Social media marketing is an integral part of any marketing and branding strategy. This means every check-in, tweet, mention, reply, like and/or comment are not just goals. These social signals are a means to get your brand to a higher level. Social media marketing is not just a way to boost sales. It has multiple advantages. Let’s look at them.

Enhanced Brand Visibility and Recognition

Social media marketing is one of the most effective methods to build your brand visibility. A multi-platform presence targetted towards the right target audience can leverage your brand to newer heights. You also become more approachable for your customers.

Improved Brand Loyalty & Credibility

Being there for your audience or target market makes your brand more credible. Engaging with them socially instils a feeling of confidence in your customers. This, in turn, makes them loyal to you and your business. Loyal customers mean better brand ambassadors.

More Traffic to Your Website

Content that you share from your social channels has a great potential to direct more traffic to your website. The idea is to create curated and relevant content that is shared regularly on appropriate social channels. Good quality content is usually noticed and becomes a great customer acquisition tool similar to a good customer retention tool. Eyeballs on your content will create multiple gateways directing more traffic to your website.

Better Search Engine Rankings

Social signals are the new buzzword in the search engine optimization arena. Social signals are likes, shares, comments, tweets and mentions on social platforms. You can leverage on these by generating quality content on your website and blogs that people can interact with. Search engines like google give weight to such social signals thereby pushing up website rankings.

Higher Conversion Rates

Social mentions on multiple platforms create a magnetic pull of traffic to your blog or website. This creates an opportunity to convert a lead into a sale. Interaction with your followers on social media humanize your brand. Hence, a brand is treated like a person. This makes it easier to do business since people like to do business with people and not companies. This also creates stickiness with your followers and leads to your content going viral.

Better Return on Investment (RoI)

Social media presence is available to everyone for free on platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest. Even paid social promotions on these platforms are cheaper than other traditional media. An investment in paid promotions on social channels hence give a better return on investment.  You can always start with a small budget and tweak it after your goals find success.

Stronger Customer Relationships

A humanized brand is responsive and engaging. Social platforms allow humanized brands to build their network and communicate effectively with their customers. This builds stronger customer relationships since customer know that their comments will receive an appropriate personalized response than canned answers.

Easy Content Distribution

Effective social media engagement needs a sound content strategy. If you have great content a marketing distribution plan needs to be devised. Today, the challenge for a business to reach out to their audience is simplified with the help of social media. What a business needs to do is to tailor the right content for the right audience via the right social media platform.

Better Customer Insights

By gathering information from social platforms you are able to understand your customers better. Insights like what people think about your brand and how do they react to it are valuable and help you in fine-tuning your products and services. These insights also go a long way in establishing a loyal customer base and generate repeat sales.

Influencer Status

Well crafted content that you share with your followers on social media establishes your expertise in that area. Good quality content elevates your authority and gains you more followers. However, take it to the next level. Engage & communicate with your followers and address their queries or concerns. This will catapult you to the influencer status and better place your brand.

Social media marketing is more than just a hype today. It is an essential tool that allows brands and all businesses big and small to engage and communicate with their target audience and customers. The advantages of integrating social media marketing are huge and involving. It is critical to build your social media marketing into your overall marketing plan.

Today, social media is not an option; it’s a necessity. This means every check-in, tweet, mention, reply, like and/or comment should be guided by a definite plan driving towards pre-established goals stemming out from the social media strategy. This means that your social media strategy needs to be specifically tailored to your business. It needs an effective design around it.

Design factors for an effective social media strategy

1. Define your goals

Any social media brand marketing strategy needs established goals & objectives that it hopes to achieve. These goals allow you to measure & react when social media campaigns are/or not meeting your expectations. Without established goals, you have no means of measuring success or calculating your return on investment.

2. Identify your customers & social channels

Social media is not just about promoting or selling a product; it is about relating, communicating and managing expectations of your customers. So think & profile your target customers. You can pull intelligent information from your customer data, research reports or through surveys. This profile information is valuable when it comes to predict where your target customers hang out. These are the social channels where you have to be.

3. Build a consistent brand voice

Your brand voice creates your customer’s perception. It involves using visuals, colours, words and tones to elicit an emotional response from your target audience. Your brand voice has to be consistent across channels so that it is easier for your customers to relate to it.

4. Deploy consistent content

Breakdown your social media strategy into campaigns tailored to your audience on different social media channels. Create content for these campaigns that your audience best relate to. Your content should cover the topics you wish to cover on social media as well as the kind of media you wish to post (status updates, links, quotes, photos, videos, etc.). Keep it consistent across the social channels.

5. Allocate budget and resources

Social media engagement doesn’t come cheap. It is definitely not free either as many think. It requires long term commitment involving both financial & human resources as well as patience. You can either deploy a team in-house or hire a competent social media marketing agency to handle the tasks for you. Allocating budget for social media marketing doesn’t always mean pulling more money out of your business’s pocket. You can think about reallocating some funds invested in low performing strategies towards social media.

6. Review metrics

Measuring results will define how engagement on social media relates directly to sales, and often, these conversations refer to where social media fits into the funnel of your customer’s journey. Every strategy needs to have measurable metrics that will determine your RoI of your social media efforts. Keep a close tab and review your metrics on a weekly basis. Analyse the data and find out better ways to engage with your customers.

The worst hit a social media strategy can get is by neglected social profiles. Social media strategy requires commitment and patience and does not yield results overnight. It requires creating campaigns tailored to the brand’s presence as well as regular engagement with the customers and prospects. Regular measurement and analysis and of metrics give valuable inputs on how to manage and tweak the social strategy for your business’ success.