Social media platforms have come a long way from their roles as websites that connect people with loved ones. The reasons to invest in social media marketing are many and compelling. Nowadays, they’ve expanded to becoming platforms where you can find endless content and information on anything and everything. And because of the sheer amount of people who use social media daily, businesses of all sizes are investing more in online marketing compared to traditional mediums such as print, television, and radio. In fact, Statista predicts that by 2022, about 56 billion dollars will be spent on social media advertising in the US alone.
If you want to ensure your business’ longevity and success, you have to take advantage of social media marketing. Plus, it’s a way to stand out from the competition. Below, we discuss a few reasons why you should invest more in social media marketing.
Social Media Marketing is Cost-Effective
Compared to traditional television and print ads, you won’t have to spend a lot to get your advertisements up and running on social media. For one, creating an account for your profile is virtually free. And if you have a good social media strategist onboard your team, you can even organically obtain new customers and leads. Paid promotions on social media are significantly cheaper as well, allowing you to funnel most of your budget into elevating the quality of your ad content and making sure that it speaks to your target market.
Social Media Can Strongly Affect Purchasing Decisions
Today’s social media platforms are more focused on commerce and personalization. With more brands pouring their budgets into social media campaigns, social media platforms took this as a chance to churn out advertising solutions to entice marketers, too. Later’s guide to social selling cites Instagram’s shopping-specific features like shopping tags and IGTV shopping as some of the best commerce tools. These are designed to work seamlessly with the website’s algorithm — promising that your content (and products) will be easily discoverable via the ‘explore’ page. On the other hand, you can also access Facebook’s marketing API. Here, you can customize your target audience, manage campaign assets, and even create custom dashboards and run analytics.
As social media platforms continue to produce all these consumer-targeted features, they’ll have a stronger impact on purchasing decisions and ensure that your advertising content reaches your desired audience.
Social Media Can Help You Build Brand Awareness
If your business is fairly new, you know how hard it is to get your brand out there. Building brand awareness from the ground up is more difficult now, as you’ll be fighting with countless competitors for customer attention on social media. Despite this, you can use social media marketing to your advantage and build a profile that expresses who you are as a brand. One way to do this is by crafting a unique and memorable online personality for your brand. According to a discussion on Design Shack, this includes defining your brand’s voice, tone, and optics.
Perhaps you want to be known as fun and a source for memes and other humorous content. Or, you could also choose to be on the serious side and focus on educating consumers about your industry. All in all, it’s good to pick a niche to be known for. Plus, social media allows you to directly engage and interact with your customers, so building this brand persona can reinforce a positive image for your business. Eventually, it will get more people to be aware and acquainted with your business.
Social media marketing is one of the most powerful tools that you can use to get your business and products out there. While there’s nothing wrong with choosing to invest in traditional marketing strategies, there’s no denying how much social media can help starting and struggling businesses firmly root themselves in the market. Looking for more clever marketing ideas to try with your brand? Check out our article entitled Marketing Ideas Your Business Needs to Adopt.
Content Prepared by Alicia Brady