About one-third of people in the world are active on social media. Besides connecting people, businesses have found a way to increase brand awareness by using social platforms for inbound marketing. The following will provide an insight into everything you need to know about social media marketing.

What is Social Media Marketing?

Social media marketing is the use of social platforms to connect your business with your target audience. This helps your business to drive sales, increase website traffic, and promote your brand. There are many popular platforms that companies can use to promote their brand with social media marketing.

Navigating social channels involves engaging with followers, publishing relevant content, running ads, and analyzing the results consistently.

Ways Social Media Can Help Your Business Grow

The opportunities that a business can achieve using social platforms are endless. Reaching and engaging the right target audience can help small enterprises grow their brand.

Here are a few ways that social media can help your business grow.

Increase Brand Awareness

By crafting creative social media content, businesses have been able to grow their brands to reach and attract more people. The key to promoting your brand on social platforms is to educate the audience instead of trying to sell to them.

By carefully educating your audience about a product or service your business offers, you will gain trust and positive recognition from a variety of people.

Increase Website Traffic

Utilize social media to drive traffic to your business’s website. Most social media platforms allow you to include links to your website. Your website is the only thing you have full control over, so it is essential to push new visitors to the site.

Stronger Brand Loyalty

When a business continually engages with its audience, brand loyalty begins to build. It’s important to be able to answer questions from your followers as quickly as possible across all social media platforms. The more you prioritize your followers and make them feel heard, the more positive feelings they will grow toward your brand.

Excellent Customer Service

A designated customer service representative to assist in answering questions or handling complaints will leave your customers feeling appreciated. If you don’t have a customer service department, assigning a team member to answer questions as soon as they come in will be necessary. Customers can be impatient, and the faster you resolve their issues, the more they will support and trust your business.

Businesses with online support create a sense of safety and reliability for consumers to shop with your brand.

Competitive Advantage

Social media is a very saturated place. The chances of you finding your competitor on at least one of the platforms are very high. Although this makes it a more competitive space, this can also benefit you by monitoring their efforts and developing a marketing strategy that will help your business grow.

Which Social Platforms Are the Right Fit?

Following are some things to consider when finding the right platform to market your business.

Business Type

Some social platforms are encouraged and sometimes required, to post pictures, while others are made more for written content. For example, businesses in the cosmetic industry may focus on platforms that use images (IG, Facebook) since they are more suitable for reaching audiences interested in seeing before and after photos. Being mindful of the purpose of your content is important when choosing what social media platform to market on.

Success Analysis

If you are using multiple platforms to market your business, it would benefit you to analyze the success of each page. See where your content resonates the best and focus on pushing content on 2 or 3 platforms.

Marketing Strategy

Social platforms offer different features that benefit different marketing strategies. For instance, if you’re focusing on creating blog content, you would want to use the social media platform best suitable for sharing your message and providing easy access to the blog. It is best to consider your approach before deciding on the appropriate platform.

Target Audience

Each social media platform has a slightly different user audience. Many of the more recent platforms, like Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, etc., are more geared toward people under the age of 30. On the other hand, Facebook and LinkedIn are typically used by 30+ year-olds. Before choosing a platform, you should consider where you will reach your target audience or your buyer persona.

Communication Techniques for Each Social Platform

To successfully use social platforms to grow your business, you need to communicate effectively to your buyer persona.

Have a Strategy

Before publishing any content on social media, you need to consider several factors. What is the goal you want to achieve? The goal may be to use inbound marketing to increase brand awareness, drive sales, or get website traffic.

Having the right, specified goal will help you decide out the best platform to use and the type of content to publish to achieve the targeted goal.

Planning

Most small businesses fail to utilize the impact that a social media presence can have on their brands by failing to plan. To be discovered on social platforms, your business needs to plan out the type of content you want to share. The goal of your planned content should be to capture the attention of your target audience.

Listening to The Audience

If you’re publishing the right type of content, you will most likely get some kind of engagement. Whether that is a direct message, a like, a share, or a comment, you need to stay listening and analyzing what is resonating with your audience. This will ultimately help your business grow.

For instance, constructive criticism on a product or service may give you ideas on ways to improve. Be sure to acknowledge the feedback even if it’s not positive.

Analyze The Results

So, how is your campaign doing? If you don’t analyze the success, or failure, of your campaign, then there is no way to plan effectively for upcoming content. Most social media platforms offer analytics on your posts and engagement, but it’s your job to analyze and make the necessary changes.

As you can see, social media marketing can be used to help your business grow in a variety of ways, depending on your end goal. But, you may be asking yourself if using social media marketing is the best use of time for your business? The Rulebook helps by suggesting the top 4-6 marketing efforts your brand needs to be doing immediately. We can help provide guidance on your brand’s best path forward!