When Six Degrees was first created in 1997, people viewed it as a platform where you could just create a profile and start making friends. Two decades later, after the invention of the first blogging site in 1999, social media has become a platform not only for the young generation to meet friends and have fun but also a place where marketers can showcase their wares.

With such convincing numbers, it is not hard to see why social media marketing should be on top of any brand’s marketing strategy, for a chance at success in the marketplace of the 21st century. A well-thought-out SMM strategy coupled with the right tools has the power to boost the growth of your business towards its maximum potential.

The following are seven areas that your business can benefit as a result of implementing a social media marketing strategy.

Increased Brand Awareness

Using social media as a marketing strategy is a great way to increase your brand visibility and exposure. Social media channels offer a great opportunity for your brand to reach out to a wider audience.

Where do you start? It is always advisable for marketers to start by identifying the best social networks for their brands. Follow this by creating powerful profiles on these platforms and start by encouraging your followers and all stakeholders such as your friends to engage and share your content.

Alternatively, a brand owner can create a social media page where they can regularly upload relevant posts about the products or services that they want to market. The more engagement the content receives on social media the higher the chances of reaching out and attracting new audiences, and this leads to increased sales and ultimately an increase in revenue.

Different brands will choose different paths in brand awareness. Some choose to video ads, others use influencer marketing, etc. A good example is FRÉ, an Israel-based skincare company that increased its sales by 19% by creating a video ad campaign on Facebook.

Building Customer Relationships

Most people like to engage and do business with other people, and not your brand or business. Social media gives brands an opportunity to interact and build relationships with their customers.

With social media marketing, marketers can add a human touch to the post that they publish online. This gives room for businesses to respond to their client’s comments and queries concerning their brands, thereby, you as a marketer are able to understand your consumer’s needs better.

This immediate response should also be applied when customers express their displeasure with the company’s products or services. The customer care team should be advised to show empathy while dealing with the customer’s complaints. This will ultimately make them feel valued which will enhance their loyalty to the brand. There should also be efforts to follow up in order to find out if the client’s concerns were resolved to their satisfaction. A good example is this comment from a Samsung customer who is quite frustrated.

The support rep is courteous and offers to continue helping until all issues are resolved.

Higher Conversion rates

After adding a voice to your brand, you can be sure of one thing, there will be an upsurge in your conversion rates. As a social media marketer, creating quality content is quite handy for the overall success of your social media campaign. Come up with authentic, creative, accurate, and relevant content then proceed to ensure you engage your audience constantly at regular intervals.

In addition, respond to your customer’s concerns and complaints. Be very careful, however, with how you handle criticism. You should never ignore criticism and always respond cautiously. By embracing both positive and negative feedback from customers, reviews from influencers among others, the relationship between a business and its customers is enhanced.

In addition, this will convince them to share your content with their friends. In the end, your brand creates a good reputation among your consumers, you not only retail customers but also increase sales.

Increase Traffic and Search Engine Rankings

One of the widely used strategies in social media marketing by most businesses is that they include their social media links on their profiles or whenever they publish a post. This works well when you upload content alongside your links aimed at directing potential customers to your blog upon clicking on it. This will result in increased traffic on your websites with more and more people visiting your website.

Furthermore, with consistent use of social media, you will have a higher page ranking through search engine optimization. With a higher page ranking on Google, for instance, your business stands a better chance of being easily identified by people using keywords.

You can incorporate quality blogs, employee photos, infographics among others to capture the attention of your target audience. With captivating content,  people will be motivated to like and share it which will increase your organic reach and result in an increase in SEO rankings.

When Backlinksvault wanted to gain visibility on Google for several of their keywords, they decided to use social media to send signals to Google. They went ahead and created hundreds of posts for Twitter, YouTube, and Pinterest and published them.

This had a notable impact on their ranking on Google. Their BookmarkingBeast.com homepage jumped to the first page for several of their target keywords, including the keyword “social bookmarking service”.

Cost-Effective

Compared to traditional advertising, SMM is quite an affordable strategy for markers to use when marketing their brand. Most, if not all, social media platforms allow marketers to create their profiles and upload content without changing them a dime. They are set on their marketing campaign online.

Even if a company may decide to go for paid social media marketing, it is still cheaper compared to traditional methods such as billboards, newspaper ads, or TV/radio ads. This enables companies to cut their advertising budget and use that money for more important business operations such as investments, business expansion, or even cater to other expenses in the business.

Improving Brand Loyalty and Authority

Social media marketing is not all about selling your products to your consumers, it’s more about creating a strong relationship with customers by constantly engaging them. A business with a higher loyal customer base stands a better chance of succeeding on social media. Customer satisfaction is of great importance in achieving brand loyalty and this can only be achieved by constantly engaging your customers.

The young generation is the best group to target to achieve a higher loyal customer base quickly. This generation sometimes referred to as millennials tend to engage more with brands and create strong bonds. You can build confidence in your customers through quality content and engaging them regularly. And you will ultimately increase brand loyalty and give your business a competitive edge.

Gaining Customer Insights

One of the end goals of carrying out marketing research is to have an in-depth understanding of your consumer’s needs. Using the information gathered, you can introduce products or services that can easily meet those needs.

Marketers also gather valuable information regarding their audience preferences, dislikes, among others. For instance, a company can monitor client’s activities on social media in order to find out which things they mostly engage in, therefore,  the business gets more insights on the types of content they should be posting and ignoring those that don’t get engagement.

In conclusion, it’s quite vivid that social media marketing is of great importance for any business that wants to succeed in the current competitive digital world. As we have outlined, there are multiple benefits of having an effective social media marketing strategy to help your business go to the next level.