Are you an owner of a small or relatively new business? Do you want to enhance your sales or attain some publicity for your products? If your answers are yes, then Social Media Marketing is one of the best choices for you.
In the current digital world we live in, Social Media Marketing is the go-to choice for expanding your business in an effective and cost-efficient way. If you’ve read our previous article What Are The Advantages And Disadvantages Of Social Media Marketing, then you must agree with us.
In this article, we will give you detailed reasoning on why and how Social Media Marketing helps your business. We will also tell you some proven ways to use Social Media Marketing to boost your business. So let’s take a tour and explore the greatness of Social Media Marketing!
11 Ways How Social Media Marketing Helps Your Business
1. Spreads the name and creates awareness
Posting your product on social media makes your product visible to the users. Your product can spread across people of similar interests if you advertise correctly. People are aware of your product.
They also find your product reliable and authentic if you provide them with useful information, statistics, and pictures. All these will help create your brand’s name and also make your brand popular and authentic among the interested people.
2. A vast number of Users and colossal popularity
Social Media is really popular. According to DataReportal, about 4.14 billion people across the world are using Social Media in October 2020. This population is more than half of the whole world’s population, 53 percent to be exact.
Adding to this huge number, about 450 million new users were added at the end of October 2020. It means a 12 percent growth annually.
On average, a person uses different social media types and spends up to 2 hours 30 minutes daily. That is about 10.4 percent of their daily lives. It is a lot!
Some of the most popular Social Media worldwide are Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, and Pinterest.
Here is a list of monthly active users of some large Social Media Platforms observed by Data Reportal:
- Facebook: 2.701 billion
- YouTube: 2 billion
- Instagram : 1.16 billion
- Twitter: 353 million
- Pinterest: 416 million
Needless to say, these numbers are enormous. Showcasing your products to such a vast number of audiences is only possible using Social Media Marketing. Among these vast numbers, there may be a lot of potential customers. Exposing your product to so many users increases your chances of boosting your business.
But different Social Media are popular in different countries and demographics. So before advertising, be sure to know about the user’s interests and the probable number of potential customers.
3. Users are always online
One thing about social media is that people spend a lot of their time on them. On average, a person uses social media and spends up to 2 hours, 30 minutes daily. Assuming that they sleep about 7 to 8 hours a day, they spend about 15 percent of their daily lives on social media.
A report by Digital Trend shows that people in the US typically check their social media accounts 17 times a day.
We see that most social media users are active and stay online most of the time. It means if you post about a product, the users are most likely to see them. If they are interested, they will know more about your products in detail.
That will be beneficial for your business for sure. Your sales will increase if more people are aware of your products.
4. Social Media is present around the globe
People all over the world use social media. Almost every single country uses social media to a certain extent. Social media is prevalent in pretty much every sector you can imagine. Music, Film, Government campaigns, News, Sports, anything you name Social Media has a part to play.
Besides these, many businesses (small and large) have started leaving their Social Media footprints. These can be Food business, clothing business, footwear business, Education, etc.
All these sectors are joining Social Media due to effective and efficient marketing outputs. Due to such broad diversity in sectors, People look for many products on different Social Media.
Hence, having a Social Media presence can boost your chances of increasing sales and prospering in Business.
5. A huge number of Smartphone Users
According to review42, the total number of smartphone users is 2.71 billion in 2019. Adding to this huge number, 100 million more started using smartphones in the past year. Also, 52 percent of the total world’s population use mobile internet.
A report by Digital Trend shows that, on average, people in the US check their social media accounts 17 times a day.
Since so many people spend so much of their time surfing the internet and Social Media on their smartphones, it is crucial to own Apps, websites, Social Media pages that support smartphones.
It will increase your chances of grabbing the viewer’s attention when searching for a product they want to buy.
6. Specifying the Audience
While advertising your products on Social Media, you can choose the type of audience you want to show your products. It is a handy tool to have.
Take the company, Nike, for example. Nike sells sneakers, which are typically worn by young people. So, while they advertise on Social Media, they choose between 15 and 30 years of age to view their products. It is because those people are their target audiences. Similarly, you may have a product that is appropriate for a certain age or demographic, or region. While advertising, you can choose the type of people you want to show your products to the best.
7. Social Media is Cost Efficient
Advertising in Social Media is basically free. If your contents are fun, attractive, relatable, and trendy, you will reach many people quickly. But most often than not, your content will get lost under a massive pile because Social Media keeps adding features and algorithms to control what the users see.
To overcome such an issue, you can go the extra mile and invest in paid advertisements. These paid advertisements cost less compared to traditional advertising systems. By paying for these advertisements, you can stay at the top of your potential clients’ Newsfeeds.
