Social media marketing requires both strategy and creativity.
While it may seem overwhelming, its importance cannot be overstated. It’s so important that 97% of marketers are using social media and 78% of salespeople outsell their peers by using social media for their business.
Plus, its benefits extend far beyond increasing sales.
However, not all businesses are aware of the benefits of social media marketing. In fact, 50% of small businesses aren’t using social media to promote their business. That’s an alarming number. Even more concerning is that an additional 25% don’t plan to use social media in the future either.
Clearly, there is a disconnect between those who are seeing the benefits of social media and those struggling to get started.
If the latter sounds like you, keep reading. You’re about to learn how social media marketing can help build your business. Some of the benefits you’ll learn about include:
- Growing your brand awareness: Social media marketing will make it easy to spread the word about your products and mission.
- Increasing your traffic: Using social media and linking it to your website will increase your traffic tremendously.
- Promoting your products and services: This is ultimately why you invest in marketing, right?
Using Social Media To Grow Your Brand Awareness
1. Create Brand Recognition
Gaining brand recognition is one of any business’ most important marketing goals. That’s because consumers want to buy brands they recognize. Thankfully, social media allows for easy and effective brand building.
Social media has a benefit over traditional media because it can get your brand in front of people much more quickly and easily. Furthermore, it gets your audience looking at your brand even when they aren’t thinking about your brand or product.
Make sure the visual elements of your brand are well represented.
Take a look at Nike’s Twitter page. Nike keeps their Twitter profile neat and clean. They place their recognizable logo on both their profile image and cover photo without being overbearing.
The cover photo is especially effective because it connects the Nike logo to the idea of running.
2. Generate A Conversation Around Your Brand
A strong social media marketing strategy will generate conversation about your brand, products, and partners.
Take this example from PlayStation. A simple post saying congratulations to Naughty Dog (the company behind the new video game Uncharted 4) for its success generated feedback on the game.
In doing so, they received a great amount of feedback about their product. They also got people talking. Fans were having genuine conversations, all facilitated by social media.
3. Learn How To Connect With Your Audience Through Social Listening
Social listening is the act of monitoring social conversations around certain topics. It helps you understand what’s important to your audience and identify trends your target audience is following.
You’ll learn about what they’re struggling with, which can help you create content addressing those pain points.
You can also identify the tone and language that your target audience uses.
Take a look at Burger King on Twitter. They use the same slang that the younger audience on Twitter uses to represent themselves in a comedic fashion. If you’re unsure how to match the tone and style of your audience, social listening can help.
4. Tell Your Brand’s Story
Using social media is a great way to share your brand’s mission and share stories. Effective stories can have a great impact on your brand’s image. They can be simple or extensive depending on what you think will be most effective.
Take this Starbucks post for example. It simply tells the story of someone getting a job at a hiring fair, and it effectively helped their public image. It has only one image, but the story is impactful and clear.
5. Gather Data From Audience Research To Improve
Audience research is similar to social listening. It searches the keywords your audience will be using, but it’s more focused on your specific product. You can use social media to gather this information.
To view the insights on your Facebook page, simply go to the page that you are the admin of and they will be next to your cover photo. Twitter will have an option to view the insights of every tweet you post at the bottom of each tweet.
Fortunately, however, there are a large number of successful cases. We can always learn from the approach using them and that can be very useful to us to guarantee to carry out our software developments.