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It doesn’t’ matter if you are a small start-up or an established business. Social Media Marketing allows businesses to generate an online presence, connecting them to both their current and potential consumer bases. In today’s digital era, it is essential for almost all businesses to have an online presence — if you wish to succeed and compete with your rivals.
What is Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing is a form of digital communication. It is a powerful tool businesses use to connect with their customers on platforms they already exist on such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Social media marketing allows to create and share images to a large audience around the world. While traditional marketing, such as print ads and television commercials, target and reach only a small audience, social media amplifies the reach of the intended audience.
It may be used to share content in the forms of basic text, photos, videos, live broadcasts, and even audio. While websites remain an integral part of a business’s brand identity, social media marketing generates hits on websites in a reoccurring form. With the amount of people on social media, it has become an ideal way for businesses to connect with users.
Source: Hootsuite
How Social Media Marketing is Integral for your Business
Recognition via Social Media Marketing
In 2014, Hubspot.com surveyed social media marketing and calculated that 92% of marketers claimed that social media marketing is beneficial for their business. Using tools with the help of social media sites, businesses have a great opportunity to increase their brand recognition. In fact, 72% of marketers around the world use their social media presence to build a loyal fan base.
Marketing Through Your Customer Base
One of the best examples of marketing through your existing customer base is Coca Cola. By the use of social media, they created a product that went viral solely through the use of social media hashtag use. Businesses can benefit from marketing campaigns such as Coke’s “Share a Coke” (#Shareece) campaign just as easily as they did.
Source: The Coca-Cola Company
This works for businesses, since it creates the opportunity to share something you love, with the people you love. Businesses who make products for consumers, have the opportunity to market them in a way that creates the desire to share.
Many businesses use social media and hashtags to spread their campaign through their consumers. With the fast pace digital world, a post, video, or photo spreads around the world in less than 24 hours — this would otherwise be extremely costly and an incredibly difficult to accomplish without the use of social media.
Increasing Conversion Rates
Creating credibility around a brand comes with difficulty. Many businesses spend years getting off the ground and still fail because while they have recognition from a niche market, they fail to produce proof of the trust their customers have in them.
One of the greatest ways to induce the feeling of trust in a brand is via social media followers. Once a brand has a large number of followers, they are automatically seen as trustworthy. Studies have shown a higher trust factor for brands with large fan followings.
The fact that a business is able to show trust from consumers around the world is essential as this increases their brand leads, traffic to their websites, and humanization of the brand. Many people around the globe want to trust a brand that interacts with them. While websites are a great source of information, they limit what a consumer sees about the brand and limits conversations. By using basic human psychology elements and interacting with consumers, brands create conversations that have shown a 100% higher lead-to-close rates than traditional outbound marketing.
Creating Your own Community, Personality, and Image to Attract Customers
Source: Forbes
The idea behind creating a brand is to create one’s own identity. With identity comes personality and the opportunity to create a community. Brands such as Offer Factor use their products and create a social media business that attracts customers uniquely through their social media presence.
Source: Offer Factor
80% of social media marketers shared that their efforts on social media made a large impact to increase website traffic. Looking at this ad, we see how marketing this ad in magazines might not be a great idea, but with large text sizes, bold colors, and the use of social media, Offer Factor is able to identify its consumers on social media channels and bring them back to their website. Social media allows the creation of brand personality and image — why is this important? Customers want to represent brands they feel speak to them, or think like them. Representing a persona online gives brands the opportunity to find customers who look and feel like them, allowing them a higher reach and in turn, increased sales.
Offer Factor is an example of an indication of using their brand persona and targeting the right consumer market via social media to increase their exposure. Hub spot quotes, “95% of marketers who use social media at least 6 hours per week indicated their social media efforts increased exposure for their businesses.”
Decrease in Marketing Costs
The difference between social media marketing and other forms of traditional marketing has to do with a decrease in costs incurred by the business. Even if a business chooses to use paid advertising through social media channels such as Facebook and Instagram, their reach exceeds the amount of money they invest in paid advertising.
If you are still wondering whether social media marketing is the right tool for your business, here are some facts published from the Social Media Examiner in their Sixth Annual Report on the State of Social Media Marketing:
- 92% of marketers agreed that social media is important for their business, up from 86% in 2013
- 92% of all marketers indicated that their social media efforts generated more exposure for their businesses
- 80% of marketers indicated that their social media efforts increased traffic
- 72% of marketers are using social media to develop loyal fans
- 95% of marketers who use social media at least 6 hours per week indicated their social media efforts increased exposure for their businesses
- By spending as little as 6 hours per week, over 66% of marketers see lead generation benefits with social media
- Nearly half of those who spend at least six hours per week on social media efforts saw a benefit of reduced marketing expenses
- More than 58% of marketers who have been using social media for one year or longer improved search engine rankings
- More than half of marketers with at least one year of social media experience were generating leads with social platforms
- Of those who have been using social media for at least 1 year, 69% found it useful for building a loyal fan base
All of these stats show that social media marketing is beneficial for businesses because it gives them recognition, loyal customers, reduced marketing expenses etc. Take advantage of social media platforms for the success of your business.
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