Marketing on social networks can significantly contribute to the development of your business; if you don’t have active accounts and an adequate strategy, you could miss out on a lot. In this article, you’ll learn what social media marketing is, why it’s important, what advantages it offers, and how to choose the platform where you’ll be active.
Let’s get right into it and move on to specific information!
What is social media marketing?
Social media marketing (SMM), one method of e-marketing or digital marketing, uses social media platforms to advertise products and services, attract new customers, and interact with existing ones to keep their interest.
Since social networks are a large part of everyday life and have a massive number of users, utilizing this potential is crucial for the success of any business. Social media marketing significantly impacts consumer behavior thanks to customer data that facilitates tailoring the right strategy for every targeted group.
The most popular social media marketing platforms are Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, YouTube, Snapchat, and LinkedIn.
Why should businesses practice social media marketing?
Social networks had 4.74 billion users in October 2022: roughly 60% of the world’s population. The opportunities are unlimited with this many people online, but only if you create a practical social media marketing approach. By choosing the right platform, you can easily reach your target market, present your products or services, build brand awareness, nurture customer trust, generate leads, increase conversions, and boost return on investment.
Social media has the potential to catapult you to the stars, but only if you know how to use each channel properly. Posting random content and hoping followers will buy your product will fail.
How can social media marketing advance your business?
Social media has numerous benefits for business purposes, but here are some of the most prominent:
1. SMM increases brand awareness
Social media marketing can give your business much-needed exposure to build brand awareness, especially if it’s a new brand.
You want your customers to understand and feel comfortable with your products or services. Social media is a fantastic tool for introducing your followers to your brand’s story, its visions, and its ups and downs while presenting them with your offering.
Create high-quality and valuable content appropriate for the social network and its users, which will spread quickly and increase the visibility of your business. A strong brand will be trusted and recognized more widely due to brand awareness, ultimately leading to success.
2. SMM helps your target the right audience
A targeted audience is a group of people you want to attract to your website or social media profiles because you assume there is a high possibility they will find your offer interesting.
Because social networks include a variety of demographic parameters that you can use to identify gender, age, hobbies, income level, occupation, behavior, geo-location, and many other aspects of the client, they are the perfect place to target the desired audience.
Additionally, social networks offer data analytics features specifically designed to provide insight into the effectiveness of the marketing approach, allowing you to adjust further and improve it.
3. SMM keeps your customers informed
Are you launching a new product? Have you upgraded a well-known product and now it’s even better? Are you running a special buy-one-get-one-free promotion or getting ready for a seasonal sale?
Your clients will appreciate being informed about important business moves you make in time, so don’t hesitate to keep them informed so they can prepare. By doing this, you promote brand awareness, customer engagement, and your goods.
4. SMM boosts lead conversion
User engagement on social networks is higher than on any other platform, including email and web pages. Users naturally interact on social media, so they won’t have trouble engaging with a company that piques their interest.
Provide compelling content as a part of SMM, and as a result, you will have a group of highly qualified leads that you can quickly turn into paying clients.
5. SMM is great for product/service promotion
Whether you own a large corporation or a small craft shop, when you’re launching a new product or want to sell off old stock, you’ll want to do some promotion. Social media is the ideal platform for that. Create high-quality and attractive product images, or even make a video, and post them on social media platforms that value visual content (Facebook, Instagram, TikTok). Don’t forget to enhance them with relevant hashtags.
You can sponsor image or video posts to reach a wider audience. This way, you will promote the product and be in contact with your customers, which will contribute to building a community on social networks.
6. SMM allows you to build a relationship of trust with your customers
Social networks promote your products and gather followers, but also serve another, more important purpose. Social media interaction can develop a relationship of trust between your business and your customers. If you succeed in developing trust, you will gain brand loyalty and keep your customers coming back and making repeat purchases.
How do you build a relationship of trust? SMM can help you establish yourself as an expert in your niche, and people trust experts. Be helpful to people, respond to their concerns, questions, and comments, and do so in a way that demonstrates your concern rather than mechanically or harshly. Communicate honestly, admit when you’re wrong, respect your users, and respond quickly. These actions will inevitably lead to the development of trust, which will positively impact the entire business.
