Traditional media formats such as television, radio, and outdoor simply cannot compete with social media in terms of benefits. If your company is able to fully utilise them, it will increase brand awareness, drive tonnes of qualified web traffic, increase sales leads, and assist in converting those leads into paying customers. In the end, this will help your company grow much faster. Let’s take a closer look at each benefit.
1. Reach a massive global audience
There are currently 3.1 billion active social media users worldwide. When you consider that social media only emerged about 15 years ago, these are insane statistics. Today, one in every three people on the planet is on social media, and all you need to reach them is an internet-connected device.
Approximately 2.6 billion of the 3.1 billion users are on Facebook, 2.1 billion on YouTube, 1 billion on Instagram, and 700 million on LinkedIn. Almost every business can now find their customers on social media. The greatest advantage of social media over traditional media is its reach.
2. Identify your precise target market
Social media platforms collect a massive amount of data on their users, which they then sell to advertisers to help them create more targeted advertisements. This includes basic information such as gender, location, and age, as well as a vast array of demographic, interest, and behavioural data. Do you want to target 18-24-year-old single males in Canada who like cats but dislike dogs? No worries, it’s only a few mouse clicks away.
Aside from basic targeting, you can also target people who have previously interacted with you or your organisation. These lists, known as a ‘custom audience,’ can include people who have visited your website, people from your existing email list, people who have watched a video of yours, people who like your Facebook page, and much more.
Finally, you can create ‘lookalike audiences,’ which are much larger audiences with characteristics similar to a smaller custom audience. For example, if you have a list of 1,000 people who have purchased your product, you could ask Facebook to find a larger audience of 100,000 people with similar demographics.
The cost of Facebook advertising will vary depending on your objectives and target audience, but using the world’s most powerful social media ad platform ensures that you only target people who are most likely to be interested in your content. This eliminates wasted marketing dollars and maximises your profits.
3. Monitor data and optimise ad spend
Everything can be measured on social media. How many people viewed your video, how many liked or reacted to it, how many commented, shared it, or clicked on your link.
The social media channels can even record the actions that people take as they navigate the internet by using a tracking pixel. For example, if you click on a social media ad and then make a sales enquiry on a website, the data from the website will be pulled back into the social media channel. This enables marketers to track conversions and optimise their spending in order to maximise their return on investment.
Furthermore, the algorithms of social media channels optimise your ad spend to help you achieve your marketing goals at the lowest possible cost. They have an incentive to assist you because the more money you make, the more money you’ll spend advertising on their platform.
4. Grow organically.
To be successful on social media, you don’t need a large paid ad budget. Indeed, many social media marketers are generating a lot of traffic and making a lot of money without spending a dime on paid ads.
The proportion of people who see your social media posts for free is referred to as your organic (or free) reach. It differs depending on the social media channel. Facebook is down about 2-3%, Instagram is down about 7%, and LinkedIn is still down about 10-12%. If the first people who see your social media post interact with it by liking, commenting or sharing it, the algorithms will reward that content with more reach, which means it will be shown to a larger proportion of your followers and may become trending content, going viral, and generating massive free reach.
Yes, the organic game has become more difficult and competitive as millions of social media marketers compete for users’ attention, but there is still a huge opportunity for you to capitalise on. The key is to create an efficient social media marketing strategy that delivers the right content to the right audience via the right channel.
5. Involve your audience
Traditional media such as television, print, radio, and outdoor are ‘broadcast’ formats, which means that a small number of media publishers share a message to which the audience cannot respond. Yes, these formats have evolved to make their media more interactive, but nothing compares to social media!
With today’s smartphones, anyone can be a media publisher. In seconds, billions of people can take a photo and post it on social media, and billions more can respond. This distinct feature of social media humanises a brand by giving it a distinct voice, assisting in the creation of meaningful connections with its audience, and ultimately increasing trust.
Marketers can also use engagement metrics to improve the performance of their content. Tracking your Instagram engagement rate, for example, will show you what your followers are interested in (and what they aren’t! ), ensuring you get a better return on your content creation investment.
6. Boost brand awareness
Search engine marketing, which is primarily done through Google, is great because people who search for something have a high purchase intent, which means they are ready to buy. If I search for ‘black Adidas joggers,’ I’m likely to want to buy a pair.
However, search is only useful if people are familiar with the brand. If they are not, they will not look for it.
Enter social media and its vast array of content formats, which can be used to first make prospects aware of your brand and then nurture them to become paying customers.
7. Increase website traffic
Social media is now one of the world’s most important internet traffic generators. This traffic can come from organic links, such as the single URL on your Instagram profile or a link in the description of a YouTube video, or it can come from a paid social media ad.
Marketers can invite social media users to the next step of the buyer journey by offering lead magnets – a high-value piece of content that compels users to exchange their personal information, most notably their email address – once they arrive on your website or landing page.
8. Create industry authority
“Brand is the ultimate leverage,” as Gary Vaynerchuk always says.
Because of the speed and ease with which anyone can create content, you can position yourself or your brand as an authority in your industry. Are you an interior designer? Create a blog post about the “Top 10 Ways to Design Your Office,” a video about “How to Style Your House for Summer,” or a Pinterest inspiration board.
Creating content like this and sharing it on social media will show potential buyers your expertise and credibility.
9. Lift conversion rates
Before making a purchase from a brand on social media, most people will follow them for a while. They become aware of the brand and develop trust in the products or services through regular content that they are of high quality and worth the investment. This process, known as ‘warming up,’ leads to an increase in conversion rates on your website once someone decides to take the next step towards purchasing.
You can use social media retargeting strategies with retargeting to increase sales. This ensures that you only serve ads to people who are genuinely interested, rather than wasting money on those who aren’t. Examine a friend’s Instagram feed who is the opposite sex and/or age to you to see how different the targeted ads are from yours!
At the end of the day, the goal of any business is to convert customers! Businesses can fine-tune and optimise their conversation rates thanks to the benefits of social media!
10. Enhance customer service
Customers nowadays do not want to wait on the phone to speak with a company about a customer service issue.
Rock Solid Marketing are experts in digital marketing in Mildura, offering SEO, social media and web design services. Contact us to learn more about how to set your website up for success!