Economic Dimension of Social Media Marketing
What is Social Media Marketing?
Social Media Marketing provides businesses the opportunity to leverage the power of social media platforms to connect with their audience.
By publishing great content on their social media profiles, engaging with their followers on a regular basis and running social media campaigns, businesses can raise awareness, build their brand, drive traffic to their website and ultimately convert website visitors to customers.
The current major social media platforms are Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, WhatsApp, Youtube, Reddit, Pinterest and LinkedIn.
The Benefits of Businesses Using Social Medial Marketing:
- Ability to Reach Large Targeted Audiences
With millions of people using social media platforms. Businesses can reach a targeted pool of people that are interested in their products or services. For example, an auto repair workshop in Dubai could use social media to reach locals residents. They could target users within a certain radius or location when creating social ads. This could help bring customers to the workshop very cheaply.
- Connect Directly With Customers
The power of Social Media Marketing is that it allows businesses to connect directly with their audience. People who are interested in a business choose to follow their social media profiles. This allows businesses a very powerful means of communicating with their audience. They can get to know them better by engaging with them and providing content personalised to their interests. This results in more engagement on their page and with their business. Businesses can analyse the engagement on their page to identify how their business is perceived, what customers want and what areas the business needs to improve on. They can also use the business page to communicate directly with their customers and provide 1-on-1 contact for any issues or questions the customer may have.
“If you make customers unhappy in the physical world, they might each tell 6 friends. If you make customers unhappy on the Internet, they can each tell 6,000 friends.” – Jeff Bezos
- Brand Equity
Building a brand has become a lot easier for small businesses and start-ups. By posting interesting and relevant content regularly on social platforms, businesses can increase exposure of their brand and promote brand loyalty with their audience. The more people get exposed to a business, the more they become familiar with it. Brand familiarity ultimately leads to more sales because people tend to buy from brands they recognise and trust. More than 50% of Americans are loyal to brands that they follow on social media.
Social media facilitates brand building by enabling people to share, retweet, and re-pin content on these platforms. When loyal followers share content with their friends and family, businesses get more exposure to their brand.
“You need to develop a tribe of loyal followers and super fans who want to hear what you have to say.” – Michael Hyatt
- Competitive Analysis
Businesses can keep an eye on their competitors by monitoring their social media presence. They can look at how their competitors interact with their audience, the type of content they post, how often they post, what ads they are running, level of engagement on their pages and various other competitor analysis information. Social media is an excellent way of scoping out a niche and identifying ways to become an authority in that niche.
- Increased Sales and Leads
Social media is a great inbound marketing tool that can be leveraged to collect leads, retarget website visitors and build an email list. With the correct social media marketing strategy, advertising can help increase sales. A loyal audience will respond to sales messaging and convert.
“Random social media tactics lead to random results. You need a strategy.” – Stephanie Sammons
(Source: https://beeketing.com/blog/gymshark-growth-story/)
Breakdown of Social Media traffic for Gymshark:
(Source: https://beeketing.com/blog/gymshark-growth-story/)
Social Media Insight from the Industry Experts:
The content your audience creates is invaluable to your brand, according to Kristi Kellogg, CEO, and Founder, Dazzling Digital.
“Your customers (and potential customers) find content posted by their peers far more influential, trustworthy, and compelling than the content a brand creates itself,” Kellogg said.
She said every brand can take three steps in 2020 to get more user-generated content (UGC) and earn more social proof:
- Encourage your audience to tag your brand in social posts by always reposting and/or featuring that UGC.
- Comment and interact with your audience regularly.
- Run contests that drive UGC.
(Source: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/2020-social-media-trends/342851/#close )
Emma Franks, Sr. Paid Social Account Manager, Hanapin Marketing, believes diversification in advertising will be a primary trend in social media.
“Facebook is no longer the one-stop-shop it used to be. Younger demographics are favouring the sister platform of Instagram, as well as TikTok and Snapchat,” Franks said. “Every ‘early-mover’ advertiser who embraces smaller networks now (e.g., Twitter, Quora, Reddit, Snapchat) will enjoy an environment of relatively low cost due to lower levels of competition.”
(Source: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/2020-social-media-trends/342851/#close )