Some marketers say that having a social media marketing campaign is like throwing a 24/7 online party. You have to keep your guests engaged at all times if you want to make new friends and have a blast together.
In his detailed study Social Media Marketing Workbook, PhD Jason McDonald says that marketers are party detectives. Their job is to attend other gatherings to take the best ideas and make an even better party themselves.
If you manage to be the best social media host ever, you will not only have fun, but also reap significant benefits.
Here is what you get from a well managed social media campaign.
#1 Boost Brand Awareness
First and foremost, a vibrant social media environment results in strong brand awareness. In 2022, the average person spent 2.5 hours on social media each day. Social media, therefore, is a great opportunity to engage with social media users and tell your story.
The more engaging and meaningful the posts are, the greater the chance viewers will share, comment, and like. In the beginning, this process goes slowly. However, with time and effort, you will learn what inspires your audience and your posts will gain more popularity. With more popularity and engagement, the number of your followers will grow.
If you decide to use social media automation tools such as Bulk.ly, you will be able to take the most from social media and create and distribute content even more effectively. By profiting from smart technologies, you will see your popularity on social media grow at an unexpected speed!
According to Statista, boosting brand awareness was a primary goal for marketers in 2021. Since social media platforms are so helpful in this regard, they are an integral part of almost every marketing strategy today.
#2 Drive More Traffic
Social media platforms are not only beneficial themselves, but also complement other marketing strategies.
For example, you can invest thousands of dollars and years of your time to create a blog. However, all the amazing content you post there will have very few readers unless you share it on social media.
By linking your website and your social media, you will be able to promote your website content and make people want to visit your website.
It is a common and very beneficial practice. To inspire social media users to visit their websites, some brands even go as far as providing codes for special coupons and discounts for those accessing the brand’s website through social media accounts.
#3 Strengthen Brand Loyalty
As you probably know, the fact that people are aware of your brand is not enough. You want them to like and trust you, and that is called brand loyalty.
Building a loyal customer base is a long process, and social media is your most powerful tool to achieve this goal.
Contacting brands through social media accounts has become a normal practice of the modern consumer. The millennial generation will soon overflow the market and become the most numerous consumer group. Research shows that this generation is 62% more loyal to brands that directly engage with them on social media.
Therefore, being responsive and understanding customers’ queries on social media accounts is currently one of the strongest competitive advantages you can have.
Today, people are busy, and don’t have time to wait in lines for phone calls or wait for replies on emails. They will give their trust only to brands which can hear them and attend to them swiftly and easily.
#4 Rank Higher on Google
Social media platforms have a way to indirectly affect your website’s ranking on Google and other search engines by:
- Extending content distribution
- Enhancing brand reputation
- Improving online visibility and organic traffic
- Boosting local search engine optimization (SEO)
- Ensuring longer lifespan of posts
- Increasing brand recognition
In other words, by being active on social media and using proper hashtags and keywords, you are more likely to be found on Google.
And it is not only customers that are looking for your products and solutions online. Potential business partners, suppliers, and influencers are searching for you as well. By becoming more visible to them, you increase chances of being involved with them and their audiences.
In turn, this involvement means you can link your website and blog with theirs. Thus, you get the opportunity to generate more organic traffic and penetrate new market segments.
You can think of this approach as digital networking. If your social media accounts are active, responsive, and well connected, your reputation will grow, both online and offline.
#5 Becoming a Thought Leader
The notion of a thought leader refers to an expert whose guidance and insight is valuable to those around them. In other words, a thought leader is someone whose opinion is listened to with attention.
Both people and companies can become thought leaders. For example, people turn to Deloitte’s blog when they want to learn more about financial and market trends. On the other hand, Elon Musk is a great example of a person who grew to be a global thought leader in technology.
It is not a surprise that Deloitte and Elon Musk are both very active on social media. These platforms are actually their main tools for starting discussions and spreading the word about their opinion.
Running an influencer page doesn’t have to be difficult. Nowadays there are many hacks on how to set up your Instagram profile template, or establish a TikTok style that gets attention.
#6 Improve Customer Experience
As previously mentioned, social media customer care is a cornerstone of premium customer experience. It refers to responsiveness to queries, and also accuracy and relevance of information provided in posts.
Furthermore, aesthetics is a vital part of any brand identity. Seeing that you are serious about the quality of your video and image content only adds to the odds of people trusting you.
Finally, digital platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn are gold mines when it comes to feedback. You can’t always know what’s wrong with your products, until you get an honest review.
By taking reviews and comments into consideration and using them to improve your services, you will ensure your customers feel heard. There is no better compliment to your customers than that.
#7 Become Strong Authority Brand
The importance of becoming an authority brand is clear. Your company, your products, and your quality will be taken more seriously, and will be chosen over others.
