Why Social Media Marketing Is Important? – Everything You Need to Know with FAQs, Tips, & More
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According to Statista, a whopping 59% of the world’s population are online users. With a great majority of them being on some form of social media.
As a marketer, it would be a severely missed opportunity if you did not take advantage of platforms that so many people engage with daily.
Quick Summary
In this post, we delve into the world of social media marketing, how it works, why it’s essential, and how your business benefits from it.
You might want to hire a social media marketer for your brand or business by the end of this post.
Let’s get started.
Why Do Companies Use Social Media Marketing?
According to a study by SproutSocial, 72% of companies use data collected from social media to drive business decisions.
The fact that so many companies invest their resources into social media marketers and social media strategies show that it’s something that works. But how exactly does it benefit brands and business owners?
Let’s delve into it.
It Helps Build Brand Awareness and Identity
To build a reputation and a “name” for your brand is something that most companies have as one of their ultimate goals. A significant reason for this is that consumers generally want to buy products and services from brands they recognize.
This form of customer loyalty is something that a brand can only achieve once it starts to become recognizable.
In the past, this was done through billboards and TV advertising. However, social media marketing is the most effective way to become a household name in today’s day and age.
The obvious benefit of social media marketing over traditional methods is now quicker and easier to set up. All you need is some form of schedule and a good batch of content. You can set up a decently effective social media marketing campaign with just that.
A quick tip: When it comes to brand recognition over social media, it’s essential that you have a solid brand identity in place. Your logo, color scheme, and banners should be well-done to ensure a sense of professionalism and comprehension.
If you don’t have a solid brand identity in place before you start social media marketing campaigns, it can hurt your chances of becoming recognizable.
Place your logo and your brand’s mission within posts every once in a while.
The goal is to find that sweet spot where your brand’s ads are not overwhelming but attention-grabbing at the same time.
Not only that, but with targeted ads, you have a much better chance of your brand reaching the type of person that would be interested in it. Not to mention that these targeted ads can help get your brand in front of consumers when they aren’t even thinking about it.
Ensure that all the visual content and brand identity for your company are clearly visible and recognizable within all of your targeted ads.
It Helps Create Discussions and “Hype” Around Your Product
The best social media marketing strategies out there are designed to create “buzz” or conversation around one or more of your products.
For example, if you have a new flagship product that will be released sometime in the upcoming month.
You can start to post on social media about its different features. A great way to engage audiences is to describe a feature and ask what they would use that feature for.
Some other great ways to engage audiences over social media include:
- Give shoutouts to other brands or collaborators that you work with.
- Offer giveaways. These could be on your own or as a collaboration with one of the brands you work with or network with.
- Frequently ask for feedback about a product or a specific feature of a product.
- Ask open-ended questions about your product(s) and let the audience answer.
It’s extremely important that you actively engage with your audience during this phase. Your job is not just to make the post but also to reply to comments after the post has been made.
People want to feel like they’re talking to a person when they communicate with brands over social media. If they feel like they’re talking to a robot, they will not feel heard or valued as a customer.
If you engage customers in this way and have long conversations with them, it might help build a long-term connection. They may become loyal or returning customers just because of that one interaction online where they felt valued by your brand.
As we all know, loyal customers are something that can help increase the longevity and relevance of your brand. Social media marketing is one of the best ways to achieve them.
It Helps You Understand Your Audience
To reach your customers and your target audience effectively, you have to understand what their interests are and what they would most likely respond to.
When you have a presence on social media, you can utilize the conversations around your brand to understand your target audience’s interests. This is termed social listening. It can help you get a feeling of what is important to your audience.
Not only that but it can also help you identify what problems they face and what unmet needs they have.
A simple example of this would be if your product is an iron. The customers that bought the product loved most aspects of it except for the fact that its cord was too short.
Now, a simple way to listen to your audience would be to increase the cord’s length. A better way to listen to your audience would be to:
- Increase the cord’s length
- Offer replacements to the first batch of customers that received irons with cords that are too short
- Do it over social media
This would be an example of how you can turn the shortcoming of your product into an opportunity to build yourself as a brand that listens to its customers.
Once you announce over social media that you have increased the cord’s length and would replace the first batch of irons, your audience would definitely be quite receptive.
Some people may not even go through the trouble of getting their iron replaced but even still, they’ll remember that your brand listened to their complaints. As a result, the next time they want to buy a product that you sell, your brand will have the edge over its competitors.
When you listen to your audience over social media platforms, it can help you identify pain points that you can address with your product(s).
Then, when you make social media and other digital marketing campaigns for the product, you can highlight these pain points. This will strike a chord with those same customers, and it might even prompt them to make a purchase.
We highly advise that you take some time out each day to perform social listening. This will help you find out what the trends are within your niche and what your customers are talking about.
