Gone are the days when we relied on traditional media to market products and services or expand our businesses. It’s a digital era where we use social media for marketing. Interestingly, it plays a vital role in it.
In this article, we will reveal the role of social media in marketing and how you can use this powerful facility to achieve your business goals. But, first, understand why social media has become this important for business and marketing. You can also make money online.
Importance of social media marketing in business
Since social media is the handiest tool for any user, your presence is essential. Today, almost everyone is on social media, spending hours on it. As per the report from Statista 2022, the average daily social media users spend 151 minutes per day on social media worldwide. That means your target audience actively uses any social media tools that might require your product and services.
Social media tools also help you target the right audience, increase your brand visibility, and reach new audiences through organic or paid social media marketing strategies. Moreover, whenever they need you, they might visit your social media pages to get to know your credibility and brand presence. That directly reflects how social media impacts the buyer’s journey to get your product and services. Let’s understand in detail.
The Role of Social Media in Each Stage of the Customer Journey
#1. Awareness
It’s the buyers, customers, and consumers’ first stage when they get to know about your product’s existence. The awareness stage can be through paid or organic social media marketing strategy. For instance, if a user searches for similar products on Google that you offer, the algorithm will show them your product, and they will learn about you.
#2. Consideration
It’s the second stage, where the users might find your product or service suitable to their needs and consider buying it. For example, the user who found your product through social media ads, checked out its details, prices, etc., started thinking of buying it to fulfil their need.
#3. Decision making
It is the crucial step when the user finally decides to buy your product or service. In this stage, your customer reached you after efficiently researching and analysing numerous similar products and services.
#4. Retention
Social media plays a crucial role in retaining a customer. With your online presence, you forever bond with your customers. In this stage, the customer can share their experience with your product or services, can give you feedback to improve it or might complain about it.
You must tackle every customer reaction calmly and build a bond that turns them loyal customers.
How to Use Social Media to Achieve Your Marketing Goals
#1. Increase brand awareness
With social media platforms, you can increase brand awareness among your target audience. The social media tools leverage you with the facility to run ads by filtering your business keywords, age range, demography, etc., which helps you reach the right audience and let them know how your product differs from your competitors and how you can solve their problems.
#2. Generate leads
By reaching the right audience, you can generate business leads and utilise them to sell your products and services. Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube ads help you generate leads. Moreover, you can generate leads for your business through consistent organic posting.
#3. Drive traffic to your website
Through social media, you can also drive traffic to your site. Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn are some of the top social media platforms that work best to drive organic social media traffic to the website. You can also add links on instagram to bring the instagram audience to your website. Instagram allows you to add clickable links in only one place, i.e. its bio. You can add up to 3 links on it.
#4. Boost sales
In the end, social media will help your business boost sales. With social media tools, reach the right audience, make them aware of your existence and convert them for your business to achieve your ultimate business goal.
#5. Improve customer service
Social media marketing offers two-way communication and emerges as a community where you share information about your product and service; your customer can share their experience. The feedback you receive can be excellent, good, bad or worse. You just need to take all the reviews to improve your customer service so you can stay in the market for a long time and build yourself as a brand with a strong and loyal customer base.
However, you need constant efforts to develop such social media marketing strategies.
Tips for Successful Social Media Marketing
#1. Create engaging content
On one hand, social media is the best platform for digital or online marketing. It’s a competitive one. You need to create engaging content to hold the eyes of your customers and target audience. To do so, follow trends, get creative, and most importantly, keep your leg in the audience’s shoes so your audience stays tuned with you.
#2. Use the right social media platforms
To share different forms of content, choose the right platform to share it. For example, if you have long video content, share it on YouTube; if it’s short, you can consider sharing it as an Instagram reel or YouTube short. Whereas for sharing images, Instagram and Facebook are the best platforms. Twitter is good for sharing clickable blog links and concise textual content. Consider your message goal and format in order to choose the right platform to share them.
#3. Be consistent
You must know consistency is essential to go with the Google algorithm, as it helps you stay connected with your target audience. Sharing quality content at fixed time intervals on all the social media tools you use for your business’s digital marketing can play a vital role in growing your followers and customer base.
#4. Use social media analytics
Social media analytics helps you analyse your social growth regarding followers, engagement, and reach. Getting insights is important to get all the possible benefits of your social media tools. It lets you know which kinds of audience your content is reaching, which format of content is working for your business and most importantly, which social media strategy or campaign works best for your company among the audience.
Conclusion
For positive business growth in this digital era, utilising social media marketing strategy and leveraging its benefits is crucial. Your brand presence is vital on popular social media platforms like YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedin. However, balancing all the media tools, content strategy, and their analysis is not a one-day game. It needs constant effort, innovative work, and a growth strategy.
Social media management tools help you balance the growth of your online presence by easing the management of multiple social media tools in one place, checking analysis, searching for trends, etc.
