7 BENEFITS OF SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING IN 2020/2021
Today is the age of social media marketing. That means your business won’t be able to stay ahead of the competition unless you make the most of opportunities to market your product on social networks. Here are the top seven benefits of deploying your enterprise marketing skills on social media.
1. Raising Brand Awareness
Having a social media presence is one of the easiest ways to increase the visibility of your brand across the globe. Forget expensive TV or print advertising, when you can set up a Twitter or Facebook account for free and reach literally billions of social media users.
With social media, your customers effectively do the work for you. If your content is attractive, potential customers will like, share and write about the content, engaging in a kind of peer to peer marketing that can send your brand viral. An added bonus from marketing through social media platforms like Facebook is that it allows you to target specific audiences based on their purchasing behaviour, interests, age and location which ensures your brand is reaching your exact target demographic.
2. Increasing Brand Authority
Now that millennials’ lives have been permeated by social media, they see social networks as an intrinsic part of the real world. Basically, if you’re not on social media, it will be hard to get taken seriously by the current generation of consumers.
The biggest change comes from communication. Social media allows businesses to communicate directly and instantly with customers, increasing openness and customer satisfaction. Growing a passionate following for your brand’s social media profile should be a top priority for every business.
3. Get Better Conversion Rates
A presence on social media vastly increases opportunities for customers to convert to your brand. Every time you make a post or comment you’re making your brand visible, providing an opportunity for new customers to discover you, and setting the groundwork for a brand conversion.
Social media can humanise your brand and allow you to develop better relationships with potential customers. Consumers are much more likely to convert to a brand that has won their trust. Platforms such as Facebook and Instagram have even begun implementing purchase buttons directly onto social media posts and advertisements which opens up a huge opportunity for your business to improve its conversion rate.
4. Climb the Search Engine Results
When modern consumers are looking for information about a product of service, they use a search engine. Since most internet users don’t look beyond the first few results on the first page, you need to get your brand to the top.
Having a strong social media presence with high quality content that users like to link to and share will increase your overall relevance and push you higher up the search engine results.
5. Better Brand Loyalty
Brands that engage with their customers on social media can expect to enjoy significantly better brand loyalty than those who don’t. Consumer satisfaction begets brand loyalty, so you need to use social networks to build trust with consumers. It is your responsibility to create a persona for your brand that your target audience is able to relate to and connect with, this is a crucial factor in improving your brand’s loyalty.
Millennials, who are operating more and more through social media, display a higher brand loyalty than previous generations. So, as time goes on, the effect of social media should be a sharp rise in overall brand loyalty (but only for those who make the most of social media resources).
6. Marketing on a Budget
Many new businesses may find themselves in a “chicken and egg” type situation with their marketing: they need money to spend on marketing, but they need marketing to grow their business in order to get money.
Social media has made it possible to engage in global marketing while paying a lot less. Most social media is free, but there are great premium advertising opportunities too; just spending a small amount on some premium social media advertising can have a noticeable effect on brand conversion rates.
Most of the larger platforms like Facebook and Instagram let you set your own marketing budgets giving you greater control over how much you spend while still giving you bang for your buck.
7. Gather Intel About Your Market
Having your market laid out across the internet makes it a lot easier to gather information and understand how major players are operating as well as which way trends are shifting.
Social media can be employed as a research tool. You can analyse the demographics of your followers and gather data about how consumers interact with your digital content. The constant real time feedback allows you to optimise your content to meet consumer expectations. There are numerous internal and external tools such as Facebook’s Audience Insights and sites like www.SocialBlade.com which you can use to learn more about your customers as well as your competitors which will allow you to create more effective marketing material.
Source: Prosperity Media
