The Necessity of Social Media Marketing In 2018 And Beyond
Today, it is difficult to find anyone who still doesn't use social media. It is even more difficult to find a marketer who does not feature social media marketing prominently in their digital marketing plans. It is, therefore, safe to say that social media is a central part of digital marketing for 21st century brands. But what exactly is it about social media marketing that makes it such an important tool for today's marketers? And how can marketers use social networking platforms to increase conversions?
In the age of social media, everyone is using social networks to get in touch with the people in the circles, including friends and family. Marketers use social media to market their goods and services. Here are some of the reasons why social media marketing is a central part of any digital marketing strategy today:
Encourage engagement through digital media
Few online platforms makes it as easy to engage with your customers like social media sites. You get direct access to your customers and they in turn find an easy and fast way to talk to you about their needs as well as give you feedback on your products and services.
Get ahead of your competitors
With a well laid-out social media plan, your business can rise from oblivion to become a household name in a very short time. Social media marketing gives you a way to beat your competition without big ad budgets; just more than average creativity and unending commitment to constant improvement. The alternatives like Google Adwords are generally quite expensive, making them an option for bigger brands with substantial resources to spend.
Go beyond the boundaries
The general path most businesses take, especially ecommerce stores, is to create their websites and then use the Google Adwords to start getting customers. While Google Adwords are effective, limiting your brand to this platform will limit the results that you can obtain. Social media marketing provides an extra platform to extend your wings. It also creates a consistent growth of potential customers likely to buy your products more than once. To somewhat, social media following acts as a new age email list where you can direct access to your customers where you can sell them good and services while making it easy for them to share the information you dispatch to them with their friends.
Get better conversion rates
Investing in social media will see a rise in the rate of conversions your business records. A noteworthy social media presence presents unending opportunities to present customers with different products and services, thereby increasing the chances that at one point, a number of those followers will have the resources they need to buy your products. Continued and growing visibility on social media ultimately results in higher sales.
Marketing on budget
Startups often find themselves working with a shoestring budget. Finding ways to make the scarce resources be adequate to move the company forward takes a lot of planning. Social media marketing gives these startups a lifeline. Unlike other marketing methods, it is cheaper and often records impressive results for a wide range of business ventures. This makes it the perfect platform to start your business even with your meagre resources. What's more, social media gives you access to a global audience which you can super-target to increase your chances of turning your small investment into an empire.
Gather intel about your market
Social media gurus often use social media as a research tool. They go into the various social sites and gather information about their market, the emerging trends as well as the goings-on with their business rivals, including the new products and services they are releasing into the market. Such information was hard to get before the emergence of social media.
Making the most of social media
Given the power social media has afforded today's marketers, it is crucial to understand what steps you can take to make maximum use of the opportunities available for your business via these platforms. Here are some of the hallmarks of a digitally savvy marketer that has mastered the use of social media to improve business conversions:
Provides quality content consistently
Social media marketing is not a one-time event. It is an unending process of keeping your followers engaged with your brand while providing information about your goods and services. To keep making progress, you must keep churning out quality, unique content. It keeps your audience yearning for more and ensures that your followers think of you every time they want to buy a product or service your brand can provide.
Video content
On social media today, video is the most effective marketing tool. Consider the following:
- Everyday, people from around the globe watch over 1 billion hours of video content on YouTube
- Compared to images, videos on Facebook get 135% more organic reach
- On Twitter videos get retweeted up to 6 times more than photos
These statistics and others are what has informed a growing number of marketers to invest in video as a marketing tool on social media.
Instagram stories
After using tools like Social Growr to organically grow your Instagram account, the next step involves the use of Instagram Stories. Since its debut on August 2, 2016, Instagram Stories became an instant hit. Today, marketers are devising new ways of making the most of this Instagram tool. Instagram Stories is already being used by over 300 million users daily on the platform. There is every indication that this trend will continue into the foreseeable future.
Chatbots
Chatbots are changing the way brands converse with their customers on social media. Instead of having an employee constantly monitoring and responding to queries sent to your brand on social networking sites, bots automate responses. Gartner predicts that by the end of 2018, at least 20% of all business content will be generated by machines, including chat responses to customers on social media.
Ephemeral content will provide the best engagement rate
Smart marketers have already noticed the trend of the growing popularity of ephemeral content. Instead of posting videos and images that will exist online forever, many social media users are preferring short-lived content that their followers and contacts can consume within 24 hours.
Influencer marketing will continue to take over
The last two decades have seen a rise in the prominence of influencer marketing. Social media watchers say there is more to look forward to in this space. The dominance of influencers in social media marketing will continue well into the future as more brands look for the most creative ways to keep turning a profit.
