What is the importance of social media marketing for businesses?

These days, it is hard to find a brand that isn’t active on social media. Social media marketing is essentially a clever mix of strategy as well as creativity. The importance of social media in business extends beyond just increase in sales. It helps in engaging the community and target audience by creating brand awareness, visibility, customer satisfaction and provides a more approachable channel to the brand/company.

Here are the key advantages of social media marketing that businesses of all sizes can benefit from –

1. Advanced Targeting

Through advanced targeted search and applying the required filters, a brand can reach out to their desired audience based on their profiles, likes and dislikes, demographics (age, location, income bracket, etc.) and what their interests are. Effective social media campaigns that target the exact customer base enables a brand to further establish its position in the market and also ensure an increase in sales.

2. Brand Awareness

Social Media allows you to connect and market your brand to over 1000 consumers around the world at once. There are no limits in terms of demographic, location, type of customer and this platform is a great way to inform your customers about the brand’s story, ideologies, offerings and even about ongoing discounts and promotions.

3. Unbiased Reviews

Consumers all over the world are more vocal about their opinions on online platforms these days. They will not hesitate to share their love and hate for a brand, product or service these days through their social media profiles. This allows the provision of collecting honest feedback and reviews and brands can benefit from this by improving their product or service accordingly. It also allows for real-time rectifications of any problems a customer faces thereby increasing customer satisfaction.

4. Building a Community

Social Media allows a brand to create a strong customer database and brand advocates through impactful and successful social media campaigns. Here is where brands also take advantage of social media influencer marketing. It has been a buzz word for a while now but this way of marketing wherein endorsements and product mentions from influencers, who are essentially who have a loyal social following and are considered experts in their respective fields, has been proven to be very effective and have a higher ROI. Due to the high amount of trust that these influencers have built amongst their followers, their recommendations are taken very seriously.

5. Reduced Advertising Costs

The various social media networking sites give marketeers the opportunities to be laser focused with their advertising budgets and target the right audience with minimum spend. The return on investment will also be higher because it can be done cheaper and faster than traditional media. There have been cases wherein Facebook ad campaigns have proven to be cheaper as well as reach a wider audience than billboards.

6. Uncovering Industry Trends

Due to the transparent nature of social media, businesses get the opportunity to to see real-time conversations between consumers and brands. A brand can easily see what its competitors are upto and what consumers are liking or disliking about their product/service. Also, keeping a check on the target audience’s activity gives an insight into potential social influencers as well as trends that are all-the-rage.