“Be present where your customers are”
– Hakimuddin Chowdhury (Founder Leotics Consulting LLP)
The two questions that we get most often, What is Social Media Marketing? and Why is it so Important for business?
Social media as you know it, is the place where you can share your content, ideas, opinions and get connected with people. Socialising is the main objective of social media.
As a business, yes you should look forward to social media. Your customers are there, they engage and socialise with others and so can with your brand.
Over the past few years we have seen a rapid increase in the number of businesses who have adapted social media as a part of their marketing strategy. The growing acceptance of social media is for a number reasons,
- Growth in number of users
- Development and enhancement of features for business
These two are what we believe has lead to the growing popularity and acceptance of social media for business.
If you are doing social media marketing or thinking to do social media marketing yourself. Then our book is meant for you.
It covers everything you need to know from choosing the right channel to business features, platform demographics and making a strategy with examples. A complete package for you – Available on Amazon.
Table of Contents
What is Social Media Marketing ?
Social media marketing is creation and sharing of content on social media platforms to promote your business (products / services / ideas / brand image). It is to engage and interact with social media network users who are or can be your potential customers.
Some of the most widely used social media platforms are
- Facebook – 2.4 Billion Monthly Active Users
- YouTube – 2.0 Billion Monthly Active Users
- Facebook Messenger – 1.3 Billion Active Users
- Instagram – 1.0 Billion Monthly Active Users
On an overall basis, over 3.4 Billion people use social media. That is 45% of the world population.
When we say create and share content, it is usually
- Images
- Videos
- Texts
- Audios
These help you engage with your customers and help in bringing potential leads. It completely depends on you the type of content that you would like to share with your audience.
The social media networks have developed tools that can help you in marketing your brand to your desired audience. Facebook & Google advertising platform are few examples.
Why is Social Media Marketing so Important?
As of today, over 3.4 Billion people use Social Media platforms. The number has grown by 9% over the previous year. With time, more and more people are using social media platforms and this where marketing on social media has become important for business.
Social media marketing is one the most powerful ways for business to market it’s products and services to existing and potential consumers. Customers are already engaging with brands on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn & Pinterest etc., if you are not doing so, then you are missing out on immense potential.
As we said earlier, the acceptance of social media marketing is increasing due to the platform upgrades like
- Business Profiles – You can create your own business profile for your audience where they can know more about you.
- Advertising Platforms – You can advertise to your target audience using these platforms. They also give you the ability to create your own target audience using demographics. We will discuss this further in the sub section.
- Social Media Marketplace – The evolution of social media into an eCommerce market place where you can sell your products. A few examples, Facebook Marketplace, Instagram Shop, Pinterest Shop etc.
In all we list 13 reasons why you should do social media marketing for business.
1. Your Customers are on Social Media
The most important reason why business should use social media to promote their products and services is that your customer is on social media.
Customers are active and interacting on the platforms, they spend their time on it. With over 3 Billion people using social media, it is very unlikely that the target audience will not be on it. It is a big opportunity for brands to reach their audience.
If this is not compelling enough then probably this would be, people on an average spend 2 hours and 23 minutes every day on social media platforms in 2019 and this number is on a constant rise.
58 minutes on Facebook, followed by Instagram & YouTube with 53 minutes and 40 minutes respectively in 2019.
People from all age groups use social media. Starting from the new generation to a considerable number of people above 65 years of age.
What more proof can you possibly need to agree that your customer is somewhere on social media.
Therefore, it is not only the number of users of social media increasing, so is their average time spent on it. With more and more people engaging with social media, thereby lies an opportunity for you as a brand to engage with them too.
It is very simple, you can wait for your customer to find you or you can go to them. You could possibly be missing out on the chance to interact and engage your customers/leads.
2. Engaging & Interactive
Now that you know your customer is on social media, you have the opportunity to interact with them using content.
Some of the reasons why people use social media is to connect with friends and family, entertainment, to know what’s going on in the world etc. They are more in the mindset to be open to things that are going to come and more likely to engage.
According to MarketingSherpa, 95% of adults in the age of group of 18 – 34 are likely to follow a brand on social media. Therefore, there is a chance, you could be that brand.
The reasons why users engage and follow brands is because they find it entertaining, valuable and can connect with the brand profiles.
Social media gives you the power to connect with your audience in groups and individually. This gives a personalised touch to your marketing. Engaging with your content and then interacting with your brand increases trust. It is a two way communication.
Your content can engage with customers and you can connect with them over it. It is very common when we see brands discussing issues or situation on twitter. A new design of a bag getting compliments and critics on the same content.
The content that you share on social media acts as your brand voice and depicts your brand personality.
These engagements and interactions helps brands understand a number of things. It helps them to understand what do their customers think and feel about them, how satisfied are they with the offerings and what do they like about the offerings etc.
