There are benefits of social media marketing, having said that sometimes it’s quite hard to justify why you should spend that much time on it, or if you outsource it to justify spending that much money. Here are a some of the benefits which you can achieve by doing social media properly. Social media is a more open approach to marketing, yet more targeted. You’re not just shouting sell, sell, sell, instead you’re finding out the right people to target who you know will have an interest in what you’re saying and potentially engage with you.
Brand Recognition
One of the main things is being successful at making your brand a visible online community. You need to leave a long lasting affect on the people who visit your website and social media platforms. As social media is a form of visual marketing, you can implement so many different ways of marketing to your social strategy which will help with brand awareness. Here are some examples of the larger companies who are great at social media branding. There are some great tools out there to get your brand recognised in a unique way. If you want to make your brand more humanised, vibrant and fun, there’s no better place to do it than to use social media. Different tools allow you to give your company a different feel or look in order to engage with potential clients. If you were a potential client would you rather do business with a company who look and sound boring? Or would you rather look at a company who is willing to show you what they get up to in the office – like everyone laughing because someone brought cakes in and a picture of a meeting which went really well with people smiling etc.
Website Traffic via Social Referal
If a correct social media strategy is in place, you will have great content in place. If this content is great, then it will be fun, engaging, expertly written and most importantly keyword focussed. The whole point of social media are all these points contained within this article, but at the end of the day you’re looking at getting people from your social media platforms to your website and in turn, make a sale or enquiry. The only way you can do this is by having calls to action on social media and your website. Without these you won’t be able to get the most out of your campaign. So it’s vital to make sure you can generate website traffic from your social media efforts.
Ahead of the Game
These days social media for business is important because most companies are ‘doing it’. I did write in one of my other blogs that social media for business is a must as you don’t want to get left behind. Your competitors and their customers are on social media, if you’re not then how do you expect to compete? The benefit of being on social media is that you will be ahead of some who are refusing to take on social media as they don’t want to move forward, or are happy in old-school marketing strategies. It’s not at all to say that these old marketing methods don’t work anymore, it’s to say that you as a company should be keeping up with what’s changing and embrace the different things you can achieve from it in the long run. There is a chance that if you aren’t on social media, your competitor that is, will be getting the enquiries that you should be receiving.
Target Audience Engagement/Communications
At the end of the long journey full of blood, sweat and tweets, you want to have some sort of reward for all your efforts. Return on investment is often discussed in social media about whether it can actually generate a profit for your company, the real answer is, yes it can if you integrate it with your other marketing areas, i.e traditional marketing methods, SEO and content marketing. Although target audience engagement isn’t and shouldn’t be a company’s primary focus, it should be a part of the process when completing the campaign. You are much more targeted when you’re marketing via social media. It offers a sense of openess about your company that you’re willing to not shout about and interrupt people when they don’t want to know about your new product launch, when in fact all you’re doing is giving them a choice!
Different Way of Selling
Not only that, with the use of social media it’s not just your typical standard marketing methods where all you’re doing its walking around with ‘SELLING’ tattooed on your forehead where everyone is avoiding you at all costs, it’s more about offering your advice on the services within your industry, solve common problems and to let the reader trust that they can use your services. It’s a softer approach to the traditional methods where more than half the people you speak to aren’t in the slightest interested in what you’ve got to say.
