Why should you invest in social media marketing?
With numerous brands now using social media platforms as their predominant marketing tool, it begs the question: why shouldn't you invest in social media marketing? We will be examining why you should be on board with using social media as a marketing tool. As with all marketing tools, there are of course some disadvantages, but we will focus on exploring why social media has seen a rapid surge in terms of increasing website traffic and customer sales.
If you are new to the world of social media marketing, then we must highlight to you that it is more than simply putting up a few posts every now and then. It requires time, dedication, and above all - commitment. Increasing publicity and widening engagement on social media does not happen instantly, it is a gradual process that needs great attention and knowledge of the appropriate tools to so. For instance, knowing how to schedule posts, use analytics, and create Reels on Instagram. One of the pivotal reasons to promote your business on social media networks is because of their capacity to increase brand recognition. Evidently, the sole purpose of marketing is to encourage people to use your service or purchase your products, right? Perhaps one of the best ways of increasing brand recognition is through connecting with influencers. Now, despite the fact that the term 'influencer' in this current climate typically connotes someone out of touch and self-indulgent, influencers are key in terms of getting that brand recognition. If they manage to strike paid partnerships or even repost the product of a particular brand, then the likelihood of that brand's page receiving a flurry of new followers and thus greater website traffic, expands.
Social media marketing? It's all about the data.
Another one of the benefits of social media marketing is that you can use cookies to generate targeted ads. By using cookies, this means that you influence the bias of the decision-making process, meaning that if the customer's search matches the description of your product, then it will pop up on their screen as they are scrolling through their Google results. Through collating data on individual usage habits, this means that you can not only create personalised data that the customer may be interested in, but also drive website traffic as a result (providing that the users share this data). Let's take a campaign like #spotifywrapped. A marketer's dream. Spotify puts together some short statistics and a brief video on their users' listening habits over the course of a year and produces them in a way that makes them easily shareable. So much so, that many users take to their social media platforms to share with their followers their top artists, top songs, and what kind of a fan they are. In short, data is the key to your social media marketing success!
As you can see, there are multiple benefits to getting your business online and on social media. However, how much maintenance does this require? What are the downsides to advertising on social media? Firstly, marketers must ensure that they have brushed up on their cultural and political awareness. That is, make sure that they are up to date with what is going on in the world around them. To project your brand as relevant and worthy of traction, you need to be in the know. Similarly, using social media as a marketing tool requires the marketer to come up with engaging, authentic and tailored content regularly. It can be time consuming to create content, as well as interact with your consumers, which is why you need to be organised and give it lots of attention. Furthermore, with social media now being more competitive than ever, you really have to stand out from the crowd. You need to know what your consumers love the most - the genuine ones, that is. The presence of bots can end up shifting your target market in analysis, thus wasting your time and money. Social media often has a tendency to become a catalyst for negativity, complaints, and scandals. So, you must ensure you are sticking to your mission statement and maintaining a good relationship with your customers. In light of this, social media can also allow you to show your consumers that your brand cares about their concerns and about the content you are putting out. It can be used as a way of recovering the situation, should you be able to demonstrate positive and helpful interaction.
In Summary
Well, we have arrived at the same question that we started with - why should you convert to social media marketing? Of course, there is no single answer, but what we do know is that it puts you on the pathway to building positive brand awareness. When it comes to social media marketing, as mentioned previously, it's all about analysing your customers and investing the time to interact with them. By creating imaginative, tailored content, responding to their queries via the relevant social channels and using analytical tools such as Hootsuite, you have the potential to boss the art of social media marketing.
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