Most marketers use social media to understand what their customers think about the brand and to know the audience is a more personal way. If you are a business, you should do that too.
The content can even bring you leads and business. We have a case study that we can share here.
Case Study
One of our clients, based out of Kolkata India, was a regional player in their line of business. On taking our advice they started a business profile on Instagram. Today, they are no more regional. Now, they get business from all over the world. They got their first business from the channel without spending a dime on advertising.
Hold on, there is more to come.
If you are doing social media marketing or thinking to do social media marketing yourself. Then our book is meant for you.
It covers everything you need to know from choosing the right channel to business features, platform demographics and making a strategy with examples. A complete package for you – Available on Amazon.
3. Precise Targeting and Reaching your Audience
Social media platforms gives you an edge in targeting and reaching your ideal target audience.
You can target your customers based on their
- Demographics such as age, gender, location, marital status, profession etc.
- Interests such as swimming, basketball, football etc.
- Devices they own such as an iPhone, etc.
- Pages that they follow etc.
- Web browser they use to login.
- Device they login form such as mobile, tablet and desktop.
The list is endless. It can go on and on. Simply, we are trying to say that it gives a plethora of options to target the audience.
Almost all social media channels have their own advertising and marketing platform. You can create the audience that you would like to target and then the platform shows you the approximate number of users you can reach.
You can reach your customers in two ways, organic and paid promotions. In organic, your customer finds your piece of content on the channel. Whereas, in paid promotion, the channel shows your content or ad to the audience of your choice at a cost.
4. Retargeting – Cherry on the Cake
Retargeting, going by the definition, targeting the customers or people who have earlier at some point interacted with your digital asset. It can be your website or your social media profiles or any such digital assets.
Social media gives you the power to retarget your customers or people who earlier engaged with your brand either on that social media channel or your website.
You can reach out to those people by showing them an ad or offer that can help in converting them into our customers. Retargeting can only be possible using paid promotions options.
Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, all major social media channels have the feature of retargeting.
It is easier to convert an existing customer or up sell an existing customer, in the same way it is easier to convert or bring back someone who has earlier interacted with your brand.
In most of the cases we see that the cost of converting an existing visitor is less than 50% of the cost of conversion of the overall campaign and this is what we have seen multiple times.
You can check out our blog on Retargeting and Remarketing which also has our case study by clicking here. In this blog, you will see our detailed case study on how did the business benefit due to retargteing.
The reason we say it is a cherry on the cake is due to the cost implications and conversions.
5. Influence Consumers, Boost Loyalty
Consumers constantly surf through social media. They have different objectives but are open to new things. This is where you as a business can benefit.
Pinterest as a platform is based on finding new ideas, products etc. You can take advantage of these and showcase your products and services. This can influence the customers decision and help them choose you over competitors.
You can influence customers through your content. Showing the benefits of your offerings and how does it stand out from the competition can make wonders for you.
Your existing customers engage and interact with your content. You can request for their reviews and showcase them on your social media profiles. This builds trust and brings new leads for your business. Consumers do look for reviews and opinions before making a purchase.
User generated content on your posts can really speed up the purchasing process. It can influence consumers to take an instant decision. Well, always user generated content will not be possible. If you are new, you technically will not have many users. In such a case, you can go through influencers.
Influencers
Influencers are people who have credibility in the eyes of their audience and can influence people towards something. People in a way trust what they say and would follow their advice. You can connect with them and work out a deal.
Normally, influencers charge an amount for sharing your content or talking about your brand with their audience. The bargain is simple, you pay them a price and they introduce you to their audience.
As a new business and in that manner an existing one also, you can get a good thrust of audience for business. The conversion will depend on how much does that audience trust the influencer.
Social media has a ton of influencers and the count is growing everyday. Their are influencers in almost all the categories that you can think of.
The question arises, how many followers or subscribers should one have to be an influencer ?
There is no such limit to where we can conclusively say, the person has become an influencer. What we consider is a following of at-least 20,000 and the engagement ratio. Now, there are cases where we have worked with people having a lower following but are really active and engaging.
It is a call that you have to take, based on the reach or audience size and engagement ratio.
So, an influencer or user generated content on your post and your content can influence a customer and boost loyalty among existing buyers. It gives them a feel that they are/have not made the wrong decision by going with your brand.
If you are doing social media marketing or thinking to do social media marketing yourself. Then our book is meant for you.
It covers everything you need to know from choosing the right channel to business features, platform demographics and making a strategy with examples. A complete package for you – Available on Amazon.
6. Source of Traffic
Social media can be your source of inbound traffic. You can send your audience from your social media profiles to your website. You can convert that traffic by providing value and influencing them.
