Do you know, that the number of active monthly social media users worldwide is projected to reach 3.02 billion by 2021? Now, this number is projected to increase to almost 4.41 billion by 2025. Amazingly, it is one-third of the world’s population accessible from your screens.
And with the unprecedented growing population on various social media marketing platforms, brands need to maintain their hardcore digital presence on every platform. Today, the digital presence is not confined to ensuring your survival in the market. But it ensures your legitimacy as a business, and if a business harnesses these social channels with proper optimization, it can result in exponential business growth.
Given below are some statistics that are the reasons for social media marketing strategy being so important.
Twitter has over 397 Million monthly users, Instagram has over 1386 million monthly users, Facebook has over 2853 million monthly users, and YouTube has 2291 million monthly users. This is the answer to is social media is worth it.
These stats alone can make a mark and a standout reason for any business to use social media marketing strategy to engage users with its services and products and it gives the answer to the question is social media marketing worth it.
So here are some tips to help your business, reap the benefits of a good social media marketing strategy:
1) Engage with the Trends
Businesses tend to restrict their content strategy and are very scared to tweak it. But if they analyze the latest social media marketing strategy, all are pointing towards the importance of engaging with the trends and applicable current affairs.
By following the same content strategy, the consumer believes that the business is engaging in a meaningful conversation with them and not just trying to sell them products. Such sort of engaging and personalized content receives a lot of engagement organically and has the potential to get viral, giving your brand massive exposure at minimal to no cost. This is the first thing you will get with effective social media marketing and here you get the answer on how you can get started with social media.
2) Start selling online
Creating an online marketplace for prospective customers to easily browse through your products, and services and easily place an order with your company can be a game-changer in your business plan.
And if you don’t have much capital to invest in your e-commerce website. Consider selling your products, and services on platforms like Facebook Marketplace, Instagram, Amazon, and more.
54% of social browsers use social media marketing to research products (GlobalWebIndex, 2018).
3) Integration and Cross-platform Marketing
Driving traffic from one social media profile/page to another is one of the most effective ways to grow your business organically. One can link all the profiles to the website, emails, and other social media profiles. Always focus on creating content that drives your followers from one platform, to interact with you on another platform.
Use the right keywords in social media marketing and hashtags to increase your brand image and some word of mouth can give your brand the initial organic push that it needs.
4) Create content that drives engagement
It has been considered as one of the prominent and easiest ways to create and maintain a responsive base through engaging content strategies like contests or polls. It can garner the attention of the followers if you complement these contests with some discounts or gifts. Contests are a good opportunity to create user-generated content as well. The participants can be encouraged to provide reviews, feedback, pictures of them using the product, etc.
73% of marketers believe that their efforts through social media marketing have been “somewhat effective” or “very effective” for their business (Buffer, 2019). And because of this effectiveness, organizations have their answers on why is social media marketing worth it?
5) Paid Marketing
Organic reach is always considered significant when it comes to reaching. But, unfortunately, organic reach and engagement have declined drastically, as the new algorithm heavily supports and promotes paid engagements. All the major social media marketing platforms are offering paid ad spaces. These platforms also allow one to carefully curate and customize a target audience to reap maximum value for their money.
Through these paid campaigns, audiences can be targeted based on general factors such as gender, age, geography, demography, and more. Apart from these, some advanced factors such as preferences, hobbies, profession, institutions, and more are also there. One must understand that a general or a bad target audience often leads to fewer or bad leads. And every badly managed targeted campaign is a missed opportunity and a waste of money. To identify your targeted audience, it is important to strike a balance between a too generic vs a too-targeted audience.
6) The importance of retargeting campaigns
Once a brand awareness is created, one can focus on lead generation campaigns. But despite the quality of the campaigns, a large number of leads drop out and do not convert into customers. Many consumer behavior studies suggest that most people don’t tend to make a purchase when visiting your website for the first time.
They might add some stuff to their Wishlist/ Cart but leave the website without making any purchase. This is where lead nurturing is a good way for regaining old cold leads and converting them into customers.
The process of retargeting involves tracking cookies that save a user’s activity on distinct web pages. For instance, if a lead clicks on your website through a Facebook ad, visits the product page, and then leaves. The applications such as Facebook Pixel track this activity and will start to display targeted ads to that specific customer.
The ads will likely be centered on the product of interest to the customer. This overtime nurturing will pave the way for the extra nudge they need to finally make a purchase.
7) Analyze, Learn and Apply
Invest in tools that help with tracking and analyzing your consumer behavior, providing valuable insights for your business. Most social media platforms today have analytics tools at no additional cost.
These insights can assist you to understand what kind of content your audience is and is not responding well to helping you to modify future content accordingly.
Social media strategies cannot be uniform across companies and industries. No one solution fits all. However, more often than not, the application of these few tips has shown promising results in the past.
8) Higher Conversion Rate
If your business has more visibility, it ultimately paves the way for a higher conversion rate. Every blog, photo, video, or even a remark has a great inherited potential to drive traffic to your company’s website. And as social media has a great human touch factor, it allows your company to make a great and long-lasting impression.
It gives your brand a unique identity when it establishes frequent interaction with customers by sharing content on different engaging platforms. It goes like this: when a brand is engaged online, consumers who follow your brand’s accounts on different social platforms and engage with them on a day-to-day basis improve your company’s authenticity.
To a study conducted by Social Media Examiner, 66 percent of marketers experienced lead generation benefits from spending at least 6 hours per week on social media sites.” If your brand puts in an ecosystem in which users share, liking, and talk about, it will ultimately help you to increase your conversion. This point is significant to prove the value of social media marketing.
9) Track Your Competition
Social Media channels allow you to keep yourself updated on all the current marketing tactics and practices. But it keeps you alive in the market, as you can track the tactics used by direct competitors.
Now the question arises: Is social media marketing effective for small-to-midsize businesses (SMBs) like yours?
Yes, in fact, small to midsize businesses are using this tool of social media marketing more effectively than big organizations. As they don’t have much reputation at stake and they are more open to new market tactics.
See no one is up to the mark and we all have to learn through different tactics prevalent in the market. So the ultimate aim is to have the customer understand us and keep our services above the rest ones. Our competitors aim to employ the same set of tactics as us, so it is always worth tracking their business tactics and adding an extra element to gain an extra edge in the market through social media marketing strategy.
Now with these comprehensive answers, we hope you will get the answer of why do social marketing and you can start from any point in time.
Happy Marketing!
