How social media works for business?
Social media has around 3 billion people all over the world, which makes it a popular marketing platform for business. Many people actively search on social media to engage with various brands. Due to this many companies maintain their presence on social media platforms, interact with their target customers, and to generate leads and conversion.
This scenario and increasing use of social media change the method of interaction between business and customer.
Social media has made an enormous impact on the marketing methods of the business. Various social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc provide an opportunity for the business to target audiences and attract a high number of users to the website.
How social media marketing helps business?
Social media helps to increase brand awareness of a company by targeting potential customers. At present, 80% of businesses generate leads by investing in social media marketing. Remarketing is also an effective strategy to get leads and conversions.
Social media can bring remarkable success to your company as it helps to improve brand awareness and loyalty of the customers towards your brand.
People can check reviews as reviews and ratings by other people boost the user’s loyalty towards your brand.
User interaction with the company is the most important factor to improve user experience.
73% of marketers believe that social media marketing is effective for their business.
If you are presently not sure about investing in social media to reach your target market and promote there then this post will help you to make the best and successful use of social media platforms to reach your ideal customers.
Because, in this post, we’re going to explain how any business or company can make the best use of social media marketing to produce results.
In the present scenario if you are not taking advantage of social media it is equal to living in the cave in this modern world.
How to plan your social media campaign?
Before knowing the benefits of social media for your business, let’s understand how to create and manage a successful social media campaign.
Starting and running a social media marketing campaign without a social strategy in mind is like roaming in a forest without a map.
Therefore before starting social media campaigns you should have researched and got answers to some questions like-
- What are the business goals that you want to achieve through social media marketing?
- Who are your target audiences?
- What is the niche of your business and which social media platform is most effective for you?
- Which product do you want to send to your audience with social media marketing?
- What strategies you will use to promote and market on social media.
- If you want to run social media marketing campaigns then what will be your target market, budget, and keywords.
For example, a real-estate business, being highly visual, can get a lot of value from a strong presence on Instagram or Facebook.
How to make social media works for your business
Choose the best social media platform according to your business
Many marketers, in view to maximize their reach, start investing in all the social media platforms, which fails to deliver expected results.
The platform should be decided according to your business niche and where most of your customers are available. For example- if your business is selling clothes then Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest are the better options rather than LinkedIn.
You should not market on all the social media platforms neither it will give results nor it is efficient. All platforms are different in features thus require different types of content. Your workload will certainly be increased without any benefit.
Therefore it is advised to master one platform and boost-up your sales tremendously.
Who is your target audience?
After choosing a social media platform, you should find your target market. To make better and accurate targeting, you should know your target audience. For example, if you have a job portal, then you should target people who are in need of a job.
Therefore, it can be done by targeting people according to the demographics of your ideal customers and how to reach them using social media.
27% of internet users say they find new brands and products on social media.
Once you’re clear on who is your ideal customer, you’ll be able to create your social media message to engage them.
Randomly reaching people on social media is of no use as 80% of them may not be interested in your product. But if you target potential customers at least 60-70% of them may be actually interested in your product or service.
What are your Goals
After choosing a perfect platform and target market for your business you should finalize your goals too. Marketing without goals is like walking without a destination. You may be on the right way but if you don’t know your business objectives then your marketing could be directionless.
Basically, there are two types of business goals
- Brand awareness
- Conversions
If your goal is brand awareness then you have to become the leader of your niche and build a strong social media presence to attract more and more users.
Your goal should not only reach but also likes, comments, shares, retweets, page likes, followers, or a combination of all called engagement.
If your goal is conversations then you should take effective steps to capture the target market and bring them to your website. You should keep a watch on your audience insights. Making a proper report and remarket them may be the most effective option for driving a higher number of conversions
Decide how you market or approach
After deciding your goals, you should make a strategy to approach your target market on the chosen platform.
Finalizing how exactly you are going to approach your audience is significantly important. You should decide how exactly you will market yourself on social media is essential.
Whether you are performing simple social media advertising, paid to advertise or remarketing, planning and creating an advanced blueprint of your plan is necessary. It concludes whether the plan you make will be effective or not.
Best Ways to make social media work for you
Social media is a powerful marketing tool that can certainly increase the success of your company. But there is a misconception that social media marketing is very easy, which is not true. It requires advanced planning and strategies which makes your marketing actually successful.
