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10 Key Advantages of Social Media Marketing Businesses Need to Know

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Not on social media? Then you’re doing business in the wrong decade.

Why wouldn’t you be where marketing is at its cheapest and most effective? Why not be there listening to your customer’s unfiltered conversations about their needs and desires?

It has never been easier to locate your niche and tell them directly how you’ll solve their pain points. It’s also a time when customer’s expectations of companies have never been so high – do you really know how to meet them if you’re not on social media listening?

You can take advantage of this, and see some real business results. By getting your business where your market is today – on social media. Check out these 10 key advantages of social media marketing and some suggestions for how to get it done quick and easy, right here.

Social Media Marketing

We don’t want to make any assumptions here since the whole idea is to break down the notion of social media marketing for you. So, just to be clear, we’re talking about using platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to get the word out about your products and company.

We’d recommend that every business use Twitter and Facebook. If your product or service is visually appealing or something aspirational than Instagram is a key platform for you. If you’re selling business services, like consulting, or a B2B product, LinkedIn is a great option.

Let’s lump all these platforms together under the ‘social media marketing’ title, and see 10 key reasons you should be using them.

10 Key Advantages of Social Media Marketing

We could easily give you 30 advantages of social media marketing. But we’ll leave it at the biggest 10 so you’ve got time after reading this to go and set up those social media accounts right away! Let’s take a look.

1. It’s Cost Effective

Gone are the days of printing thousands of flyers and leaving them on doors, hoping you might hit the jackpot by finding a customer. On social media, you can run an advertisement to thousands of people in seconds. You can target keywords relevant to your brand, and you can get across the computer screens of leads in a couple of hours.

That’s a cost-effective method of marketing because it is so direct. It’s high volume, low-cost marketing, and it pays off. Big time.

2. It’s Targeted

Before you even think about spending on a marketing campaign, you should have a very clear idea who your avatar or average customer is. What magazines do they read, where do they live, what conversations are they having online? Now, the brilliant thing about social media marketing is that you can target your market with precision.

Let’s say you have a product that sells well as a baby shower gift. You run a targeted campaign on Facebook, targeting the age group, gender, and location of your customer base. You can narrow it down to the people you want by entering ‘friend is pregnant’ in the interests and conversations.

It will now deliver your ad directly to the people most likely to buy your product, at the moment they need to buy it. Talk about targeted, huh?

3. It’s Cleverly Timed

You can reduce waste even further and target your market even closer by using social media data on the times when users are most active. You’ll see there is a better time of day to talk to LinkedIn users that’s different from when Facebook or Twitter users are most engaged. If you sell your product in more than one region, you can push the right ads to the right place at the perfect time.

4. It’s the Ultimate Connector

We know that word of mouth is the most effective advertising out there. Make it easy for your customers to brag about their new purchase on their social media profile pages. This encourages their friends and relatives to check out your offering.

This way, new customers come with a key business battle already won: they trust you. They trust you to deliver because they got a word of mouth review from someone they already trust about how great your product or service was.

5. It’s Unbelievably Effective

What do people do when they’ve got a problem or question about something they need? They type it into an online search engine or social media search. This is one of the most powerful factors of social media marketing.

You can create posts and online content answering common customer concerns or questions. So when someone types into the search engine what they need, they can quickly connect to your answers. You become a trusted advisor, and that’s the highest goal of any company.

6. The Rinse-and-Repeat Factor

If an advertising campaign works well online, you can quickly add budget to it to increase its population reach. If you had a successful sales campaign in January, you can make an adjustment to the offer’s dates and run it again in March with minor changes. No printing, no design studios, no errors with margins or ink density.

7. It Arms You with Analysis

Social Media marketing can blow any other marketing mechanisms out of the water when it comes to data on effectiveness. At a glance, you can see analytics on the gender, location, age, and interests of the people who clicked on, shared or interacted with your post. This means that every round of advertising you’re getting closer and closer to your ideal customer.

If you need data on demand for investors, you can access it at the click of a button. No focus groups, no clipboards outside the mall begging people to answer your survey.

8. You Can Start a Conversation

In social media marketing, you get to lead the conversation rather than just react to it. You can be posting valuable information for your customers. If you sell metal reusable straws, you could be heading conversations about conservation and pollution.

If you sell bikes you could be talking about the medical and climate benefits of cycling the commute. Whatever your product or service, work out the stories that can inspire behavior change in your audience. Then, of course, you offer them the product that’ll help them with this new goal.

This is powerful because you’re not chasing a pre-existing need, competing with similar products. Instead, you create the desire, inspire action, and get elevated an advisor rather than just another company pushing a product.

9. You’ll Get Global Reach

You might have a real strong-hold on the market in your town or city. Perhaps you only speak one language. With the power of online payments, global delivery systems, and social media, in seconds you can be filling orders to Taiwan, Melbourne, and London.

Just think what companies had to do before to even consider offering their products so far and why. They needed physical stores. Probably websites with check-out pages too.

Several social media platforms offer shop functions. So you can be sell products globally without as much as a website, much less a physical shopfront or local sales team.

10. You’ll Get Brand Recognition

An online presence helps you identify and position your brand for global brand recognition. Use hashtags to link your product to online conversations. Post to forums and pages connected to your offering.

Boost brand recognition, increase sales, and drive traffic to your website. The more traffic you drive to your website from social media, the better you’ll rank in search results.

The better you rank in search results, the more customers will find you right when they have questions related to their ‘pain point’. This is when they are in the perfect position to buy. If you don’t believe us, check out this helpful post for more detail on marketing strategy.

Don’t Have All Day to Monitor Social Media?

You don’t need to. You can use online classified sites to source a marketing team from anywhere in the world at competitive rates. You can also find scheduling software.

A social media scheduling software means you set aside a day a month to make all the posts and online updates you want, across all the social media platforms. You cater each post for its medium, with hashtags and mentions. Then the program schedules the posts across a whole month.

The better programs will ensure your posts hit Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram at the times the most users are using them. Your customers see a really active online company, engaged in interesting discussions all month long. They’ll have no idea you scheduled the entire month’s posts in one day at the start of last month!

What Are You Waiting For? Get Social!

There has never before been a better way to target your market so precisely. Or to find new niches, and benefit so directly from positive customer word of mouth. These are the advantages of social media – it gives you the control to reach your target audience, locally or globally.

You can shape the conversation about your brand, and adapt to customer needs more dynamically. You’re already online reading this article – so we know in a quick few steps you could be setting up your social media accounts, and getting big, fast!

If you enjoyed this article, there’s lots more helpful business advice on our blog. We want to help you get successful. Check out the best of the business blog today!

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