Every piece of content is an opportunity to send traffic from social media platforms to your website. This gives you a chance for conversion. Social media also helps you in search engine optimisation.
The more content you share, provide value to your audience, the more inbound traffic you are likely to get. It gives you more new leads and opportunity to convert to customers. For that, your website needs to be optimised for conversion.
You can also use retargeting to bring back the leads who did not convert initially.
As you know, to rank on search engines, it takes a lot of time. It is neither easy nor does it happen quickly. In such a case, social media can hold you up and running. They can be your source of traffic till you also develop additional sources.
With every visit and action on the website, your search rankings improve.
7. Improves Search Rankings
Your search engine rankings are also dependent on your social media shares. Social shares is when a site visitor shares your content with others on social media.
It acts as an indication to Google and other search engines that your content is valuable and might be helpful. This boosts your search rankings.
Your social presence is really important. A strong social presence sends a signal to search engines that your brand is credible. This increases your rankings.
It is not only that your social media helps you climb ranks. There have been instances, when your social media content itself is shown in rankings.
You can try that now, if you have a social media account, search your name in Google and see of the social profile comes up or not. It will definitely come. So does for your brand. Similarly for your content, it can rank from your social media profile itself.
We have sen instances where we see, Facebook posts, Instagram posts, YouTube videos and other social media content in rankings. YouTube is a Google company and therefore, it ranks in Google search results. We will cover this in detail.
Therefore, social media presence is very helpful for search engine optimisation and ranking.
8. Different Channels have Specific Audiences and Features
All the social media channels are not the same. Facebook is different from Instagram and YouTube. They all are different from each other.
Facebook, is the largest and most widely used. It can share all forms of content. Instagram is best for videos and images. It can attract organic traffic through keywords. YouTube is all videos channel, it ranks for Google searches etc. Similarly Pinterest, Tik Tok, Snapchat are all different from each other and so are their audiences.
Facebook, YouTube, Instagram has a diverse audience spread across all age groups. Tik Tok and Snapchat have majority of their audience under the age of 25.
It is very important you choose the social media channel properly. All your efforts can go into waste if you choose a channel where your audience does not exist.
While choosing a social media channel you should in keep in mind
- Target Audience Size
- Type of content you can share on the channel
- Marketing & Advertising options
By keeping these in mind, you will be able to choose the best channel for your brand. Also note, it is not necessary to be present on all the social media channels at once. After getting hold of one, you can expand.
This is a huge topic and you can find more on this in our blog post
If you are doing social media marketing or thinking to do social media marketing yourself. Then our book is meant for you.
It covers everything you need to know from choosing the right channel to business features, platform demographics and making a strategy with examples. A complete package for you – Available on Amazon.
9. Advertising is Relatively Cost Effective
The cost of advertising on social media platforms is relatively lower compared to other traditional advertising mediums. It is very important that you understand it is “Relatively Cost Effective”. We do not say its cheap.
We say this due to a number of reasons such as precise targeting, retargeting, wide reach, organic traffic and personalised ads.
Precise Targeting
We have talked about how precisely you can target and reach your desired audience. This reduces the cost marketing when compared to traditional marketing channels such as radio, television, newspaper, magazines etc.
The major reason is the control over the demographics and ads which is possible in social media channels but not on traditional channels.
Once an ad is published in newspaper, it is published. Nothing can be done now but in social media you can stop the ad the very second and make changes to it.
We do not have any control on the audience in traditional channels but here you can precisely select your demographics. This makes sure the ad is shown only to the audience we want and thereby it reduces the cost and yields better conversion.
For example :- You are selling iPhone covers and want to advertise to iPhone users. You will not be able to target this type of audience effectively using newspaper but can be done very easily using Facebook.
Therefore, this reduces the cost as we advertise only to our precisely targeted audience and not everyone.
Retargeting
You can retarget customers on social media and convert them into customers. The similar thing is very difficult in a television ad.
You will not be able to retarget customers who visited your website after watching your commercial on the television. This can be done on social media because you can track your audience and visitors. This gives you an understanding about them.
You can offer a discount or a promo to lure the customer to come back and finish the purchase. This will not be possible on any traditional channels.
As we know the cost of converting an existing visitor is up to 50% lower than the cost of conversion of the overall campaign. This can bring down the cost considerably.
Wide Reach
Over 3.4 billion people are using social media platforms and over 2.4 billion alone use Facebook. We know that your target audience will be smaller than that and you can effectively target and reach them.
The point here is, that your target audience will probably be there somewhere on social media and it s not very difficult to identify and market them. You will most likely find a sufficient size of target audience.
The cost of ads on digital channels is lower because it does not have many hassles that the traditional medium has such as distribution of newspaper or printing of magazines. The creative or content once prepared can be distributed on the platform in few clicks.
