When was the last time that you used social media? An hour ago? Just today?
Why are we asking that? We will just let you know!
Do you know that over 80% of consumers have reported that their buying decisions are majorly influenced by social media? You rarely scroll through social media and you never see an advertisement. As much as social media significantly impacts our lives today, it majorly affects businesses, marketing, and consumerism in general too.
And the fun part? Social Media Audience is growing by leaps and bounds with every passing second. There are over 5 billion social media users, which is over 60% of the total population of the world.
The businesses that miss to take the advantage of social media are only lagging. It won’t be wrong to say that the businesses and marketers who are not benefiting from social media are missing out on a great cost-effective and phenomenal opportunity for penetrating current and new markets.
Before we get on to discuss some of the key characteristics and benefits of marketing for social media, let us discuss some key aspects of marketing.
What is Marketing?
Marketing is visible as the institutions, activities, and processes that are use for creating, communicating, exchanging, and delivering products and services that are valuable to consumers. The main components of marketing are a blend of four things, known widely as the marketing mix. The marketing mix comprises product, price, place ad promotion. Marketing can take the form of mail, email, billboards, product samples, TV ads, telemarketing, and targeted ads.
But what is the difference between traditional marketing and marketing for social media? Read on to find out.
What is Marketing for Social Media?
Social media is a key tool for growth and success in marketing. With little time and resources at your disposal, you can do wonders with marketing for social media or commonly known as social media marketings. Marketing for social media includes various tools, strategies, processes, and plans that bring immense exposure to the business and generates multiple advantages for the business.
According to statistics, about 96% of marketers are effectively using social media for marketing their products and services. Marketing for social media effectively increases sales, drives web traffic, and builds up your brand in the digital world. The best part about using marketing for social media is that you can track your progress, success, and failure through the metrics that are using for analysis. If some strategy does not work, an alternate route can always be taken. This brings us to the question…
How does marketing for social media work?
The transformation of social media has not only changed the world but also has changed the way humans interact with each other and has majorly influenced consumer behavior too. In this age of influencer marketing and digital marketing, not reaping the benefits of using marketing for social media or SMM would be a grave sin for businesses.
Social media is widely used to scroll through and get all the latest updates 24 X 7. SMM employs marketing and digital technologies, as well as social media apps, to influence customer behavior by evaluating and utilizing knowledge extraction from regional, demographic, and personal information.
The key is to keep the marketing for social media targeted to the exact audience. A proper plan has to be in place for SMM to work effectively.
Social Media Plan is based on:
- Defining clear objectives.
- Learning about the audience in detail.
- Analyzing competition.
- Auditing the current social media plan (if any).
- Creating a strategy.
- Creating content.
- Creating and managing a content calendar.
- Tracking and analyzing metrics
Another point to consider is social media’s capacity to serve as a platform for customer and corporate engagement. Known as Customer Relationship Management. Customers can be provided with a greater value by being in touch with them and knowing them firsthand.
Next up we talk about the content that lifts the entire social media campaign and its effectiveness. The content that is released by the business on social media is shareable, free advertisement anyone? The content used on social media platforms has to be unique, captivating, and engaging. This makes sure that your business is also visible to the otherwise inaccessible audience, and brings growth to the business. The reviews and recommendations rendered by the consumer act as an additional positive advertisement for the business. A brand that is recommended by the people you know is more likely to benefit from the recommendations.
The best aspect of SMM is that social media marketing is target to specific audience preferences, historical purchase history, preferences, interests, and hobbies. This saves excess usage of time and resources for the business. Metrics were using to track the progress of social media efforts. Let us read further about it.
Metrics used in marketing for social media
The metrics that are used in social media to track progress are.
- Engagement: likes, comments, shares, saves, and clicks.
- Impressions: how many times your post shows up
- Reach or virality: refers to how many original views the post has
- Referrals: what made the visitor land on your website
- Conversions: when a purchase is made
- Response rate: how quickly and often the business responds to the consumers
When a business is devising a strategy of marketing for social media, it is always important to associate each goal with the relevant metric. If the goal is to build conversion, then use the tool that aligns effectively with that goal. And so on.
What Makes Marketing for Social Media Effective?
SMM is effective, powerful, and results-driven. Social media is based on three prime pillars, connection, data, and interaction. The power of social media enables the business to connect to consumers that were impossible to reach through traditional means of marketing. This is done through the various social media platforms that are available. The recommendation and reviews are a great source of opportunities for businesses. Social media tools such as metrics can easily be used to measure the return on investment (ROI).
Social Media Marketing Strategies
Since social media has completion of development over the last several years, so has the notion of employing different techniques to get beneficial business results. These are called social media marketing strategies and include targeted advertising. So, the use of chatbots, the creation of personal experiences for customers on websites, and the development of a loyal audience through the use of social media influencers.
The Benefits of SMM?
There are various benefits of using marketing for social media. Down below, we shed light on some of them.
1. Increases brand awareness:
SMM is cost-effective, increases your business’s visibility, and boosts brand recognition. Because the platform of social media is so vast, SMM campaigns reach a massive number of people. Building your brand on social media is a long process. After the creation of the page, the page then reaches the audiences and customers, which helps to build brand awareness and the reputation of your business. When the posts reach new potential customers, chances are that they will be turning into paying customers. It is a work of putting in only a few hours of the week and the brand will get maximum exposure and audience generation.
2. Better rankings on the search engine:
Search engine optimization is an integral part of the business in marketing for social media. SEO or search engine optimization enables more traffic to reach your business and achieve higher rankings on the website. It is also interesting to note that even though SMM does not directly increase website traffic, businesses that use social media for a year-long or more helps to rank better in search engines. If your business can rank in the top searches of the specific niche that your business operates in, the traffic to your website is going to see huge upward growth.
3. Higher rates of conversion:
Increased visibility means higher opportunities and chances of conversion. Each like and share on the blog post, photo, video, or infographic can lead to more traffic for the website. It also enables your business to get personified and get the preference of people. Personal relationship development that occurs in SMM helps to show up more conversions as people trust and develop a sense of loyalty to your brand.
Other benefits of using marketing for social media include greater customer satisfaction, increased sales, increased brand loyalty, and authority.
Conclusion:
SMM has tons of advantages, if you are not on it yet, you need o jump on the bandwagon of using marketing for social media. Because SMM is so cost-effective, the chances of losing something big in the process are minimal. So if there is nothing to lose but only gain. What are you waiting for? Get started!