Build a credible reputation
Building strong credibility is not a difficult task as it sounds. You just have to connect with the right people instead of everyone.
To build good business credibility you should start with brand awareness. Creating attractive and captivating visuals to attract more customers is a great option for brand awareness.
Along with visuals, you should maintain a regular update or posting on your social media pages to make the constant interest of the audience.
You can share posts, content, graphics, images, videos, sliders, etc to retain user engagement.
Attract Target Customers
To attract target customers, the first step should definitely be a platform i.e. a good business page where you can share and post creative content. Then you can invite them to your page and increase your page likes or followers.
Those people will get daily updates of your latest content or posts which helps to increase engagement.
If your plan is paid social media marketing then you can target people using their interests and demographics.
Use the right social media tools
As a business owner, you should choose the best tools to amplify the voice of your social media marketing efforts.
They help to organize things effectively. Moreover, these tools make work easier, fast and cost-effective
Some tools that you can use are:
- Social media calendar
- Buffer
- Hootsuite
- Post Planner
- Sprout Social
- Relay
- Canva
Implement a social media plan perfectly
Take time to create well-planned messages that will show your brand well. You have to make sure about constant posting on your social media pages. Start using a service such as HootSuite to schedule your posts for the future.
Once you start driving traffic and followers you can target more precisely according to their interest.
What are some ways to measure the success of a social media campaign?
Social media marketing has become widespread in the recent years because of its wide range of benefits. It is a good way to reach out to your target audience and establish your brand.
Measuring success of a social media campaign can be complex, but there are many ways that you can do it. Here are some ideas
1) Social media followers
2) Engagement rates
3) Time spent on social media posts
4) Top performing posts for the week/month/year
5) Conversion rates
Benefits of Social media Marketing
Increase brand awareness
More than half of the world population is present on social media, it is actually a very effective platform for business promotion and marketing. It is a new and trending place to reach new as well as highly targeted customers.
71% of consumers have said that a person who has good social media experience with a brand is likely to recommend it to others.
If you think people only connect with brands they already know on social media? Then you are probably wrong! Consider that 60 percent of Instagram users said that they discover and search for new products and brands on the platform.
Implementing a great social media strategy will significantly increase your brand awareness as you are targeting a broad audience of consumers. 91% of marketers already claimed that their social media marketing efforts considerably increased their exposure and brand awareness.
Improved search engine rankings
59% of marketers believe that maintaining a strong social media presence can boost up your search engine rankings also. Search engine crawlers also check for a website’s social media presence and performance.
This also impacts SEO as the traffic and engagement which you get from social media helps to increase your SERP rankings.
You have to create high-quality content that attracts the interest of your audience. You can share blogs, case studies, information, latest trends, infographics, etc that should make your business page credible and interesting.
Increase website traffic
Social media marketing helps to increase your website traffic significantly. Without social media, it will be difficult as well as time-consuming to bring sufficient traffic to your website.
Social media actually acts as a tunnel between the audience and your website or you can say it is a gateway to your website. You can acquire a higher number of new customers.
Therefore by marketing on social media, you can effectively market your business to a wider range of versatile consumers globally.
Brand Loyalty and Credibility
Social media is a brilliant tool to build and ensure customer’s trust and loyalty. 80% of customers feel that a brand present on social media is 70% more trustable than a brand that is not present.
Social media is open for all and it builds transparency with the audience. Moreover, customers can directly communicate and interact with the business. Your website should have more loyal customers than general traffic only because the conversion rate of loyal customers is more and they provide leads a number of times.
This ensures customer trust which ultimately results in strong brand credibility.
Higher Conversion Rate
A great social media presence ensures a higher conversion rate. Every post, video, image, infographic brings viewers to your website which increases traffic.
People trust social media brands and products and may land to your website to make conversions. You can target according to the interest and demographics of interested people thus increase conversions.
Social media ad campaigns are an effective strategy to increase conversion rate.
Conclusion
Social media is an effective tool to make a successful digital marketing campaign. From brand awareness to conversions, it fulfills all the important purposes of a digital marketing campaign.
Social media is the easiest, cost-effective, and faster way to drive traffic to the website as well as improving search engine rankings.