it plays a vital role in businesses raising awareness on their products and services and boosting their sales.
Users on social media connect with people all over the world! Businesses can even target potential customers who don’t live in the same country to promote their services with ease.
Why is social media marketing important?
You may think that just having a social media presence is enough to build your company’s profile online, but without a proper marketing strategy, your efforts will go to waste. Here are some of the best ways social media impacts your brand.
Brand Recognition
One of the most important reasons you need social media marketing is to build your brand online and reach a newer customer base. It doesn’t matter how big or small your business is – if you have a social media profile and have the right marketing strategies in place, you allow yourself to gain maximum exposure and brand recognition.
Creates a Conversation
An effective and strong social media marketing strategy will surely generate buzz and create a conversation that revolves around your brand, services and products. In order to sell to the masses, you need people to be talking about you.
Your online presence is important and has to be engaging and interactive enough to the point where users will start interacting with you first – rather than you targeting them.
A good way to start is by engaging with your follower base. Reply to comments and their private messages. Users like to engage with brands that can prove that there is a real person behind the brand – they want to be able to connect with you!
Share content that naturally creates conversations. You could ask followers for feedback on your products or ask them to repost your content for a small gift in return (discounts, gifts – whatever is possible).
Ask open-ended questions at the end of your captions to elicit a response in the comments.
Customer Loyalty
With social media, you can build your brand loyalty!
Customers typically interact and engage with brands that they’re fans of, with around 53% of users who will stay loyal to your brand specifically. When customers follow you and like what you do on social media, it’s highly likely that they will choose you over your competition.
To improve customer loyalty, make sure that you keep your followers engaged and happy. Offer discounts, gifts or promotional codes to your followers; run competitions and giveaways to show them that you appreciate their support and want to give back to the community.
Increased Traffic
If one of your goals is to increase your website traffic, then social media can help you out immensely.
Through social media marketing, you can send customers and potential customers directly to your website. Social media platforms now allow for diverse inbound traffic streams as you can’t solely depend on traffic from search engines.
Keeping this in mind, you also need to consider what type of content you should be posting, as well as how often you should be sharing it. You don’t want to make yourself look desperate for website traffic. Tip: use shortened links to keep your captions neat!
Exposure to Wider Audiences
With social media advertising, notably Facebook and Instagram, you have the option to carry out specific targeting. With Facebook advertising, you can target users based on age, gender, location, occupation, interests and so much more. You can choose to have your content seen by your specific target audience, as well as those users who you think would be interested in your products or services.
Qualified Leads
When you build a follower base on social media, you can count on them to be interested in what you have to sell – after all, they are following you on social media, so you’ve got them interested!
You can use social media to market to those users who are already fans of your brand or company and you will be reaching a qualified demographic. If they’re already following you on multiple social media platforms, that means they want to know more about what you have to offer.
Your existing followers are likely to react positively to your posts now, rather than if they had no existing relationship with your company. This also increases the likelihood that they will click on your links, engage with your posts and actually take the action that you’re asking of them.
Build Your Reputation
Social media provides the opportunity to respond to negative reviews and, in turn, control the narrative and overcome any negative publicity. When you respond to feedback, positive or negative, customers view this as a sign of maturity and will want to stay loyal to your brand.
Promote Your Content
In the age of technology and digital media, spreading the word about your brand is crucial to gaining success. This may be a more obvious factor but you’d be surprised by how poorly it can be carried out, or even ignored.
Social media allows you to promote content in the most creative ways. Creativity is what attracts followers and potential customers and you need to be creative. With the different social media networks and supporting tools, producing creative content can be done by anyone at any given time. Apps such as Mojo, StoriesEdit and Canva are great tools that provide you with free templates to create visually stunning social media posts.
Being able to tell a story through social media is an extremely effective way to promote your content without making it look like an ad.
