The fast-growing popularity of social media has brought about a paradigm shift in marketing as businesses have now included social media as an integral part of its marketing activities. It is not just because of the popularity of the social media but also because of the effectiveness of the platform in doing good for business beyond any doubt. Most importantly, the majority of the target audience loves to spend time on the social media, and if your business is not on the social media, you are distancing yourself from the audience. As marketers have to stay in close touch with customers, they would embrace the social media for their good. Since the social media is on an upswing that is not likely to recede anytime soon, the sooner businesses align its marketing activities with the platform more would be the gains.
How well you fare in business depends on how well you can keep in touch with the target audience and win their confidence. Getting closer to the audience and building relationships with them is the norm of business today, which brings social media to the fore. The social media is all-powerful in creating and maintaining relationships of all kinds and businesses should take full advantage of engaging closely with target customers on the social media networks. Let us now take a deeper look into the advantages that businesses could expect to receive from the social media.
Reap the rewards of social advertising
If the rapid growth and popularity of the social media seem something incredible, you will be even more surprised at the super fast growth of social media advertising. Facebook that leads the pack of social media networks has recorded advertisement revenue of $9.16 billion in just twelve years since its inception in 2005. Therefore, it is a clear sign that social media advertising is now here to stay for quite some time. If you wonder what attracts businesses to advertise on the social media, then pay attention to the reasons detailed below.
Targeted outreach
The basic feature that gives an edge to social media ads over traditional advertisements is its ability to reach out to the targeted audience just in the way you want. Facebook provides endless options for customizing ads even on an ongoing basis that no traditional advertisements can. You can create social media ads just for specific groups of the audience and create as many variants as you want to make it most relevant. It gives you more options for getting closer to the audience by creating friendlier messages that generate the right vibes. As you can reach the targeted audience effectively, the corresponding conversions also increase that enhances the ROI (return on investment).
Ongoing performance analysis
It is possible to evaluate the performance of the campaign on the social media and make ongoing changes to it to make it more effective. This facility reduces wasted efforts in advertising as you can tighten the belt the moment you know that you are slipping. By gauging the audience response, you can modify the campaign to make it sharper.
Social advertising is cheaper
The cost of advertising on the social media is much less than traditional advertising on television, radio, print media, etc. You can create your campaign instead of going to any advertising agency. Before you launch paid advertisement campaigns, you can try out free campaigns on various social media networks to test the waters before taking a plunge.
High impact branding on social media
Social media is quite powerful in creating brand awareness and growing brand equity. If you are not using the social media for branding, you are doing a favor to your competitors who are already doing it. There should not be any doubt that the social media branding has a high impact on the brand. For doing it effectively, you have to look into the following areas.
Go with the audience
When you delve deep and research about audience behavior, you could know their preferences for various social media networks. You must take your business to those networks where the majority of the audience exists. Do not follow similar brands to determine the choice of networks because you would then lose sight of the audience.
Create compelling visuals
Emphasize creating compelling visual content targeted at the audience because visuals have much higher appeal and quickly penetrates the minds of viewers. Use videos and images to enhance brand awareness by using the social media.
Start interacting with the audience and build authority
Engage in two-way communication with the audience and avail all opportunities of interacting with them closely. The closer you get to the audience, speak in the language they enjoy, more loyal they would become to you. Demonstrate your expertise in the topic or in the industry to establish your authority that adds to brand equity.
Improve SEO
When you do well on the social media with your marketing campaign, you are reinforcing your SEO campaign. Since SEO is about high visibility, the wide outreach of the social media facilitates in achieving the objective. That the social media profile of businesses finds mention in the search results is a clear sign of its influence on search rankings even though it is not a part of Google’s search algorithm. Search engines pick up the social media signals to judge the content quality and website authority that affect SEO performance.
More inbound traffic and more conversions
The widespread visibility of the brand on the social media drives more traffic to websites, and it keeps increasing as the brand finds more mention and sharing. This traffic is in addition to the traffic generated by SEO and more traffic means more leads, more conversion, and more revenue.
Instead of doing extensive research to understand customer behavior, interacting with them on the social media provides enough insights that businesses can explore for its own benefits. Your brand could receive high recommendations from 71% customers provided it receives a favorable response on the social media.
