Social media is an ever-growing and ever-changing online industry. It consists of everything from everyday users to celebrities to online creators that have taken hold of the internet (aka Influencers). When used correctly, this form of marketing can help businesses achieve their goals by taking advantage of social networks.
We understand the undertaking of social media platforms, especially with the dozens of apps that hold an audience. When deciding on the best social platform for your business, you will want to focus on the top performing sites:
- Facebook – 2.9 billion MAU (monthly active users)
- YouTube – 2.2 billion MAU
- Instagram – 2 billion MAU
- TikTok – 1 billion MAU
- Snapchat – 538 million MAU
- Pinterest – 444 million MAU
- LinkedIn – 250 million MAU
- Twitter – 217 million MAU
That said, despite 72% of Americans using social media, many businesses still fail to reach their core audiences. After reading this guide, you’ll have a better understanding of how to use social media marketing for your business.
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What Social Media Can Do for Your Business
There are several benefits to marketing a business on social media. But what does any of this have to do with your business? Think about it like this: if you are looking to invest in a product or service and go looking online, which one are you going to pick: the one that speaks to users online and has engaging content on all your favorite social platforms, or the one that doesn’t use social media and has no history to explore? Users will be more likely to purchase from you if you are a brand they not only trust but also like.
But how does a business or brand translate likeability into dollars? Well, 71% of consumers who have had a positive experience with a brand on social media are likely to recommend the brand to their friends and family. By engaging with your audience and building a good rapport, you can benefit from one of the most tried and tested forms of marketing: word of mouth.
And by taking advantage of social media marketing for your business, you can reach the 54% of social browsers who use these networks to research products. This is one of the many benefits of social media marketing. Plus, a great way to reach these users is by planning and implementing an effective social media campaign.
5 Important Outcomes of a Campaign
It must be said that there’s a massive difference between casual social media usage and social media marketing for business. Unfortunately, many businesses have a Facebook page and an Instagram account and post randomly with no engagement or results. This is why having a social media campaign is important. Managed campaigns help you reap the benefits of social media marketing.
This is because a strategically managed campaign performs better than just posting aimlessly on social media. You’ll experience improved engagement and results, which could get you potential leads. The same is true for having a community manager who’ll build, manage, and grow your brand online vs. scheduling posts and never replying to comments. One joins the conversation; the other is just noise. It is crucial to collect, review, and gather insights from analytical tools in order to ensure your campaign is heading in the right direction.
So, let’s dive into five important outcomes of a social media marketing campaign that’ll help your business stand out in the noisy world of social networks.
Brand Reach
One of the key benefits of social media marketing is the ability to reach new audiences to grow your business. To reach the right potential customers, it’s crucial to have a clear idea of who your audience is.
By understanding your target audience and creating engaging content specifically for them, you can further extend your business’s reach with social media marketing.
One brand that does a great job of this is Buzzfeed’s Tasty. They know their audience loves tasty foods and have created engaging content around this.
Using in-app analysis tools as well as third-party apps, you can measure your brand’s reach with social media marketing and make data-driven decisions for your business.
Brand Awareness
But what good is your name getting out there if no one is talking about you? You also want your brand to be mentioned and be part of the conversation. This is one of the most important benefits of social media marketing.
Many businesses get left out of the conversation by not contributing to or starting one. It’s important to communicate via authentic and quality content. Failure to create high-quality, engaging content that resonates with your audience can lead to being drowned out of the conversation.
Old Spice is one brand whose uniqueness and authenticity shine through their business’s social media marketing.
They do a great job of showcasing their brand’s humorous and unique personality. By creating fun, viral content, they succeed in leaving a memorable mark on their audience.
This, plus creating custom hashtags for their social media marketing campaigns, helps build brand awareness.
As with brand reach, you can measure your brand’s awareness with social media marketing by tracking your business’s metrics like impressions, how many times users have mentioned your brand, and your engagement rate. The higher these numbers, the more people are aware of your brand.
Traffic to the Website
Although organic social media has a longer timeline to see conversions, it is a quick and easy way for your business to sell your product/service and benefit from social media marketing. Whether that’s with links to your website or an actual shop through the social platform, it makes it easy for users to buy right from the app. Prime examples of actual social media shops are Instagram Shop, Facebook Shop, and Pinterest Shopping.
Driving traffic to your website is one of the top aims of social media marketing, and a major way businesses miss out on this benefit is by not including a link in their social media posts. It may sound obvious, but something as simple as including excerpts of posts works wonders.
Secondly, adding a call to action to your social media profile can help direct more eyeballs to your website. When your brand’s social media bio includes its value proposition and catches your audience’s attention, they’re more likely to click on your call to action.
Unfortunately, many businesses don’t benefit from marketing on social media by enticing viewers to visit their website and read more.
As you can see in this image, Razer included a teaser on social media marketing the Razer Enki X EDG Edition gaming chair. This Instagram post gave just the right amount of information to pique the readers’ interest without giving too much away. It also encourages engagement through giving the audience a chance to win the chair by interacting with the post and following their account. This way, they benefit from social media marketing by incentivizing their followers to comment, like, and look at other gaming chairs on their website.
It’s important to keep in mind that the link you include in your Instagram post’s caption isn’t a hyperlink. This means you can’t click on it and be taken to the destination address. That’s why most posts that want to encourage more engagement will have a clickable link posted in their bio.
