What is Social Media Marketing?
The Benefits of Social Media Marketing to Your Business
Connecting to your Customers with Brand Awareness, Brand Authority, and Brand Loyalty
Social media is a good resource to express your brand identity and increase your brand awareness. Brand identity is the mission, values, voice, tone, and visual appeal of your business. It connects you to your audience and delivers your messages in the manner you wish them to see. The different elements of your brand identity make your brand stand out and people start to recognize your brand more often. This recognition is brand awareness, so building a strong brand identity is key to building strong brand awareness on social media. Sharing curated content from other leaders in your industry is another good way to build brand awareness. It helps support your own thoughts and shows people your business stays updated with current market trends. Strong brand awareness gets your messages heard across a very large audience, even to those who don’t quite know who or what your brand represents. Your brand awareness is what gives them the interest to look in to your business.
Once you have developed a good reputation and strong brand awareness, your company gains more trust from your audience on your social media channels. Using this trust, you are able to demonstrate your expertise through your own content, developing your business in to an informative and credible thought leader, gaining even more trust. This trust in your brand is brand authority. Strong brand authority presents you as a leader in your industry and your content is shared more frequently, further spreading your brand authority to a larger audience. You may even get extra media attention because of your brand authority. This is the point where your business can get the massive exposure you want as a business owner, but don’t get overwhelmed. Remember, stay consistent with your brand identity and keep posting quality information. The stronger your brand authority, the more likely you will convert leads in to sales.
Now that you have solidified your brand authority and earned people’s trust in your brand, you have to keep that trust. Customer reward programs, interacting with your customers, and responding to their feedback or concerns are examples that show your business cares about their customers. From this positive treatment, customers develop a stronger bond with your brand and that bond is brand loyalty. Through brand loyalty, your customers will choose your products or services over your competitors because they know and trust your business will deliver a positive experience. For example, Apple has a huge following of brand loyal customers that will only buy Apple products compared to their competitors, even if the Apple products are a lot more expensive. These customers have had many positive experiences with this brand and those experiences made them loyal to that brand.
Creating a social media content strategy plan at the start of your social media marketing makes your brand awareness, authority, and loyalty easier to accomplish. You have your identity and direction established at the beginning to run the most efficient campaigns. These three goals of social media marketing play a huge role in creating inbound traffic, guiding people through the sales funnel, and keeping these consumers as long-term loyal customers. The benefits of brand awareness, authority, and loyalty from social media are colossal to your business. It’s the area where you can give your leads and customers the experience you want them to expect from your company anywhere, at any time.
Choose Social Media Marketing for More Cost-Effective Leads and Sales
Social media marketing is effective for businesses because of the amount of people they can reach on social media, but the low cost to reach these people is unbelievable. Paid advertising on the different social media platforms makes it easier to get your messages in front of your target audience with a small budget. In comparison with other traditional advertising methods, you can see the huge advantages of social media marketing. The CPM for direct mail is as high as $57, newspapers and magazines are $16, radio is $10, billboards are $5, and, as stated earlier, the CPM for social media is as low as $2.50 (lyfemarketing.com). If you only converted 0.5% of those 1,000 impressions, you are still only paying $2.50 for five more customers! Even compared to Google AdWords, social media marketing is “...as little as $0.12 per click. At the low end, that’s ten times more traffic per dollar than you get from AdWords” (contentfac.com). That is an incredible ROI and gives small businesses an even ground to market themselves alongside all other competitors, including corporations. Now, it doesn’t mean they have as many resources as corporations, but it does give them an opportunity to get their brand widely noticed without needing a corporate sized marketing budget.
With a strong social media content strategy plan in action, you can guide an enormous amount of leads through the buyer’s journey. Your brand awareness, authority, and loyalty also play big roles in the buyer’s journey, while retaining customers and delivering positive experiences. People share posts about these experiences with your company as customer reviews and these reviews can greatly influence a buyer’s decision to purchase your products or services. According to lyfemarketing.com, “72% of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations from real people” and “90% of consumers say that positive online reviews influence their buying decisions.” Consumers trust online reviews to the point that “68% of consumers go to social networking sites to read product reviews” (lyfemarketing.com). In short, the more positive reviews your company has the more leads you turn in to customers. However, negative reviews always present a chance for you to highlight your customer service. You can address and solve issues publicly online or move issues that are more serious to a private conversation after publicly apologizing for their poor experience. This shows people that your company is willing to listen to its customers and continue to deliver a positive experience. All of these factors contribute to your company acquiring leads, converting those leads into customers, and keeping those customers as loyal, repeat clients.
As this article comes to a close, I wanted to point out a few more benefits of social media marketing that I feel are worth mentioning. The first one is improving your SEO (Search Engine Optimization). The different social media platforms have very high-ranking domain authority you can use to your benefit. When your social media accounts are active with relevant, keyworded information to your brand, search engines recognize this. Therefore, when someone performs a search with those keywords, your social media accounts appear on the front page of the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) because of the platforms’ strong domain authority. Your social media accounts are just as important as your website to represent your company, so make sure to optimize them.
The second benefit is your competition is on social media. You have access to all of their content to monitor their brand identity, marketing campaigns, following etc. This allows you to create unique content that stands out in front of theirs and jump on any opportunities to make their customers yours by exploiting their weaknesses. Make sure to monitor your closest competition to keep yourself ahead.
Last but not least, social media marketing is fun! Interacting and sharing with friends is entertaining, especially when you start reaping the rewards for your work. Having strong brand identity, awareness, authority, loyalty, and a social media content strategy plan in action is key for success. Take your time developing your social media marketing plan to properly prepare each piece and launch a solid marketing plan from the start!
Resources
https://www.lyfemarketing.com/blog/marketing-through-social-media/
