Benefits of Social Media Marketing
We have already discussed the importance of social media, but what about the benefits that social media has to offer? On a personal level, social media can be more about a personality contest and who gets the most likes and comments. From a business perspective, social media has an exorbitant amount of benefits. Some of those benefits include an increase in traffic to their websites, increase in loyal fans, improved search rankings, an increase in business partnerships, improved sales, a reduction in overall marketing expenses, and much more. A couple of the top benefits are explained in more detail below. http://ift.tt/2kHO7BmFirst and foremost, the biggest benefit is exposure. The number of people a business can reach online is far more than they can reach face-to-face. This means that brand awareness can increase simply by sharing and promoting the brand online. In fact, most people look for product reviews and product information online prior to purchasing it. While a lot of people would look towards a website first instead of calling, or just dropping by the store, people are now looking towards social media. With just a scroll through Instagram you can find great deals and new events without heading to a website or inquiring. If a person isn’t in the community, they may not know what you are offering. Bring in social media and you can increase your customer base to just outside your community and further, building a relationship with those who know you and who will get to know you. This is why utilizing social media as a marketing campaign is so meaningful. By becoming more involved with the customer, you are building loyalty. Social media sites help develop a brand and legitimize them in ways that regular websites cannot. While static webpages tell consumers who they are, provide a little bit of background, and provide a shopping area, they do not change much. Social media sites allow companies to establish themselves as industry leaders. They can showcase their products and services, provide question and answer sessions, and continually produce updates to provide more about their brand. Building credibility is an important part of social media marketing. Social media is invaluable to customer service. Many customers tend to use social media as a way to communicate with businesses. Either to ask questions, compliment them or complain. Use this to your advantage by ensuring you respond to your messages and posts within a reasonable amount of time. Large companies such as Nike, T-Mobile, and Under Armour are likely to see over 2,000 questions on their wall at any given time because they have well over a million followers. It is important that they keep customer service agents focused on social media sites and answer at least 65% of these questions because recent studies show that 1 in 3 people prefer social media contact rather than phone calls. The better you serve your customers, regardless of the avenue, the better your brand appearance is. In today’s society people are using social media as a primary means of communication. Gone are the days of calling in to complain, or scroll through lists of reviews. Now, all anyone has to do is take to social media to see how a business stands up. Take this into consideration as you build your online presence. Social media marketing is a big driver of increased sales and profit. There are numerous tools and features on each of the social media platforms that help drive consumers to a sale. The ability to buy directly from a shop on Facebook, create target driven advertising campaigns, buy directly from Amazon or Twitter, utilize Instagram as a place to introduce your followers to more than just your store, and YouTube for a look at how you might use products or services. The future is lazy and instant, if you don’t keep up you’ll be driven out. There are a million tools and features that can be capitalized on from each of the social media platforms available. The key is finding which ones will work for your company. Last, social media marketing can reduce your overall advertising and marketing costs. Social media is a cost-effective manner of getting your brand and message out because of the population pool that social media platforms have. You have the ability to get text, images, videos, etc. in various forms of promotions, showcases, product updates and so on free of charge as often as you like. The use of paid ads using target audiences (and management of your social media accounts) is where you will invest your money. Social media campaigns are highly specific and more cost-effective than any TV ad or radio ad you have produced before. If you’re still using your original ways of advertising and want to add social media to the mix, this can be a great tool. Customers will see you everywhere, from TV to radio to Twitter to Facebook. By using a smaller amount of money to access social media, and still keeping your original advertising, at least for the time being, you will find that your budgets will start to look healthier. In essence, you are getting the best bargain possible buy using social media and are accessing the largest population available to you. via Blogger http://ift.tt/2jX4NjG February 07, 2017 at 02:44PM
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What is Social Media Marketing?
