15 Benefits of Social Media Marketing for Businesses

With more than 3.8 billion people using social networks globally, social media marketing (SMM) has become one of the most powerful, versatile, actionable, and cost-effective strategies to grow and promote your business. It helps you reach your target audience, create a loyal fanbase, build your brand and boost sales and revenue.

Social media marketing may seem overwhelming, but it is a phenomenal opportunity. 97% of marketers use social media, and 78% of salespeople outsell their peers by leveraging it for their business. However, it's crucial to use social media effectively to achieve business goals. According to Social Media Examiner, out of the 97% of marketers who use SMM, about 85% don't know how to use it for best results.

In this blog, we discuss the 15 most significant advantages of using SMM and share how you can leverage these for optimal business growth.

1. Increases Brand Awareness

Consumers buy brands they recognize. Therefore, boosting brand recognition and awareness is every company's fundamental goal. Brand recognition is measured by people's ability to identify a product by looking at its logo design, tagline, or advertisement. Sometimes, consumers may also recognize a brand via an audio cue, such as iPhone or Nokia's signature ringtones. Using social media is the best way to build a brand in the digital age. It gets your brand in front of a massive audience effortlessly and cost-effectively. They can always see and know about your product even if they don't intend to buy it.

Tip: The branding exercise on social media starts with creating your profile, logo, and cover photos. You need to make sure that the visual elements of your brand are well represented.

{ Image Source }

You should know how to place your logo strategically to accentuate your branding. If you look at Pepsi's on Twitter, you'll see it's clutter-free and straightforward. Their logo is visible on the profile picture, and the cover photo has a Pepsi can and their brand color palette. The cover photo connects the logo to the idea of a fresh cold drink for people who love sports.

2. Creates Buzz Around Your Products

Generating conversations and marketing buzz about their brand is every business's ultimate goal. Therefore, if you want people to invest in your products or services, try to encourage discussion around your brand. Social media is the most effective channel to help you create the buzz with minimum or no investment.

Southwest Airlines' marketing strategy relies heavily on social conversations. They use them to reinforce their customer relationships; they accomplish it by being appreciative and attentive towards their customers. When you can stimulate genuine conversations on social media, you receive a great deal of feedback about your products.

{ Image Source }

Tip: Use social media to engage with your audience, especially when they comment on your posts. Make them feel that there is a human face behind your brand that they can interact with. It also makes them feel valued.

Share content that can trigger a conversation. Give shout-outs to your partner companies and other companies in your network. Open-ended questions are also a great way to initiate meaningful conversations.

3. Provides Ready Audience

Monitoring social conversations is extremely important to keep yourself abreast of current market trends and know your audience's wants. The act of monitoring such conversations is called social listening. These conversations primarily highlight consumers' pain points and issues they are struggling with. Smart businesses tweak their marketing strategy based on these insights.

Social listening also helps you know the tone and language your audience uses so you can replicate it in your marketing messages.

Tip: Use social listening to know what people are talking about in your industry or niche and build your marketing strategy around it. You can use a social media tool to check the product or brand mentions.

4. Helps You Tell Your Brand's Story

Telling compelling stories can be a game-changer for your brand's image. When you share your brand mission and stories on social media, you can achieve several goals in one go. Compelling brand stories appeal to emotions and communicate enduring values. Craft your brand story to reflect varied elements such as your social media strategy, website copy, and ads. The following tips can help:

• Highlight the advantages: Explain how your product or service can improve your customer’s life. It does not have to be a massive change; even a slight improvement that provides them some relief or adds value to their life will do.
• Infuse emotions: We respond to emotions more strongly than to logic. Therefore, appeal to emotions with your product.
• Connect with your audience: Engage with the people you’re selling your products to.
• Tell the truth: Your audience should believe that your brand story is true, earnest, and worth investing in.

{ Image Source }

Tip: Share stories of your customers; make them your brand's mouthpiece. Ask them to share their reviews. Most of them will be happy to get featured. You can select the positive reviews and share them.

5. Allows You to Gather Data From Audience Research

Social media platforms have built-in analytical tools to gather data about audience behavior. It sounds similar to social listening, but it is different. You should focus on a specific product and the keywords your customers are using to search for it. The insights will help you tweak your marketing strategy and improve your campaigns.

Tip: You can get insights about your posts and ads using metrics such as "reach" and "engagement" on all major social media channels.

6. Allows You to Provide Instant Customer Service

Customer service is the key to a thriving business. Investment in customer service pays off as customer loyalty and increased customer satisfaction. More consumers are using social media to enquire about products and seek instant support.

Instant customer support is already prevalent on Twitter, especially among service sectors such as airlines. People ask time-sensitive questions on Twitter and get instant responses from the companies.

{ Image Source }

Tip: If you use separate teams to handle social media and customer service, ensure that the communication between them is quick, consistent, smooth, and transparent.

7. Helps Build Customer Loyalty

Brand loyalty is every company's premium asset. Social media allows businesses to build customer loyalty for free. In a world where every business is fighting for attention, people interact with the brands they love. Unsurprisingly, more than half of the customers who follow your brand are likely to be loyal to your brand.

Usually, this is how it works. A social media user follows you. Then they start choosing you over your competition. Finally, they begin to advocate your brand online and become your loyal customer, increasing your website traffic.

