Social media marketing is the most convenient way to boost up your business and to reach target customers. It’s budget-friendly and easy for anyone to advertise his products. Social media marketing is the most popular way of marketing in the recent decade by digital marketing analysts.
For those who are thinking “what is social media marketing?”
Social media marketing is a marketing strategy that means promoting your business or brand through social media platforms like Facebook, Linked In, Instagram, WhatsApp, YouTube, Twitter, etc to attract a wide range of customers from different backgrounds.
For being marketer-friendly and supportive of all sorts of start-ups, social media marketing is dominating as a trailblazing strategy in the marketing realm. Social media marketing continued its ascend, making 73% of marketers believe in this strategy according to Buffer, 2019.
Showcasing your product on social media where millions of people are rushing every day can surely increase the marketing level of your product making it sky high! In this case, as an advertiser, you don’t need to invest a huge amount of money as the marketing is going to be done completely by common people.
Still, you will be thinking, is it convenient to use, or we’re just bluffing about it? If you’re not sure how useful social media marketing can be to grow your business, then dive into the article below, where we talk about the benefits of using social media marketing.
Top 10 Advantages Of Social Media Marketing
1. Broad Range of Customers
This is the first and foremost reason why we are using social media as a marketing platform. With a total of 59% of the world’s population, you should not miss the opportunity of social media marketing where we can reach up to all of them.
According to Statista,
About 3.6 billion of the total world’s population are using social media in 2020.
All of them won’t be your customers, but at least you’ll get 54% of them to be your customer!
Benefits of using social media marketing to get customers are:
- In social media, it’s easy to attract people towards you and your products. You would get a higher response if you made a social media marketing plan to attract your customers.
- It will be easy for you to regularly be active on social media sites and keep a steady connection with them. Don’t make your audience come to you– go to your audience! You will get an idea of your highly interested customers and rank your target market accordingly.
Also, social media marketing is called a magnet to grab customers. So, start making your plan according to it.
2 .Cost-effective marketing
Staying within budget is a difficult task, especially if you’re going to start a Start-Up. But in social media marketing, you can promote your business or products at a significant cost.
So social media marketing is cost-effective as well as one of the essential things of marketing. Moreover, if you’re on a tight budget, you must use this strategy to succeed!
The fourth source article said,
Not only are social media campaigns economic (and often free) to implement and track, they can assist in bringing down overall marketing spending as well. This is particularly relevant for regional businesses that, using social media such as Facebook, can target exactly who they need to base on audience demographics.
There are different kinds of social media platforms where you can showcase your products at a low cost. Facebook, Instagram, and other social media have added the feature of advertising. In this feature, you can advertise your products at 3x less than the regular advertising price.
Conversation with your fans and followers, along with investing time in creating and publishing content, will manifest most of your social media results. By using social media marketing, you will get better co-efficiency at a lower effort.
Even if you have a small budget, you can still establish a vivid impression on these social media sites to reach your customers and significantly rank your business.
If you’re interested to learn more about cost-effectiveness, don’t forget to read “How much do social media agencies typically charge?”
3. Promoting brand recognition
Using social media marketing, you can easily promote your brand recognition, where, in traditional marketing, it is quite challenging to promote a Brand among the common people.
But how can social media marketing do this?
In this area, you’ll find a lot of people searching for quality products. If you can satisfy them with your product or services, surely they’ll give your brand a positive review as well as mention your brand on social media, which will surely increase your brand recognition.
For example, at Mad Monkey Media, we handle social media for all of our customers so well that we generally see an average of 400% increase in their sales.
This marketing strategy helps our clients as well as promoting our brand name through them which creates a win-win situation for both of us.
How to use social media marketing for promoting brand recognition?
We’re here to give you some tips on this case:
- You need to find a unique idea to showcase your brand like sponsoring any prestigious event online.
- You can make content about products on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Linked In, etc. The content needs to highlight your product ensuring the quality. Also, help the viewer to choose their desired product.
- You need to follow some social media marketing strategy. As an example, you can make your Brand attractive with a social media marketing logo.
According to MarketingSherpa,
Online adults aged 18-34 are most likely to follow a brand on social media.
An excellent visual can make your Brand or products shareable, which can promote the Brand positively. You have the opportunity to increase brand awareness by using paid ads or campaigns on social media.
Nowadays, some brands or companies use memes in social media as their strategy, and guess what? They’re nailing it at a Godspeed!
