Social media marketing (SMM) has become a powerful way for businesses of all shapes and sizes to reach consumers, mould their brand, and increase visibility. Businesses that aren’t interacting with their prospective customers through networks like Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn are missing out on one of 2017’s most profitable marketing opportunities. In fact, social is one of the best ways for companies to drive leads, increase sales, and even create devoted brand advocates (71% of satisfied customers are likely to recommend your brand to someone else via social!). This guide will cover why SMM is so lucrative to businesses and how professional companies can help you leverage the power of social networks to grow your company.

 

What is Social Media Marketing?

Social media marketing is the term for strategies devoted to turning differing social media sites into platforms for business growth. It is the process of driving traffic, garnering interest, and expanding your company’s visibility by interacting with your customer’s daily lives. When you are more active and visible across social media, you give potential customers the chance to discover you organically through your content or ads.

 

Examples of marketing efforts include:

  • News stories
  • Blog posts
  • Special offers
  • Text or image posts/shares
  • Sharing videos
  • Running targeted ads based on consumer information (for example, who they like or follow)

When you are active on these networks, you gain the advantage of the synergy between social activity and search engine success, as well as the benefits of more traffic, sales leads, and conversions.

 

Did You Know: 95% of adults aged 18-34 follow a brand via social media (source).

 

How Social Media Benefits Businesses

Social networks are evolving at an incredible rate. Sites that used to be merely platforms for liking and sharing each other’s status updates are now lucrative opportunities for developing a brand, serving your customers, and creating a community. Some are even search engines in their own right. Consumers are using social to fulfill a range of needs, and one of them is to find, interact, and defend brand’s they identify with.

Social networks influence 74% of consumer buying decisions

 

Some of the biggest benefits are:

  • Increased brand awareness
  • A major boost in website traffic
  • Improved search engine rankings
  • Higher conversion rates
  • Higher customer satisfaction
  • Improved brand loyalty
  • Marketing insight

 

How to Succeed at Social Media Marketing

Success on social media is a continuous process that requires learning and adapting to consumer trends, feedback, and site algorithm changes. But even with those challenges, there are still a few tips that will go a long way towards creating a successful social presence for your business:

 

  • Creating full and detailed profiles
  • Sharing relevant content that fulfills needs (solves problems or enhances a customer’s life)
  • Crafting a respectable reputation (take care of customers and reach out to those who’ve had negative experiences)
  • Focusing on generating more shares
  • Using images (infographics are liked and shared three times more than any other content)
  • Analyzing demographic information to target ads
  • Constantly analyzing your performance

 

Social media is one of the highest-ROI forms of marketing because of its ability to reach thousands of customers organically. Businesses of all forms benefit from the extra web traffic, higher search rankings, and devoted brand advocates that social advertising brings.

 

If you’d like to learn how our expert social media marketers use social networks to help your business grow, talk to BlueHat Marketing today.