6 Benefits Of Social Media Marketing

Social media has been around for some years now and a wide range of businesses use it to target their markets, reach out to followers, increase sales and raise brand awareness. All these goals are possible because social media has the tools to help you understand the needs of the market and also the resources to track performance.

Here are 6 benefits of social media marketing that will help you decide if it’s right for your business:

1. Enhances customer loyalty

Customers will use social media sites to talk about your brand and interact with your business if you meet their needs. By offering discounts and money-off coupons and vouchers, you help cement the relationship that you’ve built with them and it becomes easier to cross-sell related products or services.

You must make it easy for customers to engage with your brand on social media and by creating viral content, you create a buzz around your business and products. A classic example is the Blentec ‘Will It Blend’ viral campaign where they blended popular products like iPods and golf balls to show the effectiveness of their product. This went viral around the world and was a huge success and you can read about it here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_It_Blend%3F

2. Creates customer advocacy

Followers and customers can become advocates for your brand by sharing through word of mouth and online reviews about your offers and products. This leads to high profitability for your business and you can facilitate this by offering your loyal customers and followers a range of deals and products and encouraging them to recommend to their own followers and friends.

Customers who come through recommendation are often the most profitable because you do not have to sell to them and they tend to stay longer too if you meet their needs.

3. Increase website traffic

Sending traffic to your website with social media on sites like Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and LinkedIn is something that will happen gradually as your followers and connections grow. So each post and tweet should include a direct link to a blog post or landing page on your site, and it should expand on the message you’ve shared. You can see how effective your tweets and posts are by looking at your analytics to see what your average click through rate (CTR) is and then using analytics, you can study your engagement metrics like bounce rate and time on site to see how good your site is at engaging them.

4. Establishes your brand

The audience on social media sites is huge and one of its benefits is that you are guaranteed to find people and businesses that have interest in your brand. So you can reach these target markets without spending a penny and increase awareness for your brand without selling to them. So, your cover pages, logo, images, pictures and everything you share and post should be in line with your brand identity and values and you should create rules in your business to ensure everyone understands the rules – including consultants.

5. Monitors competitors

With most other online channels, it is difficult to monitor competitors’ strategies and identify product updates and launches. Social media has the tools and metrics to help you do this, and you can use simple tactics like viewing their profiles just to get a sense of what they are up to.

You can see how effective they are with their viral strategies and get a feel of how target audiences are receptive to their messages. Using this data, you can craft your own social media strategy that includes all these elements and make them unique to your business.

6. Increase conversion rate

Social media alone is not an effective channel for bringing in sales or leads compared to other channels like search engine marketing and affiliate marketing. However, it plays a big part as an ‘assist’ channel and this is evident in many multi-channel reports in Google Analytics – that it helps to reinforce the brand and brings prospects closer to purchasing. So, it does not feature in many last-click attribution reports for goal conversions and ecommerce transactions, but it features more in first-click and assist attributions.

Summary

Social media has proven to be of benefit to a wide range of businesses for customer acquisition, conversion and retention and there are many tools and strategies to implement. Many businesses are taking advantage of this and they are creating social media strategies to guide their efforts.