Organic Traffic
One of the advantages on social media is that you can have your own brand following. These are people who receive your content organically, which means it does not cost you anything.
When your account gets followers, your content is freely distributed to them, it will show in their feed without you paying anything. This varies from channel to channel. Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, they all have their own rules.
The other way of organic traffic is when people searching on the channel find you. Like in the case of Pinterest, Instagram and YouTube. This traffic comes to you organically, you do not have to pay anything for it to the social media channel.
This organic traffic that you get are your sort of free promotions and you do not pay anything for it. You can even show ads to people excluding your page followers. This brings down your cost drastically.
You get free traffic and you exclude them in your ads targeting thereby reducing unnecessary repetition.
Personalised Ads
Social media gives you the benefit of personalisation. We saw earlier how can we engage and interact with the audience. Similarly you can show personalised ads to different target audiences.
This helps in conversion and thereby reduces your cost of advertising.
For example: You were converting 10 people out of 100 earlier with your ads. Now with personalised targeted ads you were able to convert 20 out of the same 100. This increases your conversion and thereby your overall per head cost goes down.
This is how advertising on social media is relatively cost effective compared to traditional channels of advertising.
If you are doing social media marketing or thinking to do social media marketing yourself. Then our book is meant for you.
It covers everything you need to know from choosing the right channel to business features, platform demographics and making a strategy with examples. A complete package for you – Available on Amazon.
10. Improves Brand Recognition and Retention
Social media is a place where the mindset of the people is that they are open to new things and are looking for what’s going on and around. In such cases they are likely to engage with brand content.
When a customer interacts or engages with the content, they are likely to remember it during their purchase.
This completely depends on the level engagement. Your video or article, was able to inspire them or hold their attention and add value to them. These things count a lot. How are your creatives engaging and the frequency at which they engage with your customers.
It leaves an impact on the mind of the customer and therefore they remember it. For you as a brand it is important that you are consistent with your content as your competitors are also trying the same thing.
Let’s take a scenario to explain it further. If a new customer or lead finds your business profile on social media. They have never heard of you before. Therefore, using your social media content, they will be able to know more about you and the value you provide.
After that, they are more likely to recognise and recall your brand when they want to purchase because they have interacted with your brand through your content on social media.
It is the same case with existing customers also.
11. Build your Brand Loyalty
Social media is not only to showcase your products or services. It also can be used to showcase your brand values, raise awareness about your brand and what does your brand stand for. There are many such angles to this.
Customers or users follow brand pages and not a particular product. It is an opportunity for you to showcase what is your brand. You can build a brand image and that resonates with your followers or customers.
This instils confidence among the customers that the brand is trustworthy. It helps in building loyal customers and influence other customers.
12. Competitor is on Social Media
Yes, it is very likely that your competitor is also on social media. Irrespective of the target audience or the industry you belong to, there is a fair chance that your competitor could be using social media platforms to expand and better the brand footprint.
Your competitor is also trying to build its brand loyalty and woo other customers into its umbrella. Well, you are not going to be the only one trying to do that.
To sustain the race, it important you build a strong presence. Showcase as much as you can about your brand personality and better its image. Interactive and engaging content, new creatives and offerings will help you keep pace or bypass the competition.
13. Lead Generation
The idea of doing social media marketing is to better the brand footprint and get new leads/customers. We have discussed this already and why bring it here ?
If that is your question, you are right. We have all along earlier discussed how you can do that, by content engagement and interaction. There is one more thing to it. You can also use the social media marketing platform. They have campaigns designed for lead generation.
Your content or ad can direct the audience to a form or page where they can show their interest over the product or service or idea. You can request your contact information and there it is, a hot lead in your basket.
Earlier you had the social media profile id of the customer and you were limited to reach him/her on the platform only. This will enable you to reach the customer directly over their phone, email etc. Thus, giving you the complete control.
If you are doing social media marketing or thinking to do social media marketing yourself. Then our book is meant for you.
It covers everything you need to know from choosing the right channel to business features, platform demographics and making a strategy with examples. A complete package for you – Available on Amazon.
It is important to know how social media can benefit your brand but there are also things which you should be aware of. Which platform to choose ? What to do and what not to do on social media ? How to make a social media strategy ?
These questions coming to your mind, check out our blogs in this series of Social Media Marketing
We, at Leotics Consulting LLP help our clients to gain the best out of social media for their business. If you want to do anything on Digital, we are there for you. We provide innovative solutions, strategies to help you meet your business goals.
You can check out our digital marketing services by clicking here.
Apart from Digital Marketing, we have multiple other services which helps businesses to grow.
Our services are of
- Analytics
- Consulting
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You can check out all our services by clicking here.
To know more about Leotics Consulting LLP, you can check out our about us page.
