Social media marketing is essential to businesses in almost every market. Social media is ever-increasingly used in order to engage with customers, nurture relationships, establish and solidify an online presence and brand awareness
While many people think that social media is for leisure, it’s actually a very effective way to market your business. Here are some benefits of social media marketing that you may not know about.
What is social media marketing?
Social media marketing is simply utilising various social media platforms for the purposes of promotion and customer engagement. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok and YouTube are amongst some of the largest and most widely used social media platforms globally.
Social media marketing can be used in different ways. Social media can be used to increase the number of followers on your pages, such as Instagram or Facebook, as well as to increase engagement through likes and comments by potential customers Outreach is another major benefit of social media, you can use platforms such as Youtube and Twitter to promote to a much wider audience and advertise your brand. You can also use social media to create engaging content for your followers that will keep them interested in your brand and hopefully lead to sales.
Social media marketing benefits include increased brand awareness, increased return on investment (ROI), and improved customer engagement. These make social marketing a worthwhile endeavour that you may want to start implementing into your own company’s strategy soon!
How can social media marketing help your business?
- Social media marketing can be utilised to target the demographic you want.
- If you are looking to advertise via social media, you can use your own profiles on platforms or hire an agency
- Research has found that brand awareness can be increased by 80% through using social media.
- The way clients interact with your business is different to traditional methods. It can be seen as more personable.
Social Media Marketing Trends
One of the most successful and effective social media marketing trends has been the use of emoji-based marketing. With huge global companies like Starbucks and McDonald’s using emojis to engage with their fans on social media, it has become a popular strategy in the digital marketing world. If you want your social media marketing to be successful, you need to ensure you stay on top of trends and are always keeping your business in the public eye. Here’s how:
-Ensure your company’s logo & name matches your social media platforms
-Create an Instagram profile for your business. Instagram is the social platform that has the most visual/photo focus as opposed to text.
-Use hashtags on all posts on all platforms as hashtags will allow you to be seen by a specified niche.
-Follow celebrities and influencers on social media and engage with them so they see your posts as well as their community.
-Ensure you post specific and engaging content that is targeted to your customer segment across ALL platforms.
Community-focused Social Media Marketing
Social media platforms are used to connect individuals or institutions with their communities. A community is made up of followers, customers, friends, and family. This digital marketing strategy enables businesses to provide the resources that are in demand by their community.
In the digital age it is important, and easier than ever, to establish a solid online community. Social media marketing allows you to do this by providing followers and the wider community with information/content that they want.
You can easily use social media platforms to share information about upcoming events or promotions happening at your company as well as how you make your product or service safe for use.
Niche-focused Social Media Marketing
Consider that you’d like to advertise a new game. You could set up a page for this game on Facebook and then utilise targeted advertisements to only reach users who are most likely to be interested in in playing it. On other social media sites like Instagram and Twitter, you can use niche-focused social media marketing.
These focused campaigns not only are effective, but they drastically reduce advertising costs by trying to reach only the individuals that are interested in your service or product.
What are the challenges of social media marketing?
Unquestionably, social media marketing has its difficulties. You must take precautions when communicating with your online community, just as you would with any kind of marketing campaign. Furthermore, you should consider how to position your goods or services to arouse interest and encourage discussion.
You don’t have to limit your social media marketing efforts to a specific platform. To rapidly expand your online outreach potential, it’s crucial to be committed to each of your businesses’ social media platforms. A more varied customer base, that may be more receptive to what you’re selling, is created when you focus on multiple platforms. The audience on TikTok will be different to the audience on Facebook for example.
Conclusion
Businesses can utilise social media as an effective digital marketing tool to dramatically increase their exposure, improve the customer experience, and drive commerce. When utilising social media as a marketing tool, a business must take into consideration a variety of factors. These factors include the value which target marketing will add to the business, advertising on social media (Facebook Ads etc.), and understanding the needs of your target demographic. The online world is ever-changing so it’s important that you don’t fall behind and that you exploit any opportunity to improve your business. It’s important your online prescience is managed correctly, which is why a reputable agency like Atomic can be of great help.
