Social media has transformed the world of marketing. Every organization is now leveraging the benefits of social media marketing, irrespective of its size, geography, industry, or line of business.
If an organization isn't leveraging social media marketing to increase its brand loyalty, they are missing out on an inexpensive, effective, fast, and streamlined way to reach more than half the world's population.
Let's look closer at the countless ways an organization can implement social media marketing and benefit from it. Connecting with your target audience and growing brand recognition by engaging with prospects and customers is a very good strategy. Is your business using social media marketing effectively?
1. Increased brand awareness
With more than half of the world's population using social media, it makes sense to leverage platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and others to reach new and highly targeted potential customers to achieve brand recognition and gain customer loyalty.
There are a number of reasons why more and more organizations want to reap the benefits of social media marketing efforts for their business.
- According to the Datareportal January 2022 global overview, social media is now being used by 58.4 percent of the world's population. Furthermore, 424 million new users have come online in the last year, and the average daily time spent on special media globally is 2 hours and 27 minutes.
- Since 2012, social media has grown at a compound annual growth rate of 12 percent. Social media video ad spending is expected to grow by 20.1 percent to $24.35 billion in the next year.
- 52 percent of social media users are of the view that it helps them interact with the sponsored content or advertisement they view on the channel when a platform safeguards their data and privacy.
- A staggering 91 percent of active Instagram users say that they regularly view videos on Instagram every week.
- There are more than 2.91 billion monthly active Facebook users, which is a 6 percent increase year-over-year.
- India stands first in terms of Facebook audience size with more than 400 million users, followed by the United States, Indonesia, and Brazil with 200 million, 140 million, and 130 million Facebook users, respectively.
2. Improved customer service and support
Today's tech-savvy customers want brands to be available on social media so they can reach out to them in case of an issue, question, or need for assistance. They want instant satisfaction, and this is where social media networks come in handy.
You can use your brand's social media accounts to quickly respond to your customers, regardless of your geographical location, day or night, and much more efficiently than by most other means.
Forward-thinking customer service
Several market studies have rightly highlighted that brands that fail to take the advantage of the wonderful opportunities presented to them by social media lose by a huge margin to their savvy, forward-thinking, and customer-centric competitors.
If your brand is not online or not active online, you are at an increased risk of losing existing customers and not converting new ones. The ramifications of this could be disastrous for your business's growth and expansion prospects.
Here is an example to help understand this. If you are a brand that is competing with a much larger competitor with a history of customer service issues, you could leverage a social media platform to impart the quality of your company's commitment to customer service and that you actively use social channels to make it easier for customers to get in touch.
Similarly, if you are a brand with a history of customer service issues, it becomes easier for your competitors to use a social media platform your customers use to poorly review you and spark more negativity to erode your social marketing efforts and loyal customer base.
Improving public opinion
Contrary to popular belief, airing concerns raised by your customers in a public arena may seem counter-intuitive. When handled correctly and proactively, they can become a public relations victory and improve brand loyalty.
By responding publicly to a customer’s concern, problem, or complaint, you show others that you take every single issue very seriously. When others see that you respond quickly to resolve the problem, they may view your brand as truly caring about its customers and not just about making more money or earning higher profits.
3. More effective lead generation
The entire concept of social media lead generation refers to a wide range of strategies and other marketing tactics that are performed by businesses to acquire new leads on many social media platforms.
This includes but is not limited to feeding leads into a sales funnel and then qualifying the leads via channels such as emails, calls, meetings, social networking, chatbots, or other means to convert the prospects into paying customers.
Social media is usually not the first thing that comes to mind when it comes to generating leads. However, the significance of social media for lead generation is one of the biggest benefits of social media marketing.
84 percent of C-level executives and 75 percent of B2B buyers Today are incorporating social media as an integral part of their decision-making process.
To understand this better, social media lead generation is all about the implementation of time-proven and out-of-the-box strategic marketing tactics. This is done with a predefined purpose to capture qualified leads and pull them right into the sales funnel.
The generation of sales leads on various social media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram can go a long way to assist profit-driven businesses in identifying potential customers who are interested in products and/or services that are exactly similar or marginally different.
These leads can help businesses make special offers or discounts to potential customers and then convert them into loyal customers.
