For most successful businesses seeking new consumers and a larger audience, social media marketing is a must, especially if you want to do viral marketing, too.
However, social media marketing is not just about running a Facebook ad campaign and tweeting about your items every now and then. With the appropriate approach, social media marketing can bring you more than simply more visitors and sales.
We’ll go over 14 lesser-known advantages of social media marketing for business owners in this article. We’ll also go through four potential negatives so you can confidently enter the world of social media for business and decide whether now is the perfect time for your company to launch its own social media plan.
Immediate Business Benefits of Social Media Marketing
Create Customer-Generated Content with Ease
Customers can easily spread the word about your brand and generate plenty of free marketing material via social media channels. Users recorded videos of them using the pink goods for a range of domestic cleaning activities, and the popular cleaning brand “The Pink Stuff” became a sensation on TikTok and even landed a spot on Amazon’s Internet Famous page.
The Pink Stuff’s unique look and multipurpose use allowed for free advertising on social media, but any brand can use social media platforms like Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, and Facebook to encourage, engage with, and share user-generated content from happy customers while saving money on marketing costs.
Identify and nurture additional top-of-funnel leads
One of the key aims of any B2B marketer is to generate leads, and social media may help firms locate and nurture more top-funnel leads more efficiently. Platforms like LinkedIn offer a fantastic way to meet potential consumers in a professional atmosphere, while Twitter’s lead generation cards make it simple for people to fill out forms with just one click.
B2B marketers aren’t the only ones who benefit from lead creation via social media marketing: People might be encouraged to sign up for loyalty programs, newsletters, or special events through social media platforms. These audience lists are highly valuable for any successful marketing plan in the era of first-party data and can help you target future ads more effectively.
Keep an eye on and analyze your competitors
Competitor analysis can benefit your company in a number of ways: You might discover that one of your rivals is employing a social media marketing plan that you hadn’t considered, decide to target a different demographic from the one being targeted by another company, or even steal an idea or two for upcoming content marketing or organic postings.
The Long-Term Advantages of a Social Media Marketing Strategy
It gives your brand a stronger and more distinct personality
Brands may use social media marketing to showcase their personalities and engage with clients on a more personal way. Companies can increase customer loyalty and trust by connecting directly with them via social media feeds that are tailored to each platform.
For huge firms and even individual experts, the personality component of social media sites for businesses is real. On TikTok, for example, both RyanAir and Lawyer Mike Mandrell have large followings. RyanAir’s content ideas reflect the brand’s laid-back personality by jumping on patterns and displaying staff members having fun with them, whereas Mandrell, better known as “Law By Mike,” has built a loyal following on social media by providing legal advice and opinions on trending topics as well as updates on major ongoing lawsuits.
You Can Use Social Listening to Improve Your Marketing and Content
Analyzing conversations online to see what individuals are building brand awareness, services, or industry is known as social listening. This data can be utilized to enhance marketing campaigns and content, such as blog posts and website copy.
Setting up alerts for certain terms and phrases relating to your brand on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and other social media platforms is the ideal method to practice social listening. You may also use social media management tools to keep track of your brand’s mentions on the internet.
You could get feedback from ideal customers about how they feel regarding specific products or services, identify potential influencers who might be interested in collaborating with you on future campaigns, and find people who may have had a bad experience with a competitor in the past using social listening.
Your Target Audience Will Be Fine-Tuned (or Find New Ones)
Now that third-party data and cookies are on their way out, it’s more crucial than ever to get your hands on good data for audience targeting. You can establish who your existing and potential consumers are, what they’re interested in, and where they hang out online to increase interaction and drive traffic to your site or store by carefully analyzing data from your social media presence.
This data can be utilized to improve ad targeting on social media platforms as well as throughout your entire company. For example, you may discover that certain terms and phrases on Facebook appeal to a very narrow demographic, while others will only appeal to those who are interested in your sector or geographic location.
By conveying the proper message to the most responsive people possible, social media marketing can assist enhance conversion rates by refining your target audiences. It’s particularly effective for audience lookalikes and remarketing campaigns. Most of the time, your social media marketing effort will aid in the discovery of whole new consumers to whom you had not previously considered marketing.
Make the most of social media channels to improve your customer experience
Customers go through a customer journey when they connect with your brand, from learning about you and your products to making a purchase and becoming a devoted customer. A well-thought-out social media strategy can aid in the improvement of all stages of the customer journey as well as target people to increase website traffic and sales.
You may use social media to raise brand awareness by publishing useful material and updates, engaging with consumers who are interested in your products or services, and conducting giveaways to attract new followers, for example.
