Features to Look for in Social Media Marketing Services

What is social media marketing? The first thing that can come to your mind is that it is something gimmicky; sort of playful kind of campaign that uses the social media to solicit likes and shares just for the sake of popularity. There are actually a handful of social media platforms sprawling online, and each has its own followings based on the activities it enables its subscribers to do. And social media marketing can vary its approach depending on the site to use, but its core remains the same across all platforms.

Social media marketing has the capability to empower other marketing channels, like content marketing strategy, to drive leads and sales. The social media’s greater accessibility and wider reach make it also the best platform to utilize for marketing purposes. Social media marketing takes advantage of human tendencies to form networks, to socialize, and to influence each other, which are the essential aspects to use to spread brand awareness to its target audience online.

Importance of Social Media to Businesses

Most social media platforms are aimed at providing a place for people to connect, communicate and share parts of their lives through photos, status updates, links, videos, etc. The popularity of social media stems from the nature of humans to constantly interact and communicate with each other, especially with their families and friends. And through digital networks, this is made easier and more convenient to do. As the number of people populating the social media platforms increases, the more that businesses should utilize it. This also translates to more potential leads and customers for your business to seize.

Apart from those mentioned, here are more ways that the social media is helping a business thrive:

1. It can help create a brand image

Information is easy to spread in social media because of the volume of people that can pass it around. This makes it the best platform to support “word of mouth” advertising, which is one of the most effective forms of advertising. You can create your brand image in social media because your message can easily circulate within it. Relevance is the key to target the right audience you want to engage, so make sure that your content is relevant to your industry.

2. It encourages customer loyalty

The consistency of your posts, especially the relevant and high value content that you deliver, will help you gain the trust and confidence of your customers. This is one step towards a more meaningful and lasting relationship to commence between you and your customers.

3. It can improve your customer service

The social media platform provides a 2 way communication between you and your customer, which makes the interaction personalized. You can also do it real time, so that the customer can explain the nature of the problem and you can expound your solution to it. This way, there will be clarity in your communication, and the resolution will be mutually beneficial. Social media can also strengthen your customer relationship management system.

4. It increases your online presence

You can use multiple social media sites to support your social media marketing campaigns, and for you to engage a broader type of audiences. Your online presence corresponds to your “identities” online, which could be measured by how you build your profiles within the internet. These include your website (a must!), your blog, directory listings, social media accounts, mentions, citations and links.

5. It can boost web traffic and complement your SEO campaigns

Search engines now recognize social media profiles as a reliable measurement of online visibility for your business. Thus, it helps that you also nurture several social media accounts that will help the search engines verify your information and your existence. Rankings in the search engine results page are influenced by SEO, and now with your social media activities as well.

The social media reach and network can also promote a website and boost the traffic it gets. Just like SEO, the social media can also influence the way consumers will be able to locate you in the results page.

6. It attracts sales

There are 2 ways that social media marketing can help your business: to increase your brand visibility, and to attract sales. It can also serve as an advertising platform, which can attract high converting customers. If you want your social media marketing campaign to serve as a sales pipeline, it is best to integrate it to your email, organic search and content marketing.

7. It lowers marketing cost

Social media is very attractive to businesses because it requires little to no investment in order to utilize. It is beyond cheaper than using traditional forms of media advertising like TV, radio and print. Aside from money, you can also save time in creating your own marketing campaigns because of its simple and intuitive platform. It is also flexible to accommodate various marketing campaign scales.

Effective Social Media Marketing Campaign

Summing it up, the social media is a great platform to use when you want to implement brand awareness, increase customer loyalty and funnel sales into your business. Just make sure that you do it properly, and it is important to specify your objectives and goal for it first, so as to align your strategies to it.

Here are some of the characteristics of a successful social media marketing strategy that can ensure greater success for your campaigns:

1. Targeted – It should be aligned with the company’s objectives and goals, in order to have the right focus and for its performance to be evaluated appropriately.

2. Focused – Being focused don’t necessarily mean that you will be using a single strategy for a long period of time. But it rather implies that it must be pointing in a single direction. This is to make sure that you can vary your approach as part of experimenting with the right strategies, but should still arrive to your desired results.

3. Measurable – Your objectives and end-goals can also serve as metrics for you to understand your social media marketing effectiveness. Apart from it, you can also come up with other measurable criteria to further refine your analysis. Social media marketing tools use business intelligence and analytics to process your campaign data, and return reports that will help you determine improvement points, innovation opportunities and upcoming trends.

4. Engaging and high value content – They say, content remains to be the king. And it remains somewhat true because it drives the trust and confidence of your customers to stay loyal to you.

5. Simple – Keeping your approach simple and straightforward, will spare your potential customers from the guesswork of getting the message you want to convey. While creativity will keep things interesting, but going overboard might give your potential customers mixed signals that might refrain them from getting your point.

Social Media Marketing Services

Consider looking at these latest social media statistics:

1. There are now 2.3 billion active social media users tracked.
2. There are about 12 new active social media users that are added each day.
3. Ninety-one percent of retail brands are utilizing 2 or more social media accounts.
4. Internet users have an average of 5 social media accounts.

The numbers can speak of the volume of customers you need to filter and target the ones that will give you the revenues you need. The equivalent number of the 91 percent of retail brands also corresponds to the businesses that also engage in social media marketing. As the social media market stiffens, the more that one should leverage against competitors.

Working with social media marketing, especially now that it has grown tremendously, would entail additional help from social media marketing experts. Getting social media marketing services can make a sound investment, especially with the payoff that social media can return to your business. The market for social media marketing companies is robust with plenty of choices, so it is important that you choose the best social media marketing services that will address your needs and work with your objectives.

Here are the important features that you should look for in a social media marketing service:

1. It should run targeted campaigns

Your social media marketing firm must have the capability to understand the nature of the industry you’re in, and the market you should be targeting in order to maximize the results. By implementing targeted campaigns, you save effort and money by focusing on high value conversions and not just about the mere volume of followers that does not translate to more than that.

2. It maintains its reputation through excellence in their work

The length and quality of service of a social media marketing agency are reflected by its reputation in its industry. You may conduct a background research of your prospect providers, and when you have narrowed down a few in your list, you may schedule a one on one meeting so you can know more about what they do and how they do it. Asking the right questions, and working with a criteria and specific set of objectives can also help you choose the right partner for you.

3. It constantly measures the performance of the campaigns

A good social media marketing provider always strives to improve on its services by constantly monitoring and measuring the performance of its deployed campaigns. This is part of its quality control, which ensures that its clients are getting the best services for their investment.

4. It delivers high quality and profitable results

Whether you intend your social media marketing campaign to promote brand awareness or to drive sales, your social media marketing agency should deliver the required results. And since you are going to shell out investment for this, it is only logical that you require it to increase your sales volume in order to achieve an ROI.

To assist you in getting the right provider that will help you achieve your goals, check out CrowdReviews.com’s social media marketing reviews.