By paying for advertisements on Social Media, you can stay at the upper news feeds of your viewers. You can also control who can see your content (Based on age, gender, region, etc.)
Compared to traditional advertising, paid Social Media advertising is way more efficient and cost-friendly. Because of the given reasons below :
- Costs less compared to traditional advertising systems.
- Has to reach a broad number of users compared to traditional advertising systems
- Can control how many people you want to reach your products to.
- Can control who can see your products, based on age, gender, region, etc.
Social Media advertisement is more efficient than a traditional advertisement. All the reasons are enough to understand that. Hence, by planning your marketing budgets effectively on paid Social Media advertisements, you can use Social Media Marketing to boost your business.
On Social Media, you can share many things about your business. You can share your history, inside stories, prospers, etc., on your Social Media page. You can also express your gratification towards the customer and employees via Social Media. That’s why earlier we have discussed Why Instagram Is Such An Important Social Media Platform For Marketing.
Basically, you can share many stories, announcements, etc., to the mass public or fixed viewers if you want. It can positively affect your business in different ways.
People often get touched by the stories. They may also get inspired or find the stories relatable. It will make your business look ethical and down to earth. Eventually, you will obtain some loyal customers that like your overall vibe in real life.
Also, gratifying or rewarding your employees on such popular platforms increases the overall morale of the employees. They feel honored to be held on such a pedestal.
You, as the owner, can also share deep insights about the company. You may simply want people to know about history or maybe do it to boost business. Or, you want to tell a story.
Either way, Social Media has the power to do all of these. That’s why with the help of Social Media Marketing, you can create appropriate and relatable contents that will do all of these and eventually boost your business directly or indirectly.
9. Social Media encourages two-way communication
Social media is a great way to know about your customers: what they like, dislike, what they want, what they don’t want, etc. You can simply ask them to give reviews to your page. These reviews can be feedback on what they want and how to improve the products.
Customer opinions can go a long way to keep your business alive in the long run. If you don’t change and modify your products with time, they will become outdated and less appealing to the viewers.
10. Customer Service is very convenient on Social Media
Good customer service is a must for small businesses to prosper. Social Media is excellent for customer service. Here, customers can simply message your page about a problem or inquiry they have.
You have to make sure that no one feels heed of negligence from your business. Make sure no message goes unnoticed. It will make your clients feel important and honored.
If you continue this uniformly, your image will increase as a client caring company. At the edge of the time, A happy client equals a profitable business. According to Clarabridge, businesses earn 20 to 40 percent more revenue per customer using social media for customer services.
So with the help of Social Media marketing, one can nail the customer service department, which will help improve your business.
11. Accelerating the email marketing strategy
Using Social Media for email marketing is a game-changer for small businesses. One can simply share their email newsletters on any of their posts on social media.
People who are interested in the product may look for details in the emails. The viewers can also subscribe to daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly email schedules.
Emails may contain announcements, coupons, discounts, sales, etc., which will only be available to the subscribed customers. Emails may also contain insights about the company, magazine/picture books, or information regarding exciting products.
By doing so, you can get a whole new number of customers, which you didn’t know existed previously. Also, the customers will feel special due to the extra facilities provided to them via email. You can also identify the potential customers from the listed email receivers.
Using these two powerful tools (i.e., Social Media Marketing and Email Marketing), many businesses have gained many customers and prospered after that.
In the above section, we discussed how and why Social Media Marketing helps your business. Although they seem very promising, it’s tough and time-consuming to achieve results in this very competitive market. Hiring a social media agency can be a boosting factor for your business. Learn the Top 10 Reasons Why You Should Hire a Social Media Agency in 2021.
9 Ways to Use Social Media Marketing to Boost Your Business
1. Posting creative and up to date contents
For succeeding in the Social Media industry, you always need to be aware of the trends. Your marketing team must always produce quality contents, which the viewers will find interesting.
Strategizing is the key here. The marketing team must always be up to date about topics around Social Media and analyze them. They will gather up a planned strategy and make contents that showcase your products as modern, up to date useful essentials to own.
For example: Say you own a food company. There is a trend surrounding a particular meme. You can cleverly incorporate your food with this meme and display how delicious your foods are with a humorous tone using the meme.
It is a creative way to display your products. People will find it to be humorous, engaging, and relatable. By this, you may get new customers who find your products to be essential and useful investments besides being modern and relatable.
2. Narrowing targeted audience range
Displaying your products to a large diversified audience may not be the best use of your limited resources. Your marketing team must research and analyze which people buy your products the most. They will obtain the most efficient range of customer diversity.