Building a strong authority online is particularly important for service-based companies. A detergent either washes or it doesn’t. However, software is harder to understand and therefore brand authority becomes much more important. If I am not a tech person and need a phone, I will gladly buy an iPhone rather than risk other brands I don’t know much about.
Therefore, service-based businesses need social media to explain their products and the value of their solutions. B2B SaaS marketing agencies know that fact, and increasingly rely on these platforms to present innovative solutions and state-of-the-art technologies to a wide audience. This is where SaaS copywriting plays a big role in establishing the brand voice and strengthening the target audience engagement.
Even if you are not very good at promoting your own brand on social media, you can opt to partner up with other, well-established brands on the network. Creating a joint ad with a life coach or other influencers meaningful to your target audience can help you increase brand trust and establish authority.
#8 Reduce Marketing Costs While Gaining More Exposure
Email marketing is the most cost-efficient promotion tool, with the highest ROI rates. At the same time, social media pays off very well too. For every $1 invested in promotion on social platforms, you will get $2.80 in return.
Signing up and posting on platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter is free. This means your products and brand story get the chance to reach customers from all over the world. It is something we could only dream of only twenty years ago—and all that for $0.
At the same time, ads usually range between $0.4 to $0.94 per click. This price is fair, considering the fact you get to boost your exposure and gain important engagement insights.
However, it is important not to get caught up in numbers and forget that you interact with humans. As effective as social media posts and ads are, you should know when it is too much. Posting too often or bombarding customers with too many ads can easily backfire and only damage your reputation.
Being smart about social media campaigns means that you launch big when you have something important to share. For example, if you are kicking off a new product, collection, or partnership, or wish to promote your webinar, ads are a good investment.
#9 Understand Customers Better, Innovate, and Improve Quality
With so many brands out there in the market fighting fiercely for their place under the sun, a personalized approach to customers is a must. No one wants generic ads and posts anymore. You need to show your customers how deeply you understand their specific needs and pain points. Only then will they believe you.
To develop a firm brand strategy, you need first-hand information. Social media platforms provide precious sources of information on your customers.
Here is some information you can extract to get to know your target audience:
- Demographics (age, gender, location)
- Purchasing habits
- Shared interests
- Values
- Online behavior
- Affinities (likes and dislikes)
- Opinions, dilemmas, and discussions
As you can imagine, using information from social media is not only beneficial for your marketing strategy. It is precious for competition analysis, optimum website personalization, defining business goals, and designing effective sales strategies.
#10 Have Better Conversion Rates
Using social media accounts gives you an opportunity to create a story around your product, and make it more meaningful for your customers.
In fact, social platforms are the second most popular way for customers to discover new products. More than 54.7% of people who learned about a new product did so on social media, while 57.3% heard about new offers from a friend.
You can use social media in several ways to raise sales. For example, one of the usual promotion strategies for e-commerce businesses is to connect social media and Amazon/website stores. However, promoting an Amazon store using social media ads is another powerful way to generate leads, still underestimated by businesses.
Social Media Statistics
Here are some statistics to prove the importance and benefits of social media marketing.
- Social media is an extremely important source of information influencing purchase decisions in the United States. In 2021, 71% of respondents said that friend’s social media posts made them buy something, while 63% said it was the post on the brand page. At the same time, 51% said that they purchased something after being exposed to an ad on social media (Statista)
- 29% of consumers say that social media ads are the leading channel of understanding product benefits (Statista)
- The popularity of social media is growing rapidly, and the fastest growth is expected in China (the number of users is expected to grow by 18.7% by the end of 2027), 55.8% in India, and the United States (8.2%). (Statista)
- The leaders in the social media market are Facebook (78%), YouTube (68%), and Instagram (54%) (Statista)
The Future of Social Media
To make an effective social media campaign, a marketer must understand the essence of social media culture.
One important thing to understand is that the social media landscape constantly changes. As technology evolves, we can expect smarter tools and even more benefits in the future.
For example, metaverse will be the next great innovation, which will incorporate virtual reality into the known features of social media. Thus, we will be able to collaborate, trade, and network using immersive experiences, and augmented reality. The potential to improve customer experience and boost conversions will be limitless!
Quick Guide on Benefits Of Marketing On Social Media
If we understand a social media campaign as a party, then its main motto should be Work Hard, Party Hard! The platforms such as Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and TikTok are not only beneficial for your businesses. In contemporary society, there is no marketing campaign without social media.
This fact is especially true for startups and technology businesses, whose products are complex and new, and therefore not so easy to understand. Using social media platforms, you can reach a large number of potential customers, tell your story, and interact with your customers. In return, you will increase your website traffic, get to know your audience, collect useful ideas from them, and boost your sales.