Social Media is a powerful tool for businesses to reach customers and build their brand. What exactly is Social Media? Social media is the global social networking phenomenon that has revolutionized the way people communicate, connect, and share information. In today’s globalized business world, establishing your company’s social presence is vital in order to reach new markets and establish your brand’s identity. Do you need help with building your business’s social media presence? We can help!
There are several tactics that businesses use to market their products and services online. One of the most popular techniques is through social media. This guide describes how businesses use social media for marketing purposes, and explains why this technique is so critical when it comes to digital marketing.
Social media allows marketers to connect and engage potential customers where they are at: LinkedIn, Twitter, Youtube, Facebook, Instagram, and even some of the younger platforms like TikTok. With a strong social media strategy and the ability to create engaging content, marketers can engage their audience.
Social media will continue to be an important strategy in 2022, and companies can always find ways to advance their approach.
Why Is Social Media Important for Your Business? 12 Reasons.
Even though B2B companies seek to sell products to other businesses, B2B marketing is still built on human relationships. Social media has long been used to help grow these relationships, but its importance accelerated last year.
Without in-person events, B2B marketers needed an outlet to connect with prospects and partners. And they found they could do this most effectively via social platforms.
By using social media, B2B leaders:
1. Build Brand Awareness
Across different platforms, companies can tell their story, why they provide the services they offer, and keep audiences updated with customer and employee stories.
If B2B leaders are able to leverage the voice of their employees, they can extend their brand reach even further. Every employee has a personal network, and each network has potentially hundreds of contacts. In turn, each of those contacts is connected to hundreds of other people.
2. Generate Leads
Create meaningful conversations and engagement within their target industry by posting videos, news, data, and interesting trends. Not only do you build credibility with potential customers, but these strategies can result in gaining leads.
3. Nurture Leads
Social selling enables sales professionals to build relationships with leads. By leveraging their thought leadership pieces, social proofing and other content, they can help potential customers solve problems. In turn, this allows your sales team to build trust and credibility.
4. Implement Social Listening
Listen to customers and what people are saying about their company. This gives you a chance to get candid feedback about how others view your brand. It opens a window into improving the weaker areas of your business while reinforcing aspects that already resonate with people.
5. Connect Social Posts to Opportunities
With the right enterprise solution, leaders can drive customer posts to their CRM to understand customers more fully.*
Building your social media marketing strategy for 2022
Set goals that make sense for your business
Let’s kick things off with a quick question:
“What do you want from social media, anyway?”
Social media strategy planning starts with your goals.
According to the 2021 Sprout Social Index™, the most common goals for social are increasing brand awareness (58%) and increasing community engagement (41%). Whether you want to build a larger following or a more active community, taking the time to define your social goals is the first step to reaching them.
Either way, your goals will define your social media marketing strategy and how much time and energy you’ll need to dedicate to your campaigns.
Sample social media goals for 2022 and beyond
What really matters is that you set realistic social media goals.
Emphasis on “realistic,” by the way. We recommend tackling smaller objectives that allow you to scale your social efforts in a way that’s both reasonable and affordable.
Below are some sample goals that businesses of all shapes and sizes can pursue.
Increase brand awareness. This means getting your name out there. To create authentic and lasting brand awareness, avoid solely publishing promotional messages. Instead, focus on content that emphasizes your personality and values first.
Generate leads and sales. Whether online, in-store or directly through your social profiles, followers don’t make purchases by accident. For example, are you about alerting customers about new products and promos? Are you integrating your product catalog into your social profiles? Are you running exclusive deals for followers?
Grow your brand’s audience. Bringing new followers into the fold means finding ways to introduce your brand to folks who haven’t heard of you before.
Growing your audience also means discovering conversations around your business and industry that matter the most. Digging through your social channels is nearly impossible without monitoring or listening for specific keywords, phrases or hashtags. Having a pulse on these conversations helps you expand your core audience (and reach adjacent audiences) much faster.
Boost community engagement. Index data shows that 46% of consumers think brands that engage their audience are best in class on social, so it pays to explore new ways to grab the attention of your current followers. This means experimenting with messaging and content. For example, does your brand promote user-generated content and hashtags?
Even something as simple as asking a question can increase your engagement rate. Your customers can be your best cheerleaders, but only if you’re giving them something to do.
