What is the Importance of Social Media Marketing?

With the progression of digital technologies, do we know what the true importance of social media marketing is? Using social media in your strategy can have many benefits for marketers. Having an online presence maintains a strong relationship with your audience. 

You may be a marketer with a small online presence wondering how social media can benefit your brand. Here are your answers!

1. Connect With Your Audience

Where many traditional marketing methods provide one-way communication, social media is a two-way street. It allows marketers to connect with their audience through interaction and engagement. Additionally, interaction can improve brand loyalty, allowing you to build stronger customer relationships. This can be done by posting valuable and informative content. 

Moreover, it allows you to learn more about audience. What engages them the most online? And how do they feel about a particular product or service? Through interacting with them, you can know your audience inside and out. Use this to your advantage by altering aspects like your products, services or content in the future to better suit your followers.

2. Increase Brand Awareness and Recognition

The importance of social media marketing includes improving brand recognition and visibility. Share content and your message on social media to show your brand’s personality and make it more familiar to your audience. Furthermore, those who know little about you can learn a lot by browsing through your social media channels. Through sharing content about specific topics, it informs your audience what your brand stands for. Becoming familiar with your messages and ethos would be difficult for new audiences without an online presence!

3. Cost-Effectiveness

Ensuring that your marketing is cost-effective is crucial for marketers who have a tight budget. A benefit of using social media is that it’s not too expensive, especially when using organic social! Organic social can be beneficial for your brand as you aren't using paid promotion. Organic social means that your posts will be shown to those that follow you. Alternatively, you can also use paid social, where you pay a fee to boost your reach and engagement. This method is still relatively cheap compared to alternative marketing methods. It also allows your posts to reach users who do not follow you. 

4. Target Certain Audiences

Choosing a specific audience and targeting them is a must for any brand. We recommend conducting marketing research to find out more about your audience and then post accordingly.  What content do they want to see? What tone of voice should you be using? And, what times are they online? These are all questions you should be asking when using social media marketing to target your brand’s audience specifically. 

Lookalike targeting is a simple and effective way of targeting specific audiences online. Lookalike audiences share the behaviours and characteristics of your current audience. You can then focus your Facebook Ads on a particular audience that are likely to interact with your brand.

5. Increase Website Traffic

Utilising social media and having strong links with your website is excellent for website traffic. Ensure that you include your website’s link on your social media profiles. You can also use social media to share elements of your website, such as your blog. By making this content easy to share on social media, it will drive more people to your site.

Additionally, we recommend having a call-to-action on your social media posts. By encouraging your audience to ‘click here', ‘read more’ or ‘visit our site’, it is likely to make users act. In result, hopefully carrying out these steps will improve the traffic flow to your website; a benefit of marketers using social media.

6. To Remain Competitive

If you have little or no presence on social media, you are giving your competitors the upper hand. No matter who your target market is, you should be connecting with your audience and target specific demographics using social media to remain competitive.

We hope we provided you with a better understanding of the benefits of social media. While it can be challenging to be consistent and active on social media, it is vital to reach your audience. If you're a marketer currently with a small online presence, we hope this blog encourages you to dedicate some more time to growing your presence. It really will be worth it!

Written by Emily Ralphs