By this, you can use your limited resources, time, and finances to a smaller number of viewers. It is way more efficient because you don’t have to waste your resources, time, and money on people who won’t be interested in your products.
3. Investigate and explore your competitions
While there are many opportunities for you to do well on Social Media, high chances are your competitors are also on Social Media. Your potential customers may already be speaking with your competitors about their interests.
To stand apart from everyone, you need to analyze and investigate your competitors. You must follow what they are doing better than you. How are they doing it? And most importantly, how can you overcome them?
It would help if you did things that make you stand out. Not only do you have to create more brand recognition, but you must also create contents that viewers can relate to and find unique and useful.
4. Analyze progress and relapse
Always analyze advancement and downfall. That is a must.
If one of your products got very popular on Social Media, or some marketing strategy got any success, you must analyze why you got that output.
Similarly, if you experience any downfall for relapses, you must research and analyze why your plans failed. By doing so, you will understand more about your viewers, competitors, and overall business in your sector. Gaining more understanding, you can later implement more successful plans in the future.
5. Know about your audiences
Knowing what your audiences like is of great importance. Your team must produce content that the viewers find useful, can relate to, and have conversations about it with other people. By doing so, your brand name will spread, and sales will surely increase.
According to Search Engine Land, 88 percent of people trust online reviews as much as personal reviews from real life.
According to Forbes, 80 percent of people buy new social media things based on their friends’ or families’ recommendations.
Therefore, knowing what viewers like is crucial for business. Knowing what they like will help you get good reviews and praises on Social Media, which is always a win.
6. Build open-end conversations about your business
Posting open-end conversations on Social Media is an effective way to draw the attention of the viewers. Your team can post something about your products and ask questions to the viewers.
The viewer will respond to the questions accordingly. They can also have conversations among themselves. You, too, can engage with the audience.
For example: Suppose you are a video console company. You can congratulate a game developer of your console in a simple post. Then fans or players of that game will start a conversation about it in the post. Eventually, the post will get trendy. By doing so, people will talk about your products and spread them across Social Media. Brand recognition is increased. You will also get new customers since more people will recognize it. People buy things that they recognize.
Many businesses don’t know the usefulness of hashtags on Social Media. Hashtags are labels that categorize posts according to similarity and relevancy. Many firms can use such labels to gain reach among new viewers.
You can use hashtags on your posts, videos, and comments. If you use any popular hashtag or make your hashtag popular, your reach will increase among viewers.People searching for a popular hashtag can find your content if you use that particular hashtag on your post. So, as a business owner, you should use hashtags regularly and cleverly, but don’t overdo it.
8. Ensure that your Social Media page is visually presentable
Making good content is essential, but making the contents visually appealing will take them a step further. Visuals help in catching the eyes of the viewers.
People tend to check something visually appealing. These can contain images, videos, infographics, etc. You are sure to gain more traffic using this process. Besides, you will also get more followers, clicks, and conversions.
Some facts about visuals
- A person takes 1/10th of a second to understand an image
- A person can remember image-based information six times better than writing based information.
- Websites that contain images have 47 percent higher click through rates
- Posts containing images have 12 percent more traffic and 200 percent more shares compared to posts without images.
From the above stats, it is clear that the importance of visuals is incredibly high. You must be elegant, smart, and creative while choosing the visuals.
For example, Adidas manufactures shoes, clothing, accessories related to sports. If you observe their social media pages, you can see that most of their contents are sporty. They post content about athletes running, wearing their shoes, swimming, and cycle wearing their accessories.
Hence posting content with visual appeals is very important. But the contents should be related to your business.
9. Good customer service
As mentioned earlier, customer service is vital, especially in small businesses. Good customer service can go a long way. Customers feel essential and honored if you give proper importance to them.
Your Social Media team must always know what is best for the customers. It would be best if you were all ears. You’ll have to hear out their compliments, suggestions, even complaints. Hence, negligence is a big no-no.
Final Thoughts
From the above discussion, we conclude that Social Media is the best place for marketing. Social Media helps to grow businesses faster and in a cost-efficient way. That’s why Social Media Marketing is the go-to choice for business owners to succeed.
There’s no harm in involving your business in Social Media. Instead, the profits are countless. So as a business owner, you should, for sure, invest in Social Media. You should also hire people who specialize in Social Media Marketing.
Related Reading
- What Are The Different Types of Digital Marketing?
- How Much Do Social Media Agencies Typically Charge?
- Top 10 Reasons Why You Should Hire a Social Media Agency in 2021
Make sure to bookmark Mad Monkey Media to get the latest news and tips and tricks on Social Media Marketing.