Drive traffic to your site. Simple enough. If you’re laser-focused on generating leads or traffic to your website, social media can make it happen. Whether through promotional posts or social ads, keeping an eye on conversions and URL clicks can help you better determine your ROI from social media.
Any combination of these goals is fair game and can help you better understand which networks to tackle, too. When in doubt, keep your social media marketing strategy simple rather than complicating it with too many objectives that might distract you. Pick one or two and rally your team around them.
Take time to research your target audience
Making assumptions is bad news for marketers.
Only 55% of marketers use social data to better understand their target audience, making it a huge opportunity for both leaders and practitioners. Much of what you need to know about your audience to influence your social media marketing strategy is already available. You just have to know where to look.
With the right tool, marketers can quickly research their audience. No formal market research or data science chops necessary.
Remember: different platforms attract different audiences
Take today’s social media demographics, for example. These numbers speak directly to which networks your brand should approach and what types of content to publish. Here are some key takeaways for your 2022 social media marketing strategy:
- Facebook and YouTube are both prime places for ads due in part to their high-earning user bases.
- The top social networks among Millennials and Gen Z are Instagram and YouTube, signaling the strength of bold, eye-popping content that oozes with personality.
- Women vastly outnumber men on Pinterest, which is noted to boast the highest average order value for social shoppers.
- LinkedIn’s user base is well-educated, making it a hub for in-depth, industry-specific content that might be more niche than what you see on Facebook or Twitter.
Don’t spread yourself too thin. Instead, focus on networks where your core audience is already active.
Do your homework on your existing social media audience
Although the demographic data above gives you insight into each channel, what about your own customers? Further analysis needs to be done before you can determine what your real-world social customers actually look like.
That’s why many brands use a social media dashboard that provides an overview of who’s following you and how they interact with you on each channel.
Sprout’s analytics dashboard puts your audience demographics front and center. It also highlights which social networks are seeing the most activity, helping you ensure you spend your time on the right networks.
With Sprout’s Group Report, you can view Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn and Pinterest data side-by-side in a customizable format that’s exportable by date range and profile.
There’s plenty of other sources of valuable audience data to supplement your social media insights. This includes your Google and email analytics, your CRM, your customer service platform or even your best-selling products.
All of the above will ultimately influence everything from your marketing messaging to how you’ll approach customer service or social commerce.
Reasons Why Social Media Marketing Is Important For Your Business Or Brand
You Get To Tell Your Story
Having an online presence as a business on any of the social media forums like Facebook or Instagram is a great way to interact with your audience and to really connect with them on a personal level.
Which gives you the chance to tell your story to all your followers and inspire them through your success or past failures.
Social media is a place where interacting with your audience gives you more exposure and helps you better understand your audience.
Your customers will be able to know you and relate to your stories on a more personal level as well, and this is exactly what you need as an entrepreneur in this digitally connected world.
People who don’t know you or your business might find it intriguing to know how you build up your business and, thus, through these posts, you can create brand awareness about how hard you worked to make your dreams come true.
This will add more meaning to your brand, and customers love it more when they see the realities of businesses.
And to make sure that your story is heard and spreads at a faster rate, you might want to work on your content so that it is appropriate enough to impress the audience.
You Can Grow An Audience With A Small Budget
Social media advertising has to be one of the least expensive ways of marketing your business digitally.
With so many different advertising tools available on these social media forums, you can make use of this opportunity and cost-effectively market your product.
The best thing about social media marketing is that you don’t really have to use the adverts or ad tools to market your brand.
You can grow as a page on social media networks by simply being consistent and posting interesting and relatable content for your audience.
This can be done by using SEO content, where you use the most trending keywords and enhance your rankings.
And because the digital competition is always on its peak, you might want to keep your SEO game on point.
Once your social media marketing is strategized effectively, this would help you increase the traffic on your profiles on these forums, which will eventually lead them to your websites.
There are a number of businesses and bloggers who have spent not even a single dollar on a digital advertisement, but just with the help of great content and great interaction with their audience, they created a customer base who connected with them.
This means that even if you have a smaller budget for advertisements, you can help your business on these social networking forums, where through increased marketing, the process of digital growth for your brand quickens.
Conclusion
The internet and social media have become a critical tool for businesses in the 21st century to reach their customers. Whether they are creating an online presence, building brand awareness or increasing sales, marketers need to understand how social media and social networking can be used effectively as a tool to promote brands.