7. SMM helps you understand your customer’s needs and interests
Use social listening to learn your customers’ buying preferences. If you pay attention, you may quickly understand what customers like and don’t like about your products and business.
You can accomplish this in two ways: either with content that boosts engagement or with tools like HubSpot Social Media Management Software that provides detailed information on your clients, including who they are, how to approach them, and what interests them.
Use these insights to establish a connection with your customers; this connection will build trust and raise brand awareness.
8. SMM is cost-effective
Social media marketing doesn’t have to be expensive because you can set your budget and get a much larger return on investment (ROI) than you put in. You can use the many demographic filters available on social media to target your audience and make the best use of your resources while getting your advertisement in front of them.
ROI can be somewhat difficult to calculate, as you can never be sure if it results from your overall SMM strategy or the current sponsored post. You can use SMM campaigns to market or sell products and services, but they can also raise brand awareness, gain followers, or subscribe to a newsletter list.
9. SMM works for your SEO
Keyword research, and creating unique content that will be useful to your customers is part of an on-page SEO strategy.
When you share that content on social media as part of your SMM efforts, it will be well-received by your fans, who will be delighted to spread the word about it. You will inspire some people to create their content and link to yours as the source that motivated them.
This means tons of backlinks pointing in the direction of your website. Traffic to your site will increase, and the all-seeing Google will know how to appreciate it!
10. SMM can provide valuable insights into your competitor’s work
You can get quite good insights into your rival’s work through social media. Spend time studying the profiles of other businesses in your field before creating your own SMM plan to learn how they keep their followers interested. Utilize the acquired information to improve or modify your marketing plan in order to enlarge your audience.
Which platform should you advertise on?
With more than 200 social media platforms available today, it might take time to decide which one to use for marketing purposes. We’ll try to make it easier with the following advice:
- Your objective is to identify which social media platform is most popular with your target audience out of the average of 6.6 social media channels the typical internet user engages with daily. It doesn’t have to be a social network currently experiencing its peak popularity; all that counts is that your audience is present. Even if many people enjoy TikTok, it won’t help you much if your target audience prefers LinkedIn.
- Think about the social media platforms that are best for your industry. All large corporations should have LinkedIn profiles. Brands with a strong visual presence should be present on Instagram. Media sites should pay attention to Twitter, and Facebook, the most popular social media platform ever, should be available to all.
- You may determine which social media site to employ by investigating your competition. Look at the platforms they use and the areas where they get the most user engagement.
- Learn about social media platforms to determine their appropriateness for your objectives. As an illustration, Twitter is excellent for communication and serves as a fantastic platform for customer support, while the LinkedIn business network is perfect for sharing knowledge and research findings. TikTok is the best platform for DIY projects and tutorials, whereas Instagram is the best platform for selling visually appealing material with high-quality photos.
- Have as many social media accounts as you can manage to utilize regularly. Think about the time and resources you can dedicate to social media. Having accounts on various platforms is useless if you can’t devote yourself to them. Unanswered messages and ignored comments will lead to dissatisfaction due to poor user experience.
- Making a post for one social network and then copying and pasting it to all the others is inadequate. Create posts for each communication channel separately because on each of them there are different users with whom you need to find a common language.
Need a hand with social media marketing?
As you can see from the information above, social media marketing can promote your products and brand awareness, attract customers and build a relationship of trust and respect. We believe we have given you enough compelling reasons to start practicing social media marketing as soon as possible.
Of course, running a business is demanding. If you’re wondering how to fit social media management into your crowded schedule, we completely understand your frustration. Fortunately, today you can find online all the help you need to keep all the wheels of your business running smoothly. You can outsource social media management to trained professionals while doing what you do best – develop your products.
Think about the goals you want to achieve, and as soon as you gain that valuable insight, contact professionals who will free up your time and create a strategy that will bring measurable success to your business.
Author bio:
Tomas is a digital marketing specialist and a freelance blogger. His work is focusing on new web tech trends and digital voice distribution across different channels.
