7 (Surprising) Benefits of a Social Media Marketing

Marketers are gung-ho about social media. A Social Media Marketing Industry Report 2014, by Social Media Examiner says 92% of marketers believe social media is important for their business. What this tells you is that marketers trust social media to trigger business growth through its ability to reach out to a wider audience. With one in four people around the world using social media, it makes a great deal of sense to use this marketing channel. Not doing so, is big mistake.

Apart from the fact that your brand message is able to reach a large number of people, there are plenty of other benefits of social media marketing; and some of these might surprise you. Let’s take a look at some of them:

#1: Enhanced Brand Credibility

You might not have thought the use of social media allows you to improve the credibility of your brand but it does. The foundation of social media marketing rests on sharing content with the fans and followers on your network, who are also your potential or existing customers. If you are sharing content such as positive product/service reviews, a useful post on your product centric blog post or some news story about your niche that can help your customers, you will find your business’s market credibility going up. Any doubts that people might have about your brand go away and are replaced by trust.

#2: Earning Niche Authority

Credibility is just one subset of reputation building; another is coming across as authority figure in your niche. The first step in this process is to come up with highly researched content pieces about your domain and publishing them on your blog and high authority blogs. The second and equally important step is to market this content on social media. Remember, each piece of content you publish in your name or the name of your brand represents your brand. When your target audience goes through this content, their opinion about you and your business goes up. Keep doing this and you will soon find your brand being highly regarded by its audience for the actionable information it provides them regularly.

#3: Brand Humanization

The interactions that are happening on social media go a long way in humanizing your brand. The fact that you are using your social media accounts to trigger personal interactions with your audience means your target customers can relate more to your brand. For them, your brand is not just a business that offers a collection of products and services, but somebody they can talk to, share information with and who is always willing to listen to them. This ensures they will feel closely linked with your brand; this situation can translate into increased conversions for your business.

#4: Forge Brand Loyalty

Did you know that a large percentage of people who follow brands on social media are more loyal to these brands? What you are basically doing with social media is connecting with your audience. You are not only interacting with target customers but also brand influencers and advocates. You are also pushing information they will consider useful at regular intervals. More importantly, you are immediately responding to consumer concerns through the various social networks you are using. Taken together, everything helps you build brand loyalty. This ensures customers buy only from you, irrespective of the competition in your niche. Social media not only becomes a channel of customer retention but also customer acquisition.

#5: SEO Benefit

How Social Media Benefits SEO is a great read if you want to understand how the use of social media can be tapped for SEO benefits. It provides valuable insights into how social media produces signals that are appreciated by search engines. The key here is to have a really very well-defined approach vis-à-vis social media. Be very clear as to how you wish to benefit from it and then take the necessary steps to ensure you are able to meet your objectives. When it comes to SEO, you will need to focus on building a really strong social media presence, which helps you grow your online reach; this in turn will ensure more people see your content and there are more chances of their sharing it with their own friends and followers. Everything will culminate in high rankings on SERPs.

#6: You Save on Marketing Costs

The cost per lead of social media marketing is less than other traditional forms of marketing. If you are using social media marketing and are good at it, you can even think about cutting down on some of the other expensive marketing tactics you’ve been using. Astute marketers don’t spend a lot of time on social media for generating traffic. Just a few hours a week spent on a collection of social media activities is enough to generate high ROI.

#7: It’s Not Very Difficult

The best part about using social media is that is really not all that difficult to master it. Of course, you should be well aware of everything that goes into the making of a rock solid social media campaign, but if and when you get the hang of it, you will realize that it is not all that difficult to get the returns you are looking for. All you need to do is not take shortcuts and make sure that you keep at it all the time.

Conclusion

These are not the only surprising benefits of social media marketing you will encounter. There are many more and all you need to do is make the right kind of effort to experience them. As you keep getting better and better at your strategy, you will keep earning even more benefits from social media. It will be a never ending cycle. So, all the best for your social media efforts!

About the Author!

Michael Georgiou is a dynamic business professional and entrepreneurial guru associated with Imaginovation – proven his success in creative strategy, online branding, project management, and communication projects in both the public and private sectors.