You can also use social media to improve customer engagement at all stages of the customer journey by hosting events such as live Q&A sessions, running contests for your followers, or conducting polls that provide useful feedback on new products and services that you can turn into actionable goals for your company.
Small and local businesses can benefit from social media.
Personalize and improve your customer service
Small and local businesses who want to deliver customer care promptly and affordably may find social media to be a lifesaver. You may solve issues before they become major problems by monitoring social media channels for negative feedback and complaints.
You may also use social media communication applications to allow clients to make appointments and reservations straight through the platform, as well as ask inquiries. The user’s convenience and simplicity of use are important components of social media for company, as they produce more sales and leads. Automated chatbot subscriptions can instantly answer and categorize leads from messaging apps in the thousands, with suppliers like ManyChat offering reasonable cost for local small businesses using Instagram and other popular channels if there are more clients than one employee can handle.
You can also use social media to individually respond to consumer complaints and concerns that would be complicated for your customer service personnel to handle via email, phone call, chat, or other means. In the otherwise impersonal environment, knowing what your clients want and demand from you on every channel allows you to give truly individualized service.
Participate in more authentic community engagement
Local companies can benefit greatly from participating in community groups and social media conversations. People frequently create private groups for locals only or based on interests on social media platforms like Facebook. Quora and Reddit, for example, offer several chances for participation in structured groups and hobbies, as well as geographic regions. When people see you and your employees active in community issues, it can boost your brand’s reputation. Because these people are unlikely to reach your website using search engines, having a presence on social media among them can help your company become more well-known.
Keep your participation in these organizations sincere and avert social media advertising – the goal of this type of engagement is to promote a product and notoriety, so you won’t want to use these areas for outright promotional posts and social ads unless you’ve been given explicit permission to do so. They can, however, be useful for general discussion, answering inquiries, or promoting a few of blog posts.
Be Recognized as a Leader in Key Communities and Groups (Online and Offline)
A good reputation is the best kind of advertising, especially for small firms. Consider using this to boost your brand authority by engaging in local events, charities, and helping other businesses or persons beyond social media participation once you’ve positioned yourself as a contributing figure in particular social media groups or communities.
The easier it is to convert leads into customers, the more involved and well-respected your business gets in the communities it engages in. Despite the fact that the majority of this involvement takes place offline, it gives enough of conversation and substance for positive social media postings. And that is a benefit that we can all support!
Gain access to low-cost (or even no-cost!) advertising
When compared to conventional advertising tactics, businesses reach their target audiences for mere pennies thanks to customized ads and boosted posts. Through Ads Manager and other social media advertising tools, you may create and track your own social media advertising and organic content, however getting used to all of the complex settings and setup options may take some time. If you’re running multiple campaigns at the same time or have a significant budget, hiring a digital advertising firm can help you reap the advantage of social media ads without the hassle.
It’s also usual for businesses to benefit from free word-of-mouth promotion when consumers generate and share content relating to certain brands and goods when they have a great social media strategy. Once they’ve perfected social media marketing, some small businesses don’t need to spend a dollar on marketing.
The Advantages of Social Media Marketing for Developing Businesses
Maintain Your Brand’s Individuality
Growing a business from a shop or website to a full-fledged company is a lengthy process, and keeping brand consistency is critical to a smooth transition. Even at scale, social media allows businesses to keep a human touch to their brand identity and sustain true contact with their fans.
Even huge firms, such as Wendy’s, routinely use social media sites like Twitter to respond to individual customers – generally playfully – which has helped establish the company’s personality over the last decade. Even when your audience increases from thousands to millions, all it takes is a dedicated social media manager to keep your brand’s distinctive tone and message.
Maintain Industry Relevance
A well-crafted and well-established social media presence can mean the difference between remaining relevant as a business and falling behind on trends, subjects, and public opinion. Regular posting and interaction with users on various social media platforms keeps your business in front of people’s minds, and they also serve as a free information hub on community, competitors, and your industry to ensure you’re always up to date.
Social media marketing data and trends can assist you in keeping your web content, social media, and messaging as relevant and current as possible. If your company deals with seasonally or fashion items, they may assist you come up with new themes to cover, keywords or hashtags to employ, and even new product lines. Making social media advertising a crucial element of your plan ensures that you’re always one step ahead of the game, no matter how fast your market or industry evolves.
Try out new social media marketing techniques and media campaigns safely (and affordably).
A company should never stop trying new marketing methods, although some of them can be highly expensive and don’t always work. As they continue to build and scale their corporate image and messaging, and make the transition from DIY to highly qualified, large-scale ad campaigns, growing firms in particular require lots of research and testing with their campaigns.
