6 Proven Benefits Of Social Media Marketing

Discover 6 Benefits of Social Media Marketing – Unleash the Beast

Social media should never be underestimated, it has been a technologically fueled phenomenon in the past decade that has seen massive growth numbers to the amount of users who use it. As of 2016, there are 7.3 billion people in the world, 3.4 billion of those have internet and 2.3 billion of the internet uses are active social media users.

These numbers are huge no matter which way you look at it, this also means that the potential is huge to reach out to a massive audience. No matter what you are using your company social media for; whether it’s for PR, news, b2b business or as a means to interact with your customers… being able to successfully manage your company’s social media and create impactful social media marketing campaigns is what is important.

1. Consumer Relations / PR

Social media can be a great tool to directly interact with your audience for a variety of reasons. A lot of companies have opted to use social media as a form of live customer service, mainly twitter due to the convenience of communication between company and customer, an interesting fact is that only 20 Fortune 500 companies actively engage with their customers on Facebook, while 83% have a presence on Twitter.

Some examples of companies that effectively handle customer relations and complaints frequently via twitter are Microsoft, Apple and Asda. A study by EngageCustomer found that customers are 67% more likely to return to make a purchase if their complaint is handled well, this statistic shows that by creating an open line of convenient customer service via social media you can get higher levels of customer satisfaction and return rates simply by being available to help with a complaint or query quickly.

2. Better Insights Into Your Audience

Another use from social media that can prove beneficial to your business is by analyzing the customer engagement and analytic’s to find out answers to questions you may have about your audience.

You can find out how old they are, where they are from, what they like and what they dislike, by taking a deeper look you can find out what products they like, what they do on the weekend and what posts they love sharing or commenting on. The amount of data you can obtain through customer relations and analytic’s is well worth noting and can be done easily on platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

3. You Don’t have to Invest Loads of Money for a Successful Campaign

Social media campaigns are a great way to increase engagement on social media and can be used for a variety of reasons, whether it’s to launch a new product line, raise awareness of a certain topic or to build a community online.

The price of social media campaigns aren’t as expensive as most people think. If you are aiming to target a specific audience which has a higher potential rate to click your advert, you could save a lot of money by using PPC adverts on different social media platforms. This means that you are only charged when the person clicks on your advert – meaning that if you target the correct audience then there is a higher chance that the person will stay on the page once they have clicked your ad and may make a purchase.

Some social campaigns that have been dubbed a complete success such as Coca Cola’s Share a coke campaign did not have much marketing budget, the genius part behind it is that the customers themselves were used as a free marketing tool, customers would post pictures and create a buzz when they bought a bottle of coke that simply had their name on it.

This was a huge success for Coca cola, with close to 1 Billion impressions on twitter alone, 730,000 personalized glass bottles sold on the online store, over 150 million personalized bottles sold. For such a simple campaign, the ROI and exposure the brand got through social media posts & signals was incredible, and it served as proof that you don’t have to invest a load of money to have a successful campaign.

4. Building Your Brand

Your social media profiles should act like a hub of information that relates to your company, what it does and act as a easily accessible platform for customers to engage directly with you. Many customers in this day and age turn to social media to research a company further to find information about services, products and perhaps look into what you are sharing and posting.

Having great posts on your social media page that represents your company is a good way to attract impressions, followers/ fans and exposure. With lots of ways to post content such as blog posts, videos, pictures or simply by linking it, you are free to be creative with what you post. It’s no surprise that 83% of marketers choose to invest into social media to help brand exposure.

5. Leads

Social media can be a very effective inbound marketing tool that is able to help you collect leads and navigate people through to your sales funnel. Generating leads through social media helps improve sales and cuts downs costs, approximately 45% of companies in the US saw reduced marketing costs when increasing efforts in social media marketing.

By publishing engaging content to your audience, you can build up a loyal following and aim to gather intelligence on your audience and customers and find out what your target audience is interested in, what services or products you could sell them and how to go about that is important when using social media as a platform to gain leads. The benefits of his are quite clear, revenue increased for 24% of businesses when they utilized social media for lead generation.

6. Going Viral!

It is a dream for most companies to have a post go viral worldwide, the ROI is crazy. The amount of exposure, shares, visibility and conversation you get from a piece of content going viral is truly immense, the beauty of it is that is requires a relatively low amount of effort compared to the ROI you get.

How to go viral? Take a look at these top 10 marketing campaigns that became viral hits. Unfortunately there is no quick recipe in order to make a campaign get shared over 1,000,000 times, although there are some tips that can increase its shareability:

• Simplicity – It’s not a unknown fact that most people have a short attention span, keeping a campaign simple while still having a clear message is essential.
• Emotion – Being able to pull at your audience’s emotions is an effective way to get them to connect or engage with the campaign.
• Message – While some viral campaigns may be a total accident, some of them are actually well articulated and were aimed to go viral. Clever marketers realise that having a powerful message can encourage people to engage with a piece of content rather than just simply scroll past it and ignore it.

Social media can be very time consuming but as time goes on, it becomes more apparent that companies are becoming required to invest time and resources into effective social media marketing. It can be easily used as a research tool, communication medium between customer and company and much more. It’s best to start getting involved as soon as possible and begin reaping the rewards that social media marketing can bring.

Tags: smm Social Media Marketing