It Can Help You Gather Data to Use in Other Campaigns
The great thing about social media marketing and just marketing in the digital age, in general, is that you have access to all the analytics and statistics.
In the past, if you put a billboard up, you would not have any way to tell how many customers were brought to your brand through that billboard.
However, with social media marketing, you have access to many different types of metrics, such as:
- Impressions
- Likes
- Clicks
- Views
- Sales
And much more.
When you are done with a social media marketing campaign, it is heavily encouraged that you look at and study the data generated from it. This can help provide insights into what strategies of your campaign worked well and which ones didn’t.
As a result, you can then create better and more effective social media marketing strategies in the future.
Not only can you use data to create more effective campaigns in the future, but you can also check data on-the-fly to correct campaigns in real-time.
This means that a currently running campaign that is performing poorly can be fixed if you check analytics and make the necessary adjustments.
Many social media platforms out there allow insights and analytics on all of the posts you make on them.
To check insights on Instagram:
- Click on your profile.
- Click on “Insights”.
- Scroll down and click on “Your Audience”.
- Click on “See All”.
To check insights on Twitter:
- To check the analytics of a tweet, go to it and look for the graph icon on the far-right.
- When you hover the cursor over the graph icon, it should say “Analytics”.
- Click on the icon.
To check insights on Facebook:
- Go to your brand’s profile page.
- On the left side of the screen, scroll down until you see the “Manage Page” option.
- Click on the Manage Page option and then click on “Insights”.
- If you’d like to see more detailed analytics related to specific audiences, you can scroll down and click on “People”.
It Can Provide Customer Service
Having an active presence on social media as a brand can be a great way to provide quick and effective customer service. People who may have trouble with a product of yours may come straight to your social media page.
You can use this to troubleshoot their problems and provide customer satisfaction in an efficient way.
This, again, makes your customers feel valued. That’s because when they post comments and problems on your social media pages, they don’t receive an automatic computerized reply. Rather they receive a well-thought-out helpful message.
You Can Use It to Drive Traffic
If you have an online store or a website that you use to publicize your brand, your social media channels can do wonders for your traffic. You can use your social media presence and following to direct traffic to your website with ease.
If you have purchase options available on your website, then it can lead to easy conversions as well.
All you really need to do is advertise your website within posts you make on your social media pages. If you post video content, make sure to highlight how your audience can find the best deals or the most convenient way to order your product on your website.
Make sure to include the link to your website within all or majority of the posts that you make. It can also be a good idea to have the link within the bio of your social media pages.
It can be difficult to fit the link into the bio, depending on the social media platform you use. This is because most if not all of them, have a character limit for the bio. If you add a long external link to the bio, you may not have enough room to write the actual description.
An easy way to solve this issue is to use a URL shortener.
To shorten your link through Pixelfy, register an account and log in.
Step 1: After you log in, you will go to the dashboard page.
At the dashboard, you can check out the analytics from previous shortened links. This can be useful for analytics from your social media marketing campaigns.
You can also see the URL shortener box at the top part of the page.
Step 2: To get a shortened URL of the landing page of your website or the store gallery for your online store page, copy its link and paste it into the URL shortener box.
As soon as you paste the link into it, you’ll be taken to the next page. If you don’t get taken to the next page, just click on the “Shorten” box as shown below.
Step 3: You’ll receive the shortened URL on the next page. You can copy it and use it in all of the bios and posts that you make on your social media pages.
It’s Highly Cost-Efficient
There are really not a lot of costs when it comes to marketing your brand on social media.
The costs only go up if you don’t want to do it yourself and would like to hire a social media marketer for your company. However, we recommend that you should do that only if your company can really afford to.
If you’re a newer venture that is just getting on its feet, it would be much better for you to craft social media campaigns yourself. Take time to do some research on how effective campaigns are composed.
Organic social media marketing campaigns virtually cost no money to run and compose. You can optionally get a social media marketing tool that can help you compose campaigns in a more effective way.
Social media marketing tools also help you keep track of the analytics and statistics generated from your campaigns. It’s a good idea to keep an eye on these metrics while you run your campaigns.
That way, if your campaigns are not going the way you want them to, you can make adjustments in real-time to ensure you get the numbers you need.
A typical social media marketing tool can cost you anywhere from $25 to $100. That’s not a lot when you consider the amount of value you will get with the help of the tool.
There is an option of doing affiliate marketing using social media, check out how to do that here.
Wrapping Things Up…
As you can see, social media marketing is definitely worth the time, and you’re heavily missing out if you’re not taking advantage of it.
It’s cost-effective, it can help you reach specific audiences, and it’s fairly easy to implement as well.
If you have any more questions or doubts about why social media marketing is important, please reach out to us in the comments section below.
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