Learn how social media marketing can help you generate leads, boost conversions, and increase brand awareness to take your business to the next level.
Engaging with their target audience is the goal of all brands. But many struggle with creating engaging and relevant content. In this article we aim to cover everything social media marketing – what is it, tips to use social media for business, benefits of marketing on social media, best social media marketing platforms for business and a lot more.
What is social media marketing?
It is the process of promoting your products and /or services on popular social media channels to drive traffic, generate leads and convert them. It is all about meeting the expectations and needs, solving queries and addressing the issues of your ever evolving target audience.
But it is incredibly essential to know that no two platforms work in a similar fashion, therefore a one-size-fits-all approach don’t work in SMM. Your strategy will differ based on which social media platform you choose to promote your business on.
Some of the common reasons why businesses choose this popular digital marketing type are:
- Customer engagement
- Creating awareness
- Testing new services and/or offerings
- Lead generation
- Conversions
- After sale service
- Community marketing
Benefits of Social Media Marketing
The concept of SMM has evolved now. Earlier it was all about generating traffic. But today social media channels are more than just a platform to promote content.
A study of ODM Group, a digital marketing agency, concluded that74% of people use social media when making a purchasing decision. Make their decision easy by having a strong and relevant social media presence.
With the help of a relevant and well-devised social media strategy, brands can achieve a lot of benefits starting from engaging audience with meaningful and timely conversations to expand the reach of whatever they are selling.
Here are the top five benefits of social media marketing for businesses.
- Increase brand awareness – Social media is one of the most cost-effective digital marketing methods used to promote your content and generate greater visibility for your business. With a well-designed relevant social media strategy brand can engage with a broad audience and increase awareness about their brand and its offerings.
- Faster and easier mode of communication – Businesses can receive, review, and respond to customer’s complaints quicker and easier than ever before. Targeting the right set of people has become simple. Prior to social media, business found it difficult to target their advertisements/efforts to their desired audience. Social media helps get customer insights; through social media you can also gauge the needs and requirements of your target audience and the gap that needs to be filled.
- Reduced marketing costs – Traditional marketing is quite expensive with limited reach. Social media provides economical methods of marketing your products and services to millions of customers at a particular time. Unlike traditional methods, in social media marketing you have the advantage to monitor the performance of your campaign and tweak it depending on the results.
- Improved conversion rates – When you respond to your customers on time, address their queries and complaints almost instantly and engage with them at every step, you will automatically earn customer trust and loyalty. With traditional marketing methods, it is quite difficult to have a one to one connect with your audience.
- Thought leadership – Without social media you can make your brand standout in the crowd. By sharing your expert opinion on trending, popular or breaking news you can establish your brand as a thought leader in the industry. Of course, not posting anything controversial is the key to a good social media presence of your brand.
Now that we know the many advantages of social media marketing for businesses, its time to know which platforms one should market their offerings on to get maximum returns.
How to Use social media for Business
Here are some of the best practices that you need to follow.
- Be consistent – Post consistently on social media. You can create a social media calendar for your brand to avoid posting too much or too little. This will also give variety to your followers.
- Have fun and deliver fun – Don’t do same type of posts or just text post. Have a proper mix of content – audio, video, infographics, memes etc. Generate leads by running contests, giving special offers, hosting live videos, expert talks or announcing exciting updates. You can use Instagram shops to sell your product directly on the platform.
- Know your audience well – Get the demographic information, customer behaviour and social media trends using analytical tools. Know what your audience wants to see or receive and create content accordingly.
Best Social Media Marketing Platforms for Businesses
Businesses can get to know the competition efforts, develop their brand voice, and engage with the audiences on social media. But not every business can use every social platform for their business. It is very important to know which social media platform will suit your business. Using the right platform will amplify your visibility and sales and take your brand to the next level.
Below are the top 7 platforms every business should consider (depending on the requirement) to market their offerings on.
- YouTube– This is one such platform that is been used by all demographics. Product reviews, testimonials, instructional videos, comedy videos, fashion videos, tutorials there is an audience for every type of content on YouTube. When you post a video on this platform, it starts to show up in Google and YouTube search results, and you can promote the same on all your social networks, because video is everywhere; the demand for videos is huge. When you want to educate your customers, there is no other medium than YouTube to market your brand.
- Facebook – With more than two billion active users, Facebook is the most popular social network among businesses to market their offerings.You can find nearly everyone you know on Facebook. This means you have a broad customer base for targeting. You can run contests, share photos and videos, memes, promote new content, and exciting announcements and offers on Facebook.
- Instagram – If you are a brand looking to target young market, Instagram should be your first choice. Photos, short videos (reels) and little text will do wonders to your brand. This platform is most popular in urban areas, which means brands that focus on fashion, retail, digital tech must not miss marketing on Instagram. Be creative and innovative when creating a social media strategy for Instagram.
- WhatsApp – Heard about WhatsApp Business? Yes, WhatsApp allows you create a business profile, respond to customer messages, automate messaging, share updates with customer about their purchases. It offers brands the ability to create catalogues of their products and services. It can be used as a great customer service channel by brands, especially B2C.
- LinkedIn – A great platform to connect with or target working professionals and business tycoons, LinkedIn is the right choice for B2B brands. In a nutshell, companies that are looking for businesses as clients will have more success than companies that market directly to consumers.
- Twitter – With millions of engaged users, Twitter is one of the most accessible networks in the internet world. Of course, the user base is not as broad as Facebook, but most of the brands use this microblogging (text limit is 280 characters) site to expand brand awareness.
- Telegram – It is a new age marketing channel for brands.There are many ways brands can leverage Telegram – providing one-to-one customer support by using chatbots, the platform’s channel feature can be used to broadcast messages to up to 200,000 people at a time.
Other than this you can also explore TikTok, Snapchat, WeChat, Pinterest etc. for your business.
Whichever platform you choose, make sure you create a customized social media strategy for those sites. A ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach don’t work every time.
Which social media platform is best for your brand?
Every new business has this question. And there is no right or direct answer to this. It totally depends on your requirement, nature of business. You need to do a lot of experiments, try and test before taking a firm decision.
Below are some of the tips you can take into consideration to create a relevant and lucrative social media strategy:
- Have a clear goal in mind when you decide to create an account on any social media platform.
- Have a good knowledge about each platform. Do your research before jumping into the pool.
- Know what you achieve from the platform you decide to go with.
- Look at the user data for the platforms you think will work best: income, gender, age, location, interests, etc.
- Make sure you use latest data related to the social media sites to support your strategy.
- Get help from social media marketing professionals. There are many social media marketing agencies who can assist you create a strong online presence.
To conclude,
Social media marketing platforms help businesses in many ways, but as a brand you should understand that it isn’t all about tools and platforms. You need to have the right social media marketing strategy to get that exposure and result. You need to have custom marketing plan for every channel; content should be engaging and relevant to your target audience.