As per Investopedia, around 80% of people say social media content greatly impacts their buying decisions. This shows the enormous influence of social media on every potential customer base. The importance of social media marketing can be best understood by its humongous user base, which is around 4.76 billion. Therefore, almost all businesses nowadays implement SMM to reach their customers. Let’s have an overview of social media marketing and its importance.
What is Social Media Marketing?
Social Media Marketing, or SMM, is a major part of digital marketing. Simply put, digital marketing through social media platforms is called social media marketing. A brand shares information on social media connects with its customers and promotes its brand under this type of marketing. The main aim is to engage with the audience and attract more traffic to the website.
It comes with purpose-built data analytics that gives marketers the additional advantage of tracking the responses. As a result, marketers can easily integrate tools in their social media marketing to understand their customers better.
The Importance of Social Media Marketing
Now you know what social media marketing is. So, let’s head towards discussing the importance of SMM.
Increase Brand Awareness
One of the importance of SMM is that it helps enhance brand awareness, as we have discussed that many people use social media today. This presents an amazing opportunity for businesses to explore this customer base. Furthermore, and most importantly, a large proportion of these people take the help of social media and its content to make their buying decisions. So, businesses can directly influence customers to try their products or services.
Stay Relevant
Social media helps you in staying relevant to industry trends. For instance, you are a clothing brand with no social media platform to endorse yourself. Y2K style, or 2000s style, is becoming very popular in today’s fashion world. Most fashion brands are making their looks per the Y2K style. But you will have no idea about it without knowing the social media trends. You might even advertise your products in the same outdated clothing looks. Do you think your customers will still be interested?
Customize Your Brand Image
Social media provides you with complete control and flexibility over your advertising. You can decide how to portray your brand in front of the schools. Businesses get complete freedom to choose their content or marketing style for advertising. Moreover, you can quickly change your brand marketing direction if you think something is not working for your business. For instance, you are making text content a lot, but it’s not performing well. Then, you can easily switch to the video content without extra effort.
Generate Leads
Social media is not just for creating awareness; it also increases the number of leads you get. You create awareness about your brand, then influence the customers, bring them to your website, and finally call them to take action. However, you don’t need to make any direct efforts to generate leads. This is part of the whole process of social media marketing. As a result, SMM helps you enhance your leads and, ultimately, the ROI.
Build Communication with Customers
The next importance of social media marketing is that it provides much more effective communication with your customers. This is because you connect with your customers directly without any layers. For example, imagine you tell a story, and your customers can directly reply. In another scenario, your customers have an issue with a product, so they can directly message you to resolve their query. This will also help in enhancing your customer service experience.
Cost-Effective Marketing Channel
Social media marketing is a cost-effective channel, so even small businesses with limited resources can use it. In addition, social media marketing is easier and more resource-optimized than conventional marketing.
Measurable Key Metrics
With social media marketing, you get to measure your responses and effectiveness. This helps you understand the real impact of your marketing strategy. Do you get to see how many people are engaging with your content? How are they responding? To how many people your content reaches every day? And so on. You can take more informed marketing decisions while building a more accurate marketing strategy.
Target Your Marketing Strategy
Social media marketing provides you with complete flexibility in choosing your marketing strategy. You can choose whom you want to show your social media ads or content. It contrasts with conventional marketing, where you have no control over the type of customer base. For example, suppose you are a gen Z apparel brand, but through newspaper ads, you will advertise your brand to every age group, whether they are your customer base or not. So, this will reduce your lead generation. But through social media marketing, you can choose demographics, age, gender, location, etc., for your customer base.
Know Your Customers Better
Social media helps you understand your customers better. It is more effective than surveys or feedback, where you have only one-way mass communication. Instead, on social media, you can see which post worked more, or you can directly take the customers’ opinions to understand their preferences. You can conduct opinion polls or respond to the customers’ comments. This will help build a more tailored or customized customer experience.
Enhance SEO ranking
Integrating social media into your website or hyperlinking your blogs also helps enhance your SEO ranking. In addition, businesses can use social media to divert their traffic from social media to the website. This will also help in enhancing the website traffic.
Final Words
Social media marketing has become one of the most effective ways of digital marketing. Not only it provides you with effective marketing, but it also helps in enhancing your customer service experience. You can understand your customers better by offering a customized or personalized experience. Similarly, it helps enhance your SEO ranking while generating more leads and boosting your overall ROI.