Social media has become the backbone of marketing. It is no hidden fact now that social media is one of the best marketing techniques used most often by marketing professionals.
According to the reports, “It is anticipated that by 2024, the industry for social media advertising will have spent US$219.8 billion on ads.” As a result, this number shows the growing ads in social media, also how social media is becoming the major marketing tool for creating brand value.
Now, let’s understand, what is the role of social media in marketing and how it can help you create brand value. And as marketing professionals what are the techniques that you can use to build a brand with the help of social media marketing?
These blogs will provide you with a proper guide and information on social media marketing, that even a beginner can use for their start-ups…
Why Social Media Matters for Your Brand:
Social media has become an important part of brand recognition and customer engagement.
Indeed, it’s a fact that some of the brands started on social media platforms and became popular through social media, and another shocking fact is that most of the brands generate major revenue from social media itself.
Now, let’s take a broader picture of it and discuss why brands give importance to social media. Why does it matter to them? And as marketing professionals why you should focus on social media marketing…
Reach and visibility:
Let’s go back to the 90s and see what it looks like, the world without social media.
Companies had limited customer access, and it took a lot of work to reach customers in different cities, states, or countries. Furthermore, there was one major medium newspaper that was used as a marketing tool during that era. Even that has some limitations.
But, now thanks to social media, it has become a matter of a few taps to reach a large number of audience.
The first and foremost advantage of social media platforms is that there is a large chunk of the audience available from different states to countries.
According to reports, “4.8 billion people use social media globally, accounting for 59.9% of the total population.”
In addition, if your target audience is sitting in a small town in a different country, you can also reach out to them through the help of social media. As a result, the visibility of your product, service, and brand will not be limited to one state or country. It can go beyond that.
Brand awareness and recognition:
Brand recognition by customers is the first step in the customer journey towards sales. In addition, reaching out to a large chunk of the audience can help you to increase brand awareness and recognition. As a result, when more customers know about your brand they will start looking into the products and services also, which will lead to customer engagement.
Customer engagement and community building:
By using storytelling techniques in social media one can increase engagement among their customers. In addition, social media platforms allow you to interact with your customers who might be sitting anywhere, you can hear their needs, wants, and build a relationship, and foster a loyal customer base.
Furthermore, some brands also build their community over social media which helps them to promote their products, and engage with their target customer easily.
Increase website traffic and sales:
Social media platforms are also used to promote blogs, services, and products that are available on your website. For instance, e-commerce brands use social media to get traffic into their e-commerce store, which eventually leads to an increase in sales.
Improved customer service and feedback:
Nowadays, social media platforms are used by brands to improve their customer services and get feedback from the customer. Social media allows two-way communication, which helps brands to hear customer queries, provide customer services, and get feedback on the same.
As a result, there are two main advantages of using social media platforms for providing customer service. Firstly, it will reduce the cost of setting up customer service centers offline. Secondly, the brands that improve customer service and get feedback from customers will lead to a competitive advantage.
Mastering the social media landscape: How businesses and brands can use social media?
There are plenty of social media platforms available and several audiences too. But as marketing professionals, you need to make sure before doing social media marketing you are reaching the right people, pitching the right product, and creating the right content, which can help you get results in your social media marketing.
Now, let’s look at the steps to consider while doing social media marketing…
#1. Identify your target audience:
Most of the companies don’t even know about their target audience. According to the research of Hubspot, “only 31% of marketers fully understand the online communities their target audience frequents, limiting their reach and engagement potential.”
As a result, the first and foremost step is to identify your target audience or define your target audience, based on your product and service.
In order to build a brand it’s important to reach out and pitch to the right people who might be your potential customers. One can define their target audience based on age, group, gender, and other parameters.
#2. Choose the right social media platform:
Once you identify your target audience, the second step is to choose the right social media platforms where there is a presence of your target audience.
As a result, if your brand has a presence in the same platform where your target audience is then the chance is more than likely to get noticed by your customer and spread awareness of your product or service.
#3. Creating a high-quality content:
Most companies fail to create good-quality content. And of the bad practices used in marketing is misleading information spread to the customer for products and services. That defeats the purpose of creating brand value. Because brands are built on trust and authenticity.
As a result, creating high-quality content with proper information that resonates with your target audience can help you increase engagement with your customers, which eventually leads to more sales.
#4. Maintaining consistency:
No matter what steps or techniques you follow, having consistency is important to get results. Because building brand value in social media marketing is not a matter of a few days, it’s a matter of years. However, you also need to keep constantly track of your performance and improve your strategy based on that.
#5 AI for social media marketing: Utilizing AI in tracking and analyzing performance:
Utilizing AI for social media marketing can help you foster your growth and achieve your marketing goals. Furthermore, artificial intelligence can help you predict trends by analyzing the data of your marketing campaigns in social media.
As a result, that will help you to make informed decisions for your social media marketing and change your marketing strategy over a period of time with the help of data analytics using AI.
#6. Stay up to date with trends:
Social media marketing involves constantly changing trends, as a marketer you need to stay up to date with the trends and create content accordingly.
Furthermore, creating content that aligns with trends, can help you reach more people over a social media platform. However, as a content creator, you also need to keep in mind. How do you relate the social media trends with your brand?
If that is very clear to you then let’s sum up what we have learned so far. And what does the future of social media look like?
Winding-up: The Future of Social Media Marketing
Although, the future of social media seems to be bright, having said that. The consumption of short content in social media is much more than large content. In addition, the growing importance of authenticity and transparency in social media is something that as a marketing professional you have to keep adopting.
However, artificial intelligence in social media marketing is also one of the major trends in social media marketing. So as a marketing professional you need to start exploring different AI tools that can help you define strategy for social media as well as track and do predictive analytics of your marketing campaigns.