The best platform to generate qualified leads is the platform where your customers are. That said, most believe Facebook is the best social media site when it comes to social media lead generation.
However, this doesn't mean that social media marketers should feel compelled to leverage Facebook and/or rule out other sites. For instance, LinkedIn is trusted by 89 percent of B2B marketers for lead generation. These marketers believe LinkedIn helps them generate more than twice as many leads as other social channels.
4. Enhanced SEO and website traffic
Driving traffic from social media to your website is of critical importance. If you're new to the world of social media or have been asking yourself how to increase that type of traffic consistently, there are simple tips for you to follow.
Website traffic tips
To enhance the value and purpose of your SEO initiatives and drive more traffic to your website, you can engage in the following activities:
- A good social media profile will go a long way to drive significant and consistent traffic to your website. In other words, create social media profiles and optimize them to get more inbound traffic.
- For SEO purposes, it's vital to enrich your social media profile with relevant primary and secondary keywords (both short-tail and long-tail).
- Always add the links of your social media profiles to your website and those of your website to your social media profiles.
- Just as search engine optimization is about knowing your customers' expectations, requirements, and preferences, social media marketing is the same. You can leverage SEO and social media marketing tools to enhance the value of your SEO and social media marketing.
- This will help you drive regular traffic to your website that, in turn, will help you identify more leads by better profiling a few satisfied customers and closing more deals. Furthermore, it will help you improve customer retention and brand loyalty.
- Social media networks have largely become more and more like search engines, and just like search engines, social media sites need to be fed with best practice setup and use to ensure success. You must take care of all your brand's social media accounts across all relevant platforms.
5. Greater online visibility
Social media can go a long way to enhance the visibility of your online content and brand at large. It can help in spreading the word about your products or services to customers who otherwise wouldn’t have known you existed.
Focus on quality subscribers, fans, and followers, and not on adding people just to boost your numbers. For this, you can utilize a social media management tool to identify top, specific keywords across different social media channels.
You should also review the keywords and followers of your competitors and give them a follow too. They will be more likely to follow you back if they are already interested in the topics you cover.
You should share quality, relevant, unique, engaging, customer-centric, and up-to-date blogs, videos, images, and tutorials to help your customers learn more about your products and services.
Your primary objective should be to help your customers make informed decisions. Once you manage that, your brand's online visibility will grow exponentially.
6. Increased conversion rates
When it comes to the benefits of social media marketing for small businesses, one of the most striking aspects is that social media allows businesses to share valuable content with the right people at the right time.
The 2021 Edelman Trust Barometer found that 61 percent of online users trust organizations with an impeccable social media presence when it comes to information and insights.
Regardless of your business niche, social media provides the opportunity to position your brand as an industry thought leader. This helps your customers perceive you as a go-to source for information and insights on topics within your niche.
Social media advertisements and posts are highly value-driven ways to drive regular traffic to your website. You can gather data on your click-throughs by using tracking codes and notifying users as soon as you publish a post.
Compose personal messages using marketplace insights and get more business partners and customers. Engaging with your brand's accounts helps drive more leads without increasing business expenses.
By actively participating in social chats, you can increase your brand's visibility. Your brand will get more people's attention, and you can showcase your brand's expertise and unique selling proposition. This helps drive more traffic to your business website and convert more prospects and leads into satisfied customers.
7. Greater market penetration
Social media allows organizations to demonstrate how existing customers are using and benefiting from products and/or services. Positive reviews, feedback, and testimonials go a long way to help a brand build trust, acceptability, and loyalty.
This, in turn, helps in driving more business and build marketing receptiveness. Moreover, you can leverage social media to show how your organization embraces its brand values, how your products and/or services work in real life to solve pain points, and how your organization is making a significant impact in the lives of its customers, employees, and communities.
All these benefits of social media marketing help your brand penetrate the market better and deeper.
8. Broader reach to potential customers
With the advent of social platforms, customers can now easily reach out to a customer service representative. Furthermore, organizations can receive, review, and respond to customers' feedback, grievances, and suggestions more easily and faster.
In addition to these advantages, social media allows brands to humanize themselves in front of their target market and the world at large. This gives brands the ability to project themselves as more relatable and trustworthy. This, in turn, allows brands to retain more customers and attract more customers.
