Social Media Marketing is one of the most creative and strategic forms of marketing in the business and marketing industries at the moment. It comes with several benefits for the companies or individuals engaging in the same and opens a wide range of cost-effective opportunities for organisations to grow their businesses and revenue!
Did you know that more than a million users join social media platforms each day? Reports by Hootsuite have revealed that 1.3 million new users joined different social networking sites each day in 2020. Through this article, we aim to explore what social media marketing is and why you should start using social media platforms as an important part of your business’s digital marketing elements!
What is Social Media Marketing?
Social Media Marketing refers to the process of utilising the social media networks and websites to market and promote the product and services of a company. It involves creating content specifically for increasing social media engagement. This content that is tailored for social media helps in boosting the reach of your business.
Social Media marketing is great for connecting with your audience and generating potential leads for your company. GlobalWebIndex has revealed that 54% of social media users use these platforms to browse through and search for products. Through a social media network, your customers can understand your brand and the voice of your business better. If you are able to reach out to the right audience and provide value-adding, quality content to your target audience, social media can be no less of a boon to your business!
6 Reasons to start Social Media Marketing Today
Now that we have an understanding about what is social media marketing, let us look into 6 key reasons why you should start social media marketing today:-
1. Increased Organic Traffic on Website
One of the key benefits of using social media marketing is that it can really help you increase the organic traffic and the number of unique visitors on your platform. You can create content for your platform and share snippets from the same, along with the link to the post on your social media platform. If your content is really captivating, it can help you drive organic traffic on your website and you can track the click-throughs to get a better understanding of what works and what does not.
Another way you can increase the traffic on your website is through social media ads which direct your audience to your website’s page. It is always best to always include the link of your website on all the social media accounts that you use. Another interesting way of driving traffic to your online store is by engaging in chats through comments or directly with your audience through polls and surveys to show your expertise in your field.
2. Increased Brand Awareness
Platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter and many others are a great way to reach out to new clients and increase your business’s brand awareness. While a lot of business owners express their worries that social media users may not engage with an entirely new brand, which is not completely true, users are on the lookout for newer businesses and brands as it may turn out to be a refreshing change from the content they already engage in.
On this note, Instagram in one of its user data reports revealed that about 83% of users have claimed that they discover new products and services through the platform. Therefore, social media marketing can really help you increase brand awareness and help your audience understand your brand better.
3. Growth in Sales
Another key benefit of social media marketing is that if it is done right, it can really help you grow your sales and, in turn your revenue. Social media platforms are considered being an important part of the sales funnel. The sales funnel is indicative of the process, which makes a potential client a permanent customer of your products or services. Using social media marketing to drive your sales in this way refers to social selling.
If you have difficulty in figuring out how to grow your sales through social networking platforms, you can use tools that are specially designed for this purpose. These tools align your brand’s social media accounts with your marketing efforts and help you carry out activities that can boost your sales rapidly. They keep a check of all the digital activities and generate reports to help you in understanding the impact of your social media marketing strategies.
4. Lead Generation
One of the major benefits of using social media business accounts is that it is an easy way of lead generation. Lead generation is one of the most essential elements of a business and because your audience expresses interest in your products, certain social media offer tools and special settings for generating and collecting leads through advertisements.
The advertisements on various social media networking platforms like Facebook can generate as many as 4.3 times more leads as compared to leads generated through other marketing practices. Additionally, these leads tend to cost twice less than the traditional marketing expenses. However, make sure you do not go overboard with your advertisements. According to reports by eMarketer, 22.3% of people who used ad lockers on social media revealed that “too many ads” was one of the two main reasons for using blockers, the second being “annoying and irrelevant ads”.
5. Collaborate with Influencers
Social media marketing opens up a variety of opportunities for business owners. One interesting benefit of marketing through social media is the ability to collaborate with influencers. Influencers tend to have a large following and asking them to promote your business can help you increase your potential customers.
This word-of-mouth tactic can help you build credibility and trust in your brand as the audience trusts the influencer and can prove to be crucial for boosting your sales. The click-through rates and conversion rates are likely to register a spike with an increase in unique visitors on your platform. According to Sprout Social, the two most effective types of content when carrying out influencer marketing are posts, with 78% effectiveness and stories, with 73% effectiveness.
6. Customer Engagement
Social media platforms help you to get in contact with your audience and customers directly and can facilitate direct customer engagement with your brand. Social media helps you establish a to-and-fro relation between your organisation and customers and, unlike a one-way communication channel in traditional media; social media allows the establishment of a two-way channel of communication.
To ensure that your customers stay engaged and connected with you, you must use social media management to track the activities of your audience and what type of content they are following and talking about. Accordingly, you can plan out your activities.
Furthermore, it is also important for you to keep commenting and answering questions of your audience so that they know that you are looking after their concerns related to your services and products. Reports by Convince and Convert revealed that answering complaints or issues on social networking platforms can boost customer advocacy by 25%.
We hope that this article was helpful in understanding how social media marketing can be beneficial for you. Other than the reasons that we have elaborated upon in our article, there can be many other advantages of using social media to help your business grow, you must start social media marketing for your business right away!
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