Tip: Make every effort to keep your loyal customers engaged and happy. It will reward you many times over in ways you can't imagine.

Reward your loyal customers occasionally by announcing special promotional schemes and discounts. However, be mindful of not violating Facebook's promotional content guidelines. You can collaborate with startups and other businesses that might be interested in giving out merchandise (t-shirts, hats, sunglasses, corporate and fashion accessories, office stationery) to promote their brands. You can also give away your products for free on special occasions, festivals, and events.

8. Sends Referral Traffic To Your Website

After search engines, social networks send the most amount of direct referral traffic to your website. Therefore, you should decide the content and frequency of your posts for optimal results. Use a content calendar and follow a fixed schedule for posting. You can use social media tools such as Hootsuite to find the most effective time to post.

Tip: Use URL shorteners like bitly to shorten your links when posting on social media channels. They save space and look aesthetically pleasing.

{ Image Source }

9. Helps You Earn Inbound Links and Improve SEO

Social media has a significant impact on SEO. Google considers social shares, likes, and mentions as a major ranking factor.

Furthermore, a diverse audience views your content on social networks. They can be bloggers, writers, content publishers, or major brands. They can gather ideas from your post, write a new article and link back to you. This way, you earn free inbound links that can improve your rankings against your competition. Both Google and Bing display tweets in their search results. That's why the topics that trend on Twitter also rank on top in Google search.

{ Image Source }

Tip: Use social media post scheduling tools such as Hootsuite or CoSchedule to publish content at the most effective time when your audience is most likely to see it. It will help you earn more backlinks.

10. Social Media is Mostly Free and Cost-Effective

Most social media is available to use free of cost. However, you might need to pay for SMM and promotion. For most businesses, organic promotion is enough.

But for paid advertising, decide on a budget before you start your campaign. Social platforms use AI to take care of your ads' performance and provide you with custom-built, targetable audiences. As a result, you get to target the right audiences and start getting better results with minimum investment.

Tip: People use social media for leisure, and they don't like to see promotional content in their feeds. Advertising on social media is not a bad idea, but you should do it professionally by paying for it to look like an ad. Even if promotional, your posts should engage, inform, and entertain.

11. Establishes Your Brand As An Authority

A significant SMM objective is to help you establish your brand as a topical authority. If you post consistently on social media and receive high engagement, search engines start to perceive you as an authority in your domain or on a specific topic. Soon you may acquire the "go-to" authority status for a given topic and start receiving more traffic on your landing pages. Therefore, when you create content, use sources with a high domain authority score.

Tip: You can use Moz's domain authority score to find the most authoritative resources for your content by downloading Moz's free toolbar. A domain authority score of more than 60 is considered good.

12. Allows You to Retarget Your Audience

SMM is incomplete without retargeting, a handy feature of paid advertising on social media. Given that only 2% of customers purchase something during their first visit to your website, you should have a solid plan to target the remaining 98% using a sales funnel. The most popular method to target this audience is to run retargeting ads.

When a visitor comes to your site, the website places cookies on its browser. When they leave without buying and revisit the social media site, the retargeting service starts displaying the ad in their feed. It acts as a gentle reminder and is usually successful in driving conversion.

13. Gives Visibility To Your Cause

Social media allows you to share your stories with the potential for them to go viral. You can use stories to promote your cause, run a campaign, or support your branding efforts. A story that targets emotions and is inspired by other viral stories has a high chance of going viral. You might have seen various viral stories. They use a good plot and emotions ā€” struggle, conflict, heartbreak, or heroic courage ā€” to achieve something big. Such videos have an underlying message that leaves a lasting impression.

Tip: An SMM campaign's objective should be to reach the right people, even if they are few. You should try to make a lasting impression, but don't do something desperate or forced to make your post go viral. Good content goes viral if created with enthusiasm, is well-planned, uses effective storytelling, and is promoted heavily.

14. Drives Conversions

Apart from sending traffic to your website, social media also helps in driving conversions. You can take the following steps to boost conversions through social posts and ads:

1. Add strong calls to action (CTAs)
2. Create engaging landing pages for your ads to prevent customers from bouncing off
3. Announce contests and giveaways frequently
4. Use social ads but don’t post promotional content in organic space

15. Promotes Your Content

Social media is currently the biggest platform to market content. Each month approximately 409 million people view more than 20 billion pages of content globally. You can use both free and paid tactics to promote your content on various social platforms. You can also use content repurposing to increase its impact.

You must take into consideration the following when promoting a post:

1. Its headline
2. It should have a catchy image
3. The time of posting

Use your creativity when writing a message for your posts. The content should be original and appealing. Use storytelling to prevent promotional content from looking like an ad.

Tip: Use this Lightroom Instagram Presets collection to spruce up your images for Instagram and quickly achieve the desired effect.

Conclusion

Much like with other digital marketing strategies, success through SMM largely depends on learning, experimenting, and updating your strategy from time to time. Its benefits and rewards almost always outweigh the time, cost, and effort it demands. Within a few weeks of implementing effective SMM, you will likely see an increase in traffic, conversion rate, brand loyalty, and improved SEO. Furthermore, since it is highly cost-effective, you have nothing to lose. Your competitors are already there on different social platforms leveraging SMM's benefits. You should use it too and make it your own.