When it comes to social media, marketers’ top goals are advertising their products/services and increasing their brand awareness.
However, many brands struggle with creating engaging content and reaching their target audience. With social media playing such an important role at the top of the funnel, let’s dive into all things social media marketing – what it is, its benefits, and how to actually build a social media marketing strategy that’ll work for your specific business.
What Is Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing is the process of creating content for social media platforms to promote your products and/or services, build community with your target audience, and drive traffic to your business. With new features and platforms emerging every day, social media marketing is constantly evolving.
Social media marketing is all about meeting your target audience and customers where they are and as they socially interact with each other and your brand.
While social media marketing as a whole is incredibly valuable and beneficial to your business growth (as you’ll see in the following section), your strategy will differ based on which social networks your audience spends their time on.
Benefits Of Social Media Marketing
To illustrate the benefits of social media marketing, let’s take a look at the experience from the user’s perspective. Well, my perspective.
As I scroll through my Instagram feed every day (cough, cough…multiple times a day), I consistently notice new posts and stories by The Frye Company. I’ve always been a fan of their boots, clothing, and accessories, but I also love the content they share on their Instagram profile.
All of their photos have the same filter on them to ensure they match — this makes their profile look professional, artistic, and organized when visitors, like myself, browse their page.
Frye’s account also encourages interaction between the company and its followers by providing them with a specific hashtag to use so they can be featured on the page when they post photos with Frye products.
Frye’s Instagram account is a great example of successful social media marketing — it’s attractive, distinctly Frye, engages their ~200K followers, and promotes their products.
But why is social media marketing so important? And how do you actually build a social media marketing strategy that’ll work for your specific type of business?
There are a variety of reasons why your company should use social media marketing. We’ve created a list of the most beneficial reasons to consider.
Let’s dive in.
1. Increase your brand awareness.
Due to the sheer amount of people on social media, you’re missing out on the potential to reach thousands, and even millions, if you don’t have a presence.
In fact, social media has been proven to boost brand awareness by driving up engagement. Social engagement includes things like comments, likes, shares, and reposts, and saves.
It also helps you increase brand awareness by directing traffic straight to your site. You can do this by including direct links to your website in your profile, bio, and posts.
2. Generate leads and boost conversions.
Promoting and sharing your products on social media is a simple way to improve lead generation, boost conversions, and increase sales because you’re advertising to people who have opted to engage with you by following your account.
Here are some examples of ways you can use social media to generate more leads.
- Create contests for your visitors and followers to participate in on your social media profiles.
- Include links to your website and offers in the bio sections of your profiles.
- Host live videos to make announcements about products and provide updates or details about exciting news at your company.
- Implement a social media marketing campaign on one of your channels.
- Sell your products through your social profiles. For example, you can enable Facebook’s Shop Section or Instagram’s Shopping feature on your profiles. These features allow your visitors and followers to click on products you’ve shared in posts to view information such as price, material, and size. Then, visitors can easily proceed to checkout through the platform and buy the product directly from you.
3. Foster relationships with your customers.
By connecting and engaging with your social media followers, you’ll be able to build lasting relationships between them and your business. You can do this by interacting with them on your posts, responding to their questions and comments, and providing them with any help they may need.
You can also ask your followers questions about your products, their pain points, or create giveaways to help you build trust and show them how much you value their input and support.
4. Learn from your competitors.
Social media is a great way to keep tabs on your competitors — whether that’s in reference to their social media tactics, the products they’re promoting, the campaigns they’re implementing, or their level of interaction with followers.
Social media allows you to get a look at what is and isn’t working for your competition, and therefore helps you decide what should or shouldn’t change in terms of your company’s approach.
Lastly, reviewing the social accounts of your competitors can help you make sure your marketing stands out and is unique to your brand.