You can also learn of existing and potential problems or opportunities of which you might not otherwise be aware by listening to what people are saying about your business and your competitors on social media.
In other words, proactive listening can quickly emerge as the most powerful aspect of social media management. You can leverage it to start an interaction with the people who are talking about your brand and looking for a solution to their problem. The use of social media management tools can enhance this process.
You can even create a partnership, develop an opportunity or product, or explore a wide range of other possibilities. You can use paid promotions to showcase a positive purchase experience of your usual customers to improve your brand reputation.
9. Easier content sharing and distribution
Social media marketing benefits are countless. Social networks help you deal directly with customers, fans, and followers. It also allows them to deal directly with your brand.
Social media is a two-way street, unlike traditional media, which facilitates only one-way communication. You can share blogs, videos, do-it-yourself (DIY) tutorials, images, etc., on social media platforms with a single click.
Social networks also help you explore a huge amount of data and invaluable insights into your target audience's preferences, expectations, needs, and beliefs. You can leverage this information to make smarter business decisions and close more deals.
You can use this information to tailor your social media strategy and offer more benefits of social media marketing for consumers.
There is no denying the fact that there is no or little use of content marketing unless you can distribute it wisely. If you want to make your brand stand out from your competitors on top social media platforms, you need to have a strong social media content marketing strategy.
This will help you measure your results over time and fine-tune your content marketing strategy as and when required.
To get started, it is important for you to first carefully outline your marketing goals so you have a clear and complete understanding of how to tailor social media content. Thereafter, you need to make regular content audits to discover which of your brand's social media posts have been able to engage active users and how you can serve your target audience in a better way.
This will also help you create and nurture a content calendar that will help you simplify content marketing strategies and processes.
Once this has been done, you will need to formulate a customer-centric and purpose-driven content distribution strategy that can find creative ways for your brand to actively distribute the content across multiple social media platforms and receive maximum exposure.
Then, you can easily track different activities with the right KPIs or social media metrics like awareness, the number of visits, engagement, likes, return on investment, etc., to optimize your content distribution strategy.
In addition to this, you should also seriously plan to build your own community on social media if you haven't one. A social media community can be a great way to stay connected with your existing and potential clients. This will also help you enhance your brand's outreach and visibility.
After all, having a community of loyal, faithful, and repeat customers can do a lot of good for your business.
You can host social conversations or webinars about the benefits of social media marketing for consumers. This will help your customers better understand your brand and your products and/or services. This will also help you engage more with your customers and demonstrate your brand as an industry leader in its niche.
You can run contests on your brand's social networking platforms to generate social media leads and increase brand awareness. You can even ask the participants to share their positive experiences on social media platforms with their family, friends, colleagues, and followers to enhance the viral impact.
10. Greater audience engagement and interaction
As people start sharing, liking, and commenting on your social media posts, your content is exposed to new audiences; friends, family members, colleagues, and followers.
Create content that is engaging and share it with your network. To generate ideas for blog posts, look at Google Trends and other sources to find what is trending or newsworthy. Current trends are like goldmines; identifying trends helps you find targeted keywords that will improve your search engine rankings.
Search engine rankings help reap lead generation benefits without investing in paid advertising. Brand loyalty typically increases more based on authority when compared to promotional campaigns and outbound marketing. This kind of positive exposure helps your brand in countless ways.
Use social media to solve customer problems and challenges. Customers who use social media to engage with brands when it comes to resolving customer service issues tend to exhibit a more loyal customer circle, wield enormous influence, and are willing to pay more, according to American Express.
Social media allows you to share the brand's story professionally and politely if there is something negative or wrongly written about your brand. This helps you increase top-of-mind awareness, which can make a big difference in a brand's ability to win over customers.
Benefits of Social Media Marketing Wrap-up
Social media is a highly powerful and customer-centric medium for every modern-day organization. It can be as useful for a brick-and-mortar store as a Fortune 500 company. Social media wields an awesome double-edged sword.
An impeccable social media presence can help you retain existing and attract more customers while improving your organization's online reputation and brand value. While a poor presence on social networks can drive potential paying customers away and damage your brand's reputation.
Social media is a step in the right direction for brands that are more than ready to move ahead in brand engagement and awareness. Whether it's collecting leads or connecting with customers, social media marketing can bring big returns.