Social media has provided a very much safer and less expensive environment in which to test new ideas before implementing them across other marketing platforms. Helpful analytics capabilities track various metrics so that your team can successfully execute A/B testing, and innovative campaigns can be simply changed and scaled based on their performance. Your marketing plan will improve as your company grows if you can “dip your toes in the water” with diverse formats, priorities, copy, and creatives.
Potential Drawbacks & Important Considerations
Making the Most of Social Media Marketing Requires a Financial Investment
Because the advantages of digital marketing can’t be accomplished with a half-hearted effort, many of these statements used terms like “clever” or “committed” before “plan.” Each platform has its own demographic, interests, sense of humor, and other characteristics, and groups within social media platforms use their own hashtags, trends, and subjects.
This requires devoting a significant amount of effort to ensuring your company is properly represented in social media places, particularly if you or your members of the team aren’t actively engaged in these sites and aren’t aware of their digital world. Before creating any posts or employing a social media specialist that maintains himself and your company in the know on a professional level, it’s always a good idea to spend some time prowling around multiple devices and groups you want to have a footprint in.
Social media audiences are savvy and attentive to messaging errors
To stress the value of effort and research, it’s crucial to understand that social networking viewers respond strongly and negatively to businesses that enter their spaces in the wrong way – even if their only mistake was being a little behind on trends. Many users and communities are ad-averse and wary of companies on social media as a result of corporate marketing in the digital world; this means that as a business, you must take the necessary steps to ensure that what you’re posting and how you’re reaching out to your audiences is appropriate for your platform, communities, and label.
Furthermore, not all social media trends are appropriate for every business. Even if you use social media culture, trends, or slang correctly in your posts or campaigns, some aspects of social media culture, trends, or slang may reflect adversely on your business. The harm to your reputation may not be worth the fleeting attention of a trending tweet, and that attention may not come from your intended audience in the first place – a lesson that many firms attempting Twitter advertising have plainly failed to grasp.
Successful Social Media Strategies
A bad one, on the other hand, can backfire.
Our in-depth look at viral marketing methods delves deeper into these themes, but social media initiatives have just as much of a chance of backfiring as they do of succeeding. Sometimes it’s merely a “cringe” post in bad taste that gets buried quickly. Many businesses, on the other hand, become viral for all the wrong reasons, as millions of people laugh at their botched attempts to infiltrate social media channels.
Which do you think the typical social media user will remember more: the candidates for the 2018 US midterm elections or Wendy’s terrible “Like a Boss” commercial from 2018? These social media gaffes remain in people’s minds for a reason: out-of-touch or slightly “odd” marketing on social media is comparable to a company publicly admitting that they don’t understand its clients. People will make sure to disseminate the word in order to publicly humiliate a company that makes a mistake like this.
Because they have a more personal feel and touch, smaller businesses have a little more area for forgiveness and thus more wiggle room to make some social media mistakes. However, the bigger your company is, the more a terrible post or campaign might entirely backfire, and the less forgiveness you’ll get from the Internet if it does.
It’s a Long-Term Strategy to Use Social Media Marketing
There are certain social media wizards out there who can quickly develop a brand’s presence on a platform and start things moving. In general, however, the aforementioned social media marketing benefits should not be expected immediately. All of these advantages require a long-term approach that will take time and money to pay off. You can’t expect your business to grow overnight by sending one tweet or creating an Instagram post – it takes months, a lot of research, and ongoing participation with diverse communities on social networks to get the most out of each platform.
Furthermore, the success of social media marketing is difficult to assess. It’s similar to content marketing in that the best ways to assess performance aren’t always accurate figures, and relying solely on hard data to determine success (e.g., amount of likes and shares) can readily lead to incorrect conclusions. If you’re thinking about starting a business on social media this year or transferring your marketing focus to social media entirely, keep in mind that it’s more of a time commitment than anything else.
Conclusion
Businesses who want to increase brand awareness, create relationships with current or potential consumers, provide customer support, market products and services organically, and more can profit from social media. These 14 advantages are just the tip of the iceberg in terms of the return social media can provide businesses, but it’s also vital to remember the four major negatives of social media that we discussed before entering a new market as a brand. Any brand, large or small, anywhere in the world can benefit from social media marketing if they strike the appropriate balance of efforts, awareness, and authenticity.
If your company big enough, you’ll need the services of a digital marketing agency like Oregon Advertising for your social media marketing. Consider your budget and objectives when hiring digital specialists to maximize your Returns and reap the benefits of social media for businesses.