In today's digital age, where social media platforms have become integral parts of our daily lives, the concept of social media marketing has emerged as a crucial strategy for businesses looking to connect with their audience, build brand awareness, and drive engagement. But what exactly is social media marketing, and how can it benefit businesses of all sizes? In this blog article, we'll delve into the fundamentals of social media marketing and explore its various uses and advantages.
1 - Why do a majority of marketers obsess over social media marketing and how is it really useful to a business's success?
Do you know a whooping 98.98% UAE population gets active on social media almost every day? When it comes to internet users, UAE is projected to have received an annual growth of 1.6%. If you check the individual user count in the UAE to the leading platforms the stats goes this way:
- YouTube - 8.69 Million users
- Facebook - 7.85 Million users
- Instagram - 6.67 Million users
Wondering how is this useful to boost your revenues? Learn all about social media marketing and its usefulness in maximizing the growth of a brand.
2 - What is meant by social media marketing?
Social media marketing or commonly referred to as SMM is a form of online marketing where marketers use social media platforms as marketing tools to drive uncountable benefits for a brand's success. The social media platforms enable brands to present their services, communicate and connect with prospective customers and grow lead generation.
A marketer must be aware of how each platform works and has the insights to drive a results-oriented strategy to yield the maximum outcomes.
3 - Benefits of Social Media Marketing
Here are the many ways through which social media marketing can help reap the uncountable benefits of success and growth for your brand.
3.1 Builds a Brand
Online users are getting aware and are conscious of how to choose a brand that is reliable and unique. Hence, before you think of attracting any lead, you must work on the online presence and personality of your brand. This is how social media can help.
3.1.1 Increases brand awareness
With over half of the world's population on social media, platforms like Instagram, Twitter and Facebook provide ample exposure to brands. They help in increasing online presence and building awareness through regular posting, and interactive content strategy.
Stillhouse Spirits plans to increase its brand awareness by running a campaign on Facebook; the brand receives a 17-point lift in the ad recalls.
3.1.2 Humanizes your brand
Social media offers you the ability to build meaningful relationship moments with your audience. It serves as a key benefit for your brand as it brings it closer to prospective users. You get to showcase your services and connect them with your brand's ideology. Moreover, in the marketing world, you need to ensure authenticity that leads to building trust, which generates greater leads. Social media marketing makes it possible.
3.2 Maximizes the Growth
The next benefit comes down to the most important stage of a business growth- lead acquisition. Through social media you get qualified leads and get to work on buyer's journey as gathering insights about your audience becomes easier.
3.2.1 Boost Web Traffic
Social media posts and ads help in driving traffic to your site. You can share your brand's insights and news in different content distribution styles and divert the traffic to the page linked with your call-to-action button.
For instance, Architectural Digest posted story content on their Instagram to direct followers towards their platform to read the complete article.
3.2.2 Generates Lead & Accelerates Sales
Social media ads tend to produce 4.3 times more sales leads. Not only this, LinkedIn dominates in generating leads with over 80% of B2B brands. Around 43% of social media marketers have acquired prospective customers through Facebook.
As social media platforms help to work on the process to attract a new buyer it contributes to optimizing the sales funnel.
Professional social media marketers use a strategic approach to keep their audience engaged and involved– it be through influencer marketing or social contests.
3.3 - Helps in Content Creation & Distribution
Social media platforms power up your content strategy by introducing exciting newer ways to publish content. Explore more:
3.3.1 Promotes Content
Social media users welcome interesting pieces of content and contribute to maximising their reach by sharing them on their profiles. You need to create shareable content for your brand with engaging creativity to keep the audience involved. Brands are finding incredible ways to stay connected to their audience. For instance, Hootsuite shared the latest insights to the Digital 2021 global report in a series of infographics with its Twitter followers.
3.3.2 Source Ideas
Social media platforms help you carry out social listening, which is essential to getting on the same page with your audience. It helps you find possible areas to improvise and gives you insight into the common areas to target that can accelerate lead generation.
Apart from this, it provides you with strategic ideas like posting user-generated content to showcase the reliability and authenticity of your brand.
3.4 Establishes Communication
Brands need to stay available to respond to customer queries in order to keep the lead involved. With growing competition, it's necessary to stay active and penetrate into the market efficiently.
3.4.1 Reputation management
As much as it's important to highlight the positive feedback of your company, addressing the complaints and negative ratings is crucial too. Social media allows brands to stay watchful of such comments and to rectify the mistake to build a strong reputation online.
3.4.2 Customer engagement
The secret to prosperity on social media is in staying active regularly. Schedule your posts for the week, upload story content and find ways to stay in front of your customers. It leads to enhanced customer engagement. Moreover, you get to monitor your profiles and how well they are performing.
3.5 Provides Insights
Social media platforms help you gather data related to a lot of different aspects of your business from customer insights to product performance.
3.5.1 Customer's Persona
You get to know more about your customer’s persona, what they like, how to target them, the problems, the preferences and likeness of your audience. You get to learn about their temperament, intellectual level, and understanding of the product.
3.5.2 Competitive Analysis
All the major social media platforms offer analytics with demographic information. You can tailor your marketing strategy and reap more targeted outcomes. It helps brands keep an eye on their competitors and create a strong footprint in the market.
3.6 Avenues For Advertisements
Facebook currently accounts for over 10 million active advertisers. This reveals the potential social platforms hold and how they are important in digital marketing.
3.6.1 Targeted advertising
Social ads offer a cost-effective option to promote and market your brand. It provides a number of options to distribute content with custom strategies. The powerful targeting options with built-in tools ensure greater results. Considering the outbound benefits of social ads, in 2022, marketers are expected to spend over $56 billion on social ad campaigns.
3.6.2 Retargeting
Cart abandonment is a problem many eCommerce marketers encounter. Nearly 70% of buyers abandon carts right before checking out. However, with social media marketing, there is a way to retarget such potential buyers. You can make the social ads appear in front of them to engage them and attract them enough to get a successful conversion.
3.7 Guarantees ROI
It's always a challenge for digital marketers to prove ROI to satisfy the investors and stakeholders. However, with social media marketing things are simpler and proactive.
3.7.1 Reporting And Analytics
With tools like Google Analytics, you can easily track the performance of your social platforms. You can monitor the influx of traffic to segment your audience into different groups based on their age, preferences and region. Above all, you can calculate the conversion rate and discover areas for improvement.
Wrap up
SMM opens a new avenue for marketers to explore and succeed. All the types of social media marketing have their equal contribution to accelerating the progress of a business. You can connect with experts social media marketers at ConnectIn Digital who have years of excellence and have an uncanny approach to marketing.