Social media marketing is the utilization of modern social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, and others to gain website traffic and bring attention to your brand as well as expand your marketing communication. There are several reasons why you may want to expand your marketing resources into social media, but to understand the significance and importance of that expansion, below are some statistics that might baffle you. http://ift.tt/2jX0wwI
As you plan your social media marketing strategy you need to look at all of the platforms available. What is the popularity like, what marketing opportunities are there, what type of content will you need to create and share, and do you have the right content that will be engaging enough to generate leads and purchases? Taking advantage of every social media platform available to you may be the best option for you and your company, or it may be beneficial just to use one or two platforms. SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING STRATEGYYour social media marketing strategy should clearly identify your business goals. You need to have a clear vision of what you are working towards so that you can create objectives to attain them. Your goals may be to increase brand awareness, retain your customers, introduce new products or services, expand to a new geographic or demographic market; etc. Choose two or three primary goals that you believe are attainable from your list, as well as two or three secondary goals that you want to focus on in this marketing strategy.Once you have your goals clearly defined, you can then develop specific measures to achieve those goals. Ask yourself how you can meet those goals. If one of your primary goals is to increase brand awareness, what can you feasibly do to meet that goal? Utilize Facebook advertising and contests? Generate Twitter posts on a routine basis? Whatever the objectives are you should be able to meet the goal successfully in a timely manner. Your goals should be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound. Note: Do not overshoot your goals. For example, do not set a goal that you will reach over one million users on social media within the first year. This is highly unfeasible and unrealistic. Make sure your goals are relevant and consistent with your company’s mission. Using social media as a marketing tool is a great way to heighten your brand awareness and tap into new users, especially the younger market. However, social media marketing is a long-term goal and takes a lot of time and effort to achieve high-standing status. Be patient with your goals and re-assess what they mean to you and your company monthly, if not weekly. After you have you goals and objectives, you then need to identify who you need to engage. Who are your customers? Who will use your product or services? You need to think about your target audience from every perspective including, but not limited to: demographics, geography, age, income, occupation, motivations, obstacles, etc. The more specific you can breakdown your user groups, the better off you will be when it comes time to market your brand. You will be able to target specific groups and tailor your advertising for them. Now that you know your audience, what does your competition look like? Take an active approach in studying your competition to understand what social media platforms they are currently using and what type of content seems to attract the most response. You can use these notes as you decide what social media platforms you believe will be the most beneficial for you and the kind of content you need to post to be successful. The most important thing you need to remember is that engagement is your number one goal. If you are posting daily on any social media platform, or perhaps all of them, but aren’t getting any engagement, or very little, it’s time to re-think your plans. Go over your goals, see what others are doing, and re-start your social media marketing. Once you find out what seems to be working for your competitors and you have done your research to determine what will work best for your business (remember your research should be based around your goals and objectives as well what works for your competitors), it is time to decide what social media platforms you will use. I will tell you that most people spend at least 40% of their online time on Facebook and at least 20% of their time on Twitter. These two platforms are almost a given for any new social media marketing campaign. You can also use one form of social media more frequently than the other. Say, for example, you focus more energy into Facebook, and post a little less on Twitter. You’re still reaching an audience and putting your name out there, but you are focusing your efforts onto one social media platform more than you are in another. You can also increase the time and money spent on other platforms as you continue to grow and feel comfortable using social media for marketing. A simple way to even out the amount of time you are spending on your platforms is to link your accounts. For instance, you can link your Facebook and Twitter accounts, so that when you post something on one, it will automatically post to the other. Once you have settled on your social media platforms, you need to develop your content strategy. Content is extremely important to building relationships online. Your new accounts will be meaningless unless you have meaningful content to connect you with new followers (either current customers or prospective customers). Your content strategy will include what content you will post, the timing of your posts and the frequency you should be posting. There are different types of content that can be posted: pure text, images, links, video, etc. All of these have their own value, which will be discussed later on. Now that the entire social media marketing strategy has been written, it is time to allocate some time and resources to this plan. You need to decide how much money you are willing to allocate to the social media side of advertising as opposed to traditional advertising. Many companies are pulling advertising dollars from other advertising budgets; however, many have now created a special budget for social media because of its impact on the company. You will need to look at your return on investment to help you make these decisions and it may be something that comes alive as you generate profits. Maybe you build the social media marketing strategy over time. Your budget may need to be broadened the longer you market with social media and use different ways to engage your customers and future customers. Also, who will handle this new advertising burden? Do you have a social media expert(s)? Make sure you have a plan intact that controls who is developing the content, researching content, posting the content, and handing the management of each site traffic analytics. This may be a job for someone who can handle more responsibility, meeting with yourself to figure out your marketing plan. Or, you may need to hire an entirely new person (or promote from within and hire for their previous position) to help take over the social media platforms. Once you get going and use each one, a job that once seemed flippant and easy will take great time and care. This entire process should be a work in process as you build your social media marketing strategy. via Blogger http://ift.tt/2jXeQFn February 07, 2017 at 01:40PM |