Businesses when creating their marketing strategy should include social media as part of their plan, our blog post will look at the many benefits for businesses using social media marketing.
A study found users spend an average of 2 hours and 25 minutes on social channels every day, therefore social media is a great way to reach your target audience in a space they interact with on a regular basis.
Social media gives the ability to directly build a deeper relationship with your target audience, so much so it can create brand advocates. To do this, a social media marketing plan should expand further than purely to create content, it is important to also engage regularly with your followers and customers.
We will look at this in more depth and the different benefits to businesses increasing social media presence in our blog post, along with providing social media tips.
Gemma Finch
Social Media & Paid Ad Specialist at 1PCS Creative. Love engaging and impactful social content, family time with my little girl and helping companies grow and build their presence online.
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Research
When creating a social media marketing strategy having a full understanding of your target audience, competitors and industry trends on social media as a first port of call will help with planning the digital marketing plan.
As part of our social media marketing tips, it is beneficial to analysis your competitors to identify what is working well and not so well for them. Along with noting which social media networks they are posting on, this will help identify which social media platforms your target audience are likely to be using.
Industry wide research of other businesses is useful too to take inspiration from social posts and their social media approaches on each social media platform which could fit and be adapted for your business.
Brand Identity
For a successful social media strategy whether a small business or large business, it is important from the offset to ensure the brand identity is clear so everyone involved in the social media marketing is in agreement on the same message and approach for the business.
For example this would include the tone of voice, personality, company culture and focuses for the brand which you want to use on social media platforms.
A study found, 81% of people use Instagram to research products and services. Having a consistent voice and style of posts across the content calendar on each social media platform is important to help build the right brand identity for the business. With the aim to stand out ahead of your competitors when potential customers are doing their research.
As part of this, it will help to identify the right major platforms to focus on. For example with the research above on your audience and your business could mean best suited to video content or visual content, which may lead to a focus on a visual platform such as Instagram and posting on a Facebook business page.
Brand Awareness
Looking at the benefits for businesses to use social media channels as part of their digital marketing strategy, firstly is the ability to increase brand awareness. A study found there are nearly twice as many active social media users as there was five years ago in 2017, taking the current total to 4.2 billion active social media users.
Businesses are seeing the benefit to utilising popular social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn. With so many users being active on most social media platforms regularly, it gives businesses who post quality content and engage with their audience increased brand awareness on each social network.
By achieving increased brand awareness over time this can lead onto enquiries and sales being made as a result of your social media marketing strategy. These could be customers that would have been costly to reach through other marketing efforts such as local print advertising.
Social Media Advertising
An impactful way to reach your target audience and new customers is through social media advertising. Social media campaigns can be fine tuned to target potential customers and new audiences who specifically have the right demographics and interests for your business, with a high intent to purchase.
It can allow even small businesses to reach a huge audience they may not have otherwise been able to. Further building on their brand awareness, increase social media followers, drive website traffic and ultimately increase enquiries and conversions.
Ad campaigns are available across different social media channels, however to give some positive context on the impact it can have for a business. A study found that Facebook users on average every month click on 12 Facebook ads to learn more about that business. Showing the impact social media can have to potentially grow a business.
Relationship Building
A successful social media marketing strategy doesn’t purely come down to relevant content being planned into social media management tools to schedule social media posts. There is more involved to get the most from social media for businesses.
When time is taken to regularly engage with your audience it can help to build trust, strong relationships and create brand advocates, whilst also looking after reputation management.
This could include any negative comments received which are best tackled head on to resolve promptly and effectively. A customer complaint dealt with effectively can actually build trust and reassurance with your audience that you care about your customers and that customer support is important.
Relationship building on social media includes responding timely to any comments on posts and replying to questions sent on direct message. It is rare to have such an opportunity to build a customer relationship one on one through a marketing channel.
Taking that opportunity could give important learnings and valuable insights into what potential customers like and want from your business, to further build on your own strategy to continue to add value and insight for your followers.
Test and Improve
To maximise the potential social media brings for businesses, one of our social media marketing tips would be the importance of using social media analytics for each business account.
Reviewing regularly the social media content calendar and social media accounts to see what has been having the best impact for each professional network. Such as your Facebook page, Instagram, LinkedIn or Twitter or other social media platforms depending on which social platforms work best for your business.
Regularly conducting tests and reviewing social media analytics will give valuable insights on each social platform to make improvements to your social channels. This could include adjusting the time and day schedule posts in your social media calendar to the preferred time for your audience on each social media site from the findings.
The social media marketing strategy may need improving to include more relevant content to create enough impact. The aim should be to stop the scroll effect on each social media platform to deliver the best results for your business.
The higher the engagement and shares on multiple platforms due to impactful content, the more this will benefit the reach for your content to be seen by a larger audience, further building on the brand awareness and success.
We hope our blog post was useful to understand some of the benefits to using social media for businesses. When a social media marketing strategy is delivered successfully it can lead to increased brand awareness, strong customer relationships across each social media network and ultimately increased enquiries and sales.
At 1PCS Creative we provide social media management which takes care of creating the social media marketing strategy including creating compelling content, scheduling posts, interacting and responding to followers.
Along with providing regular reporting to continuously analyse and improve the social media content. Please feel free to get in touch to discuss further how we can help your business.