Social media marketing has become the most influential tool in the online world for businesses to showcase themselves. It is so powerful that 59% of the entire population now use social media and on average people spend around 3 hours on social media a day. There are various social media platforms from Facebook -the social leader, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, Youtube, Linkedin, Twitter, and Whatsapp.
So why is social media marketing so important?
Storytelling
From showcasing how they started to highlighting its mission and values, a brand can tell a story through social media. It allows you to connect with people through visual and creative outlets to allow them to understand you. For some, people resonate with certain brands’ stories which makes them loyal advocates of that brand. This is important for your long term marketing strategy. One great example of how a brand tells its story through social media is Nike. With the power of social media, Nike sells users more than just a product, they sell us their vision, making us feel that we really can ‘Just Do It’. As users, we are so familiar with these brand values that we look out for their content when it comes to addressing socially conscious issues. This is what you call ’emotional branding’ and is what makes them a powerful and influential brand. Their ‘You Can’t Stop Us Campaign’ in response to Covid19 is a great example.
Understanding Your Audience
Social listening is a large part of social media marketing – it is about getting to monitor your audience, see what content they like, understand who they are, their likes and dislikes, what topics they like to see and if your tone of voice is working. There are many ways you can listen to your audience through social media whilst also engaging with them. For example on Twitter, you could use polls or on Instagram, you can use story quizzes. Each social platform provides audience insights such as demographics like age, gender, and location which can help you understand your audience. There are various tools such as SproutSocial or Hootsuite which can also assist in understanding your audience through demographic insights but also outlining best performing posts and hashtags for example.
Customer Service
People no longer always want to pick up the phone and spend time speaking to a customer service team when they could simply send a message on a social media platform. Just as in a store you would answer a customer’s question, well now most customers are online, so brands incorporate customer service in their social media marketing plan and use social media channels as a way to respond to customer requests.
Meeting Business Goals
With such a large online landscape you have the ability to create an online community, grow your following, and directly showcase your products. So the Awareness, Consideration, and Conversion stage of a buyer’s journey can all be reached with social media. Appealing, creative, and consistent content is more likely to be shared and reposted to increase awareness and consideration. It also reaches website traffic goals as by including a call to action you can generate direct traffic to your website and it is also a large source of referral traffic. Through paid media tactics such as Instagram ads, you can also generate direct conversions by paying to reach a larger or more targeted audience.
Engage with your followers
Now more than ever people want to feel like part of an online community. Replying to followers, sharing their stories or tweets, responding to them, reposting their content are all examples of how you can do this. This helps to build loyal advocates of your brand.
Strategic Social Media Tools
You are not alone with social media and there is plenty of help out there to help you be strategic. To be strategic is to be effective when it comes to social media marketing so make sure you benefit from all of the tools out there. Facebook Audience Insights, Facebook Ads Manager, and Facebook Pixel are all examples of great social media tools.
Need help with your social media marketing strategy? We are here to help. Contact us. to discuss your social media goals.
