Social Media has changed the world significantly over the past decade, not only has it connected us to the people farthest from us, but it has also become one of the most important marketing tools of the 21st century.
What is Social Media Marketing?
Social Media Marketing (SMM) utilizes social media, social networks (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube, and Snapchat), and social marketing tools to market products and services. According to Chaffey (2011), social media marketing involves “encouraging customer communications on a company’s own website or through its social presence.”
According to a recent survey, social media became even more critical to marketers during the pandemic, with those that were able to get their social media efforts right, seeing major returns on their social media investments.
Social media marketing provides businesses the avenue to engage with existing customers and reach other prospective customers while also allowing companies to promote their products. This process involves strategies like creating sublime content on your social media accounts, listening to and engaging your followers, while also analyzing your results, and running social media advertisements.
So why is social media marketing important. Social media marketing has a plethora of advantages, it allows you to build your brand, increase sales, and drive website traffic to name a few.
5 Reasons Why Social Media Marketing Is Important
- It Helps with Brand Awareness
“Brand awareness is a marketing term that describes the degree of consumer recognition of a product by its name. Creating brand awareness is a key step in promoting a new product or reviving an older brand. Ideally, awareness of the brand may include the qualities that distinguish the product from its competition.”
It needs to be mentioned that the majority of your potential customers are online, and this is enough reason why you should be too and one of the easiest ways of achieving this is through social media. Having an online presence allows your business to effectively market itself, in addition to potentially reaching nearly 3.8 billion users who use these platforms every day. Businesses wanting to gain traction should definitely take advantage of social media platforms.
To attract a larger consumer base, it is important that you create brand awareness first where your potential buyers are well aware of your brand. When you have a social media presence, anytime people feel like engaging with your product they already know where to go. By connecting with your customers through social media, you are more probable to upsurge customer retention and customer loyalty.
- It Helps Engagement Between You and Your Customers
Engagements have been the cornerstone of social media platforms since birth. They allow you to measure how well your content product is doing and also how well your consumers are receiving it. According to the Global Web Index, 30% of all time spent online is now allocated to social media interaction.
Social Media Marketing is a good way for businesses to engage and interact with customers. The more people engage with your content, the more chances you have of conversion. A business that connects the most with its customers is a business that grows immensely on all possible levels. Besides building relationships with customers, SMM also helps in building relations with businesses, influencers, competing and non-competing businesses.
Communication and engagement with customers are one of the ways to win their attention and convey your brand’s message. Thus, your brand will reach more audience in real terms and gets itself established without any hassle.
- It Helps You Gather Data About Your Audience
Data collection allows you to store and analyze the data derived from your consumers and your potential consumers also. It allows you to use the information gotten to make more informed business decisions.
Using market research, you can search the keywords your audience will be using, but more focused on your specific product. There are also many social media management tools available that you can make use of to cost-effectively analyze your market product.
This helps marketers be more informed about their target audience, likes, dislikes, and interests so that they can create a better marketing strategy to attract such customers. For example, many social media platforms allow you to view the reach and insights of all your posts. Use this to gather the information needed to lunch your next campaign.
- It Helps Drive Traffic to Your Website
Social media marketing can assist in sending customers directly to your site. The use of Search Engine Marketing and Search Engine Optimization are great, but being overly reliant on search results means you’re missing out on a ton of potential traffic.
Social media channels allow for more diverse inbound traffic streams, the more engaging your content is the more time they spend consuming your content. Hold surveys, host spaces, use infographics, these are some ways you can increase traction sing social media.
It needs to be mentioned that the world we live in today is statistically driven, and in order to make money, you would need to present evidence to your sponsors as to why they should invest in your idea.
- It’s Cost Effective
Amongst all the mediums of marketing social media marketing is one of the most cost-effective mediums to use in marketing. It’s free to create social media accounts and post organic content. For some, that may be enough, and the quality of the content may promote the content on its own. However, if you’d like to go the extra mile and promote it further, paying for promotion will help increase exposure.
According to an analysis conducted by the content factory, “the average organization spends between $200 and $350 per day on social media marketing. This works out to between $6,000 and $10,500 per month or between $72,000 and $126,000 per year.”
Social media is an incredible chance for content marketing. However, you should select your platform wisely. There are lots of social networks in the market. Using all isn’t practical in any way. Instead, select the channel that most people use – of course – that depends on your business.
Conclusively, Social Media Marketing has proven to be an effective tool in business today. The benefits are endless as it has succeeded in connecting businesses to their target audience while also giving businesses with little to no visibility and resources a competitive advantage in the digital world we live in today.