The advent of social media marketing has changed the digital marketing landscape. The way brands build a relationship with their customers has also been altered. Nowadays, brands decide their strategies based on their consumers’ likes, dislikes, and browsing history. Whether you’re a small or large-scale business, your digital success is determined by how well you can establish yourself on various social media platforms like Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and so on.

The Benefits of Social Media Marketing

Through new and innovative techniques, brands build themselves online on social media platforms. This brings a number of advantages like:

Building an Accurate Buyer Persona

By closely looking at the activity of your target audience online, you can build a detailed buyer persona that goes beyond basic factors like demographics and deeper into specific likes, dislikes, and preferences for new trends. If you’re successful in incorporating these insights into your digital marketing strategy, it will show your consumers that they are being heard.

Being Available 24/7

Through social media, you can tend to your customers’ queries and problems pretty much instantly. This includes responding publicly and also having chatbots to handle private messages. An important thing to remember is that even though chatbots generate automated responses, there is still someone managing them on the backend to make sure that they appear to be personalized and human.

Apart from that, the cost of social media marketing is so low that you can afford to push your presence daily through daily posts, videos, competitions, etc. Some platforms like Pinterest and Twitter have no charges for marketing at all. This daily digital connectivity helps you keep track of new trends and changes in demand.

Creating Brand Awareness

Even if you’re a brick-and-mortar company, social media platforms will help you generate awareness and credibility for your brand.

Getting Instant Feedback

With social media advertising, you can see how your marketing strategy is doing almost immediately. This can be in the form of “like,” and ”heart” reacts, comments, or even reviews left by customers on your page. In fact, given how easy social media has made it for you to put and even take down posts, you can tweak the same strategy after the immediate response it gets.

Going “Viral”

A single marketing campaign can become a viral sensation, and if you’re lucky enough to experience this, you’ll find that your brand awareness can shoot up instantly. In order for you to become a viral sensation, you don’t even need to spend thousands of dollars. You need to find the thing that clicks with your audience. It can be as simple as the guy on Twitter who ended up getting over 3 million retweets for demanding a fast-food chain to give him a lifetime supply of free chicken nuggets.

Reaching the Masses

Digital marketing has always been about reaching a vast audience without taking too much time or putting in too much money. But even with strategies like blogging and affiliate marketing, the reach is slow. With social media, a single post can help you connect with thousands of consumers instantly.

However, unlike other digital marketing strategies, with social media marketing, you need to be a bit more careful. Through analytics data, you can find out what time of day users are more active, and when you can reach more of your audience without your ad getting lost in the clutter.

Using Social Influencers

Think of this as an advanced (and paid) version of buzz marketing. Influencer marketing is a major portion of your digital marketing strategy, and the best part is that it caters to small businesses with limited budgets and large ones. Small businesses can find social media influencers with a few thousand followers and still get the traction they’re looking for. These small scale celebrities will also be less costly than getting Hollywood stars or influencers like Kylie Jenner.

The Concept of Social Selling

Social selling is one of those breakthroughs that has managed to open up the wall between marketing and sales and has intertwined the two like never before. The main aim of any marketing strategy is to push consumers to take some kind of action. With social selling, the success of digital marketing strategies can be gauged quite easily.

Nowadays, billions of people use platforms like Facebook and Instagram, and with social selling, making a purchase means directly clicking on your ads or other content.

How to Effectively Incorporate Social Media into Your Digital Marketing Strategy

Social media can help you make your digital marketing strategy successful as long as you focus on the following:

• Clearly defining your business goals
• Using analytics and insights gathered through your current social media presence to better understand your target audience- this includes their demographics, likes/dislikes, activities, and any latent needs that your brand can fulfill.
• Using a combination of text, graphics, and videos to relate a story to your audience and make yourself relevant to them.
• SEO optimizing your posts for maximum traffic and viewership and including the relevant links to drive traffic to either your main website or your social selling platform or both.
• Constantly updating your social media strategy- this is probably the most important factor and the one where most organizations fall short. The social media landscape is so erratic that something popular today may go out of demand tomorrow. This is why it is important for you to keep listening to your consumers’ demands and adjusting your strategies to fit their needs.

Endnote

Even companies that were once skeptical about social media marketing are now onboard with this new digital marketing platform. The only thing here is to keep experimenting. If you’re new to the social marketing scene, you may want to put in a little money and monetize your initial posts and content to gain more viewership. Over time, as your brand becomes more credible, the audie