To track how well your social media marketing campaign is driving traffic to your business’s website, you can use in-app analysis tools to check how many people clicked on the links shared in your posts. In addition to this, you can go into Google Analytics and see the different sources for your website’s traffic. Using UTM links to track organic social traffic can also give you more accurate results from your campaign.
Consistent Branding
Establishing and keeping consistent branding is what will ultimately attract consumers to your company. Social media allows you to highlight your tone, visuals, and creativity and benefit from deploying consistent branding throughout your social media marketing campaign.
Wendy’s has got this down to a T. They consistently use branded images and witty humor across their social media channels.
Their use of playful and relatable tone of voice when roasting everyone from musical artists to everyday users builds their brand and encourages engagement among their fans. By consistently using their humor, Wendy’s has made interacting with them a fun experience.
If your audience feels your business’s social media marketing campaign is inconsistent with your brand messaging and overall brand identity, they won’t shy away from making this known online. That’s why it’s critical to get this right.
Customer Engagement/Community Building
Social media offers the most efficient and engaging way to interact with consumers. With tools like commenting, Instagram Stories, and direct messaging, users can now reach you and each other in a way that wasn’t possible before. Social media marketing makes it easier to benefit from creating a loyal customer base.
Your brand has to get proactive with building a community online, and social media marketing is a great way to do that for your business. Where many businesses fail in this regard is that they just create and forget their social media profiles. It’s not enough to just have a “build it and they will come” mentality; you have to actively get out there and meet your consumers where they’re at.
Canva is great at engaging with their online community. They manage to effortlessly blend socially relevant topics with their offering. As can be seen in their tweet, they cheerfully respond and engage with their customers. It also helps that they use gifs and images in their business’s social media marketing as this is far more engaging than just text.
In addition to creating relevant and quality engaging content, you can provide friendly and helpful responses to audience questions. This will keep your audience engaged and is a great benefit of social media marketing. Even if they don’t ask you a question and just drop an emoji, it helps to be responsive and interact with your audience as they’ll feel appreciated by your brand. Plus, the more you interact with them the more they’ll interact with your business online.
Another effective use of social media marketing for your business is to include other media besides text in your posts. It’s a known fact that social media users interact more with posts that have images than those without, so adding variety this way will help your brand with engagement.
Lastly, adding calls to action like “What are your thoughts?” or “Share your views below” can encourage your followers to engage. This could be sharing their opinion in the comments section or clicking on a link to purchase a product on your online store.
You can measure how effective your social media marketing campaign is at helping your business build a community and improve customer engagement by checking post engagements and how often people mention (tag) your brand online.
The benefits of a social media marketing campaign can’t be overstated, especially when they fit within an overall targeted, intentional marketing campaign.
Advantages of a Targeted, Intentional Marketing Campaign
As a business, your overall goal is to make a profit from sales. An inexpensive way to market your business is through social media marketing. This form of marketing is a great way to reach out to potential customers and build relationships with them. It’s also a way to manage your business’s online reputation.
In addition to these, the following are the benefits of social media marketing in a targeted, intentional marketing campaign:
- Creating brand awareness
- Driving traffic to your website
- Building relationships with customers
- Generating leads
- Increasing sales
Now that we’ve established the advantages of a targeted, intentional marketing campaign, it’s time to understand how organic and paid services can take your social media marketing to the next level.
Organic and Paid Services Can Boost Your Reach and Expedite Goals and Profitability
Integrating organic and paid social media marketing services in your business’s overall marketing campaign can help you achieve both brand awareness and conversions. This is especially helpful in periods leading up to and including holidays, like Black Friday and Christmas, for example.
But first, what are organic and paid social media?
Organic Social Media
Organic social media refers to any free content circulated on social networks. These include posts, videos, pictures, and more. The people who see your content include a group of your followers, people who follow your hashtags, and the followers of people who share your posts.
Benefits of organic social media in your social media marketing campaign include:
- Engaging customers at the different stages of their buying journey
- Establishing your brand’s voice and personality
- Building rapport with your customers through engaging, informative, and relevant content
- Providing customer service to your customers
That said, your business’s social media marketing efforts may not get the results you hoped for as organic reach has been declining over the years. To capitalize the users that spend around 2.5 hours on social media per day, you’re going to have to turn to paid social media to reach as many of them as possible.
Paid Social Media
Using social media ads to target your specified audience is paid social media. You can either “boost” your business’s organic social media marketing posts or create unique ads.
Benefits of paid social media in your social media marketing campaign include:
- Generating leads
- Increasing brand awareness and gaining new followers
- Advertising your most recent deals
- Driving conversions and making e-commerce sales
By incorporating organic and paid services into your business’s social media marketing plan, you can build connections with existing consumers, reach new ones, and achieve organizational goals such as driving conversions and profitability.
Conclusion
Social media isn’t going anywhere; either you ride the wave or you get caught underneath the weight. And we’re here to help you ride the wave with ease. Founded in 2009, Coalition Technologies is a team of experts that is globally positioned with several services to help your business.
Check out our successful case studies to see how we helped Giovanni Cosmetics and Jasper PIM increase followers and engagement, as well as engage potential leads. Similarly, our social media marketing service is here to help your business keep a relevant, optimized profile dedicated to your industry trends and organic presence.
Coalition understands the importance of social media marketing, and that’s why we created our social media marketing department to help brands, both B2C and B2B, achieve their potential for organic growth and reap the benefits of social media marketing.
Contact us today to supercharge your social media marketing and get data-driven results.
