This is a guest article written by Sophia Young who recently quit a non-writing job to tell stories and paint the world through her words. Sophia writes about business trends, sustainable marketing, travel and fashion.
Article Contents
Estimated reading time: 7 minutes
Social media is at the forefront of modern marketing. Every business benefits greatly from a social media account guiding its brand, no matter what niche the business might be.
That is exactly why learning how to integrate social media into your online marketing strategies should be one of your top priorities, especially for startups.
The best form of marketing has always been through brand awareness. There’s no better way to keep your product in people’s minds than having them associate a product with your name. Social media is one of the best places to do that.
A social media presence provides the potential of virality plus an easy-to-find page for potential customers. Not to mention, the page itself is basically an interactive advertisement. There are links to your site, galleries for your products, and other handy information that’s accessible with the click of a button.
Clients value convenience very highly, and social media is one of the most convenient ways they can communicate with your business.
Social media is a very easy way to humanise your brand and help your clients share their queries and engage with your brand. Social media can lend an air of authenticity to your brand that is hard to replicate with other marketing strategies. Plus, it’s also a great platform for additional customer service, especially on sites such as Facebook which have built-in business programs.
Social media is one of the newest platforms for online marketing, and it is ripe for trendsetting opportunities. Carefully study social media trends to see how you can best replicate their success. The core of a good social media team is consistently high engagement through likes and comments. Once clients start to look to you for new ideas, your social media page will be where they look towards.
Social media is already a “mini-website” in itself, but for certain businesses, having your own primary website is still preferable. Thankfully, it’s very easy to integrate links to your website in your social media posts.
For example, if you have a product on sale, it’s easy to promote it on social media with an affiliate link directly leading to your website. That way, both your social media page and website gain more traffic from customers, increasing both your brand and your sales.
Brand ambassadors are influences on social media who advertise your product by using them in their own videos. For fashion and tech businesses, in particular, this has proven an incredibly effective tactic to generate hype for new products and other promotions. People are more likely to buy products that are used by content creators they admire. Social media is the best place to find brand ambassadors and also the best place to host their content.
Social media is a low-management way to generate leads for your business. Many potential clients can be reached by them simply seeing one of your social media posts. These leads can further be capitalised on in certain social media through paid promotions.
For example, Facebook offers to increase your brand’s reach for a small daily fee by promoting your posts more frequently in the marketplace. To that end, social media is the only platform that can provide leads easily and cost-effectively.
It is inevitable in any businesses’ life that they have to deal with a sudden crisis that could severely affect their reputation. Addressing people’s issues quickly on a public platform shows customers that your business is listening and is doing its best to ensure each customer gets the services they need.
Additionally, it lets your brand’s social media team immediately send out messages to the customers before rumours or other negative news overtakes the spotlight.
Social media is an incredibly useful pool of data to gain insight into what your customers want. The presence of things such as likes, views and comments being built right into the site means it’s much easier to track what products and services are working and which need attention. This will help brand new product launches have a higher chance of finding success. The information gained from the customer feedback is very beneficial to pitching new products.
Social media is one of the best tools in a modern marketing team’s arsenal. There are so many ways that social media can help your business grow past the methods talked about here. However, the methods above are the foundation of a successful social media account. They are what enables you to do even more amazing things with your brand in the future.
However, don’t underestimate the efforts it will take to make your business successful on social media. It’s a platform that’s easy to use, but hard to master. Algorithms, viral online marketing and targeted advertising are some of the more complex things you can study to get the most out of your social media brand.