For example, you can check the picture above which is an ad for a restaurant where they use memes in social media to attract customers. You can find it helpful for your products too.
When the customers see your content on the social media platform, they will become well acquainted with your business, increasing the purchase.
4. Lead to a high conversion rate
As digital media continues to pave the way for marketing, millions of businesses worldwide have turned to social media as a core advertising tool.
Social media is the most cost-effective marketing tool when it comes to Returning on Investment (ROI). And it’s one of the main reasons why you should use social media marketing.
What do we mean by conversion?
A conversion could be an online registration that makes a purchase or checking out or add an item to their shopping cart. It depends on the business. Essentially, it is an action on the website which the business owner considers a lead.
On social media, the way to reach the target market is different. They’re not looking for us. Instead, we are looking for them.
So, if your targeting successfully attracts the customers, they’re more likely to purchase because your ads reached these potential buyers before they saw your competition listed right next to you. Thus, the usage of Social media marketing leads to a higher conversion rate.
5. Improving brand loyalty
Social media marketing is also useful for improving brand loyalty. Your customers are always talking about your products, and it’s necessary to hear their comments about your products.
According to Forbes,
35% of millennials consider online forums before purchasing a product.
How to improve brand loyalty?
you can improve your brand loyalty by using the tips below:
- If you include a social monitoring feature, you can easily see clients’ comments about the products, which is a crucial strategy for your product or business.
- You need to market your products according to their need so that they find it helpful.
- You can go through social listening to get a better understanding of how your brand is perceived online. Your customers may share a post about your products or services, which can influence your branding
Many companies are afraid to ask for customer reviews. It’s a kind of bad strategy.
Why is it important to take a review?
- It’s important to promote the customer’s review. If they give negative feedback, you need to recheck the product.
- If you handle criticism properly on social media, it will be an opportunity to present your brand as an industry leader.
- You can reward your customers for being loyal to your brands, such as a discount, exclusive content, or sneak peek.
Forbes found that,
62% of millennials say that if a brand engages them on social networks, they are more likely to become loyal customers.
You can turn customers into brand advocates by engaging with them through valuable feedback, quality content, and conversation.
The chance to improve brand authority is the main fact why marketers use social media marketing, which can effectively position your business as a leader in the marketplace.
How to improve band authority?
Most importantly, it matters when you make valuable content and share it on social media sites. Sharing will allow you to show your expertise to customers. If the content is helpful to them, they will share it with their fans and followers, mentioning your Brand. That will build your brand authority.
To improve band authority you can use these methods:
- Engage with your audience and speak with confidence from your particular platform of values. Your Brand or products will be more valuable when your customers talk positively about your product.
- Let everyone contribute their experiences and views. The social platform is ideal for everyone to have a distinct identity, even as they work for one company. Next time anyone wants to buy, you can be confident that they will opt for the brand authorization to choose.
Using social media marketing you’ll get the opportunity to engage with different kinds of audiences.
How can we serve social media marketing services to our customers?
An exceptional benefit of Social Media Marketing is, you will get access to a diverse audience and a wide range of networks will open up to you.
According to the Pew Research Center Report, In America
It came into the research that among social media users 79% of them using Facebook, 24% are using Twitter, 32% are using Instagram, 31% are using Pinterest, and 29% use LinkedIn.
How can you reach them?
Firstly, you have to list your audience demographic values with more detailed information like – gender, age, location, interest, the brands they follow to get an idea of which way you need to grab their attention.
Again, you have to stay updated with the trend. This information will help you to create suitable content on different social media to reach the target audience.
Like, a new hyped game, Cyberpunk 2077, has launched on 10th December; if you have a business regarding gaming instruments, you can do the trick to use this hype for your products!
Mainly, you have to check which social media is best for your products or business. Then you can find out about each social media and can take actions according to the audience. This research will help you to reach the audience and get enough profit.
No matter what your target market is, there will be a competitor in every step of your business, and there is a good chance that your competitors are already present and involved on social media channels.
So, you have to do well on these social media sites and have to remain competitive. Most of the brands take this competition too seriously, and that’s why they perform higher day by day.
If you miss essential leads to this competition, you will end up being isolated in the game. You have to start working toward building a presence on social media. Social media content that can demonstrate our knowledge is one of the best ways to succeed and bring in more relevant online traffic.
9. Developing search engine ranking
You need to use Social media profiles to play an influential role in SEO. Additionally, you should ensure that your profile’s information and captions sections are optimized with industry keywords, heightening your perceptibility. Social media searches depend heavily on the strength of the used keywords.
Social media content and techniques can help your business attain better SEO results on your website and improve rankings within the SERPs (search engine page results). Even though social media and its relation to search ranking have been confusing for quite some time, a business’s social media presence impacts your Google search ranking.
You can consider Search ranking factors for aspects of the user experience. In other words, a higher ranking increases the visibility of customers ensuring both profit and marketing.
The reasons to use this feather in social media marketing are:
- Content quality and keyword research are vital factors of content optimization, and no one can deny that crawl ability and mobile-friendliness are essential site-architecture factors.
- Optimizing the website and content while keeping these factors in mind can help the webpages rank higher in the search results.
Features like smart results and Knowledge Panels in the search results can increase the visibility and provide users with more information about your company directly and quickly.
10. Get the opportunity to gain new customer insight
The noticeable thing about using social media marketing is that it can allow you to know about the customer’s understanding. When you communicate and interact with your customers, you will get to understand your customer’s interests.
If you inquire what your customers are talking about on social media, you will understand what attracts them the most. Seeing the insight of your customers, you can make a change accordingly to satisfy your customers.
And social media platforms also enable you to understand your customer’s behavior.
5 Disadvantages Of Social Media Marketing
For disadvantages, the first word that comes to our mind should be “Privacy.” Privacy is an essential thing for business. But in social media marketing, there is a loophole that may cause privacy breakdown.
For example, the scandal of Cambridge Analytica that happened in 2018 shattered people’s trust in Facebook as they found out Facebook had sold its user’s personal data to Cambridge Analytica. That caused the most prominent leak in Facebook history.
Like this, other social media sites also have some disadvantages.
So what are the main threats of social media marketing?
1. Exposure to competitors
Suppose, you have built a business and started to market your products on social media. Here the threat is along with your audience, and your competitors will also notice your products and marketing plans. This incident may harm your business policy or strategy.
Social media enables us to study our competitor’s strategies. They can learn about our business method. And then what does it cost? It costs our business or products to be undone.
2. Needs qualified personnel
You build your business. But you alone can’t spend enough time on every side of your business. So it would be best if you employed personnel who are well qualified for your business. They will manage your other side of the company and have the traffic under control. That’s why you’ll have to invest in both sides: product and salary for a quality outcome. In this case, your total cost will be higher than before.
3. Slow returns on investments
The ROI (Return on investment) from social media marketing is one of the lowest in online marketing strategies. If we do not post or engage with our fans or people regularly, the followers will decrease.
As ROI depends on your customers, you need to attract more people. From the graph below, you’ll notice that the improvement of ROI is a little bit slow.
If your brand or business is not well aware of a particular group of people or locations, it will be hard to establish a long-range customer base. So it’s time-consuming to create that kind of fan-base unless you are already well known.
4. Tarnish brand name
Social media is one of the essential marketing tools for any business. You need to post enough relevant content that your followers are noticing, but not posting too often.
It can get spammy and lead your followers to hit that “unlike” or “unfollow” button. It would be best if you do not get addicted to a single social media platform. If your customers can’t get satisfied with your products or business, they will give negative reviews. Other customers can see this negative feedback. They don’t take anything from you, which may tarnish your product or business and deteriorate the relationship between your customers and you.
5. Time-consuming
When we, Mad Monkey Media, started to market our products or business, customers don’t come at first sight. We had to spend a long time preparing to plan and make quality content to attract our customers and share our content to get it appreciated by common people. It may take time. Nothing is available immediately. You have to keep patient until the customers are coming. To ensure frequent publishing of aesthetic posts, you can allot resources in terms of money and time.
Conclusion
companies. Uses of social media marketing are becoming a new normal for every sort of business.
According to Harvard Business Review,
Unless we connect our social media actions to broader business goals from the beginning, ROI can be elusive, and social media becomes an end unto itself.
Some people will say Social media marketing is not effective. Social media marketing indeed has some demerits. Countless resources say social media marketing (SMM) remains the most effective thing since sliced bread. Nevertheless, we need to measure our SMM return on investment about our most important business objectives. Social media marketing is no longer an option but a must, especially for companies dealing directly with customers.