The advent of social media changed how the game is played when it comes to digital marketing and customer relationship management. The platform provided a way for companies to increase their web presence by promoting their businesses in social, community-based networks. Marketing with social media opened the doors for the two way communication between the company and its customers, which makes it faster to resolve concerns and complaints. It also provided a way for customers to take an active part in improving the products and services, as well to influence future innovations according to their needs.
Social media enhances the way a business targets its audience. The methods have become more interactive, and there is sharing of high quality content that is relevant to the product or service being offered. This results to well informed consumers, which now know what they want, what they need and how it is going to be delivered to satisfy them.
Benefits of Social Media to Consumers
Marketing experts learned that a consumer purchase things in order to:
- Satisfy a need
- Enjoy or achieve pleasure or entertainment
So a typical mantra for businesses to significantly influence modern consumers is to engage them through a more interactive approach in solving their needs. Social media is capable of attracting customers through a direct interaction with the business, an engaging content, and a more visual presentation of products and services to stimulate further the interest of the consumers.
On the consumers end, social media allows them to become informed customers – they know what they want, when they need it, and how it is going to be delivered to them. Other reasons why social media is also favorable for customers include:
- Social media for marketing informs them about the latest trends in the market.
- Customers can know more about the company’s products and services, even without contacting the company yet, or if it doesn’t have a website.
- Customers can openly give feedbacks by posting on the company’s social media account directly, so that it can be answered right away.
- Customers can participate with an online community that uses the same products or services, and gain feedbacks about it, before making a purchase decision.
- Customers can also know and participate in upcoming events and insider sales from their favorite brands ahead through social media announcements.
- Customers can take advantage of exclusive discounts and privileges from being a follower or subscriber of the company’s social media accounts.
- Consumers can take advantage of high quality content, which can make them informed customers.
Benefits of Social Media in Online Marketing
The impact of social media in online marketing is multifaceted, which influences a variety of factors like lead conversions, consumer purchase decisions, online presence, brand visibility and company reputation. And there are many ways to use social media to build a business. Here are the other benefits that social media brings to businesses that utilize it for their marketing campaigns:
- Social media enables businesses to know more about their audiences. Analytics tools can capture broad customer categories like age, sex, and gender from subscribers and even conversations. You can use this information to know your unique audience and nurture them, and to empower the category you are weakest and make targeted campaigns to engage them as well.
- Geo targeting enables local businesses to stand out by incorporating location-based information like maps and native language options.
- Social media can help a business improve its customer service by providing an alternative platform for customers to air their complaints, concerns and raise questions. By making the social media account public, businesses will be compelled to answer right away as delays may affect their online reputation.
- A well-structured and informative content is easily shareable in social media networks, which can your business take advantage as a form of brand awareness and instilling a sense of authority and credibility in its respective industry. Public networks like social media make it easier for content to reach its target audience.
- Your business can reach out to a variety of audiences that make up both the desktop and mobile social media users and subscribers. It is quite challenging to do this using traditional offline marketing campaigns like TV commercials, large scale ad prints, celebrity endorsements or magazine features, which can be very expensive and toiling when it comes to effort and preparation.
The “Exceptional Experience”
It was said, that from the “information age”, we are now in the brink of “experiential age”. Consumers are looking for an exceptional experience with their engagements, whether socially or even when marketed at. With so many options, and vendors vying for a perfect spot in the market, consumers themselves find it difficult to stick with one brand that continuously satisfies and engages them.
Consumers nowadays don’t get easily convinced by something that attracts their eyes, but with what stimulates their minds and heightens their senses. Social media marketing does this by adding interactive and personalized elements in their campaigns. As starters, it uses images to provide more visual representations of the products, much like with magazine advertisements, only that the images are practically limitless, and it can be downloaded and shared online. Social media networks like YouTube allows companies to create video presentations of their products or services, to easily introduce and expound a message without the need to talk personally to the clients. The videos are not limited in length too, which will contribute higher expense when done as a TV commercial. The videos can also be shared online, or be embedded across the company’s blogs and websites.
Social media networks can also make satisfied customers share their experiences online, which bring the “word of mouth” advertising to a higher level. It is another dimension when it comes to exceptional experience, which favors a business so well because social media turned the consumers to be the most credible advertisers around.
Practically, a consumer would actually believe the recommendations of peers and family now more than what an advertisement convinces him or her to. There are even professional bloggers, which you can invite to try a particular product, and give out an honest review of it. If the experience turns out to be a great one, you get a powerful recommendation from a reputable person in his industry, and at the same time, maximize his or her network of followers in social media. There are even more aggressive marketers that actually pay bloggers to “hype” their products and services, in order to faster penetrate the social media.
Another element that brings exceptional experience is mobile technology. With the proliferation of mobile devices, consumers now have more access to the internet, and to their social media accounts. Social media have become an indispensable part of our everyday living, and is greatly influenced our purchase decisions. According to a study by a digital marketing agency, 74% of buyers are influenced by what they saw in social media networks. Mobile technology also allows companies to develop their own mobile apps, which makes them easily convert the perked interests of its consumers instantly to sales and revenues. These mobile applications can be customized by the consumer, to return more targeted information to him. This kind of personalized engagement can compel a consumer to buy at the same time his attention was captured. Elements like maps, discount vouchers, loyalty points and rewards, exclusive sales and events, instant access to customer service, and online purchase buttons can be incorporated in a mobile app for maximized results.
Social Media Management
An exceptional experience can also be further enhanced by using multiple types of social media platforms. This can broaden a company’s reach, thus widening its online presence. Each type of social media platform brings a different experience, and by being present across a lot can contribute to that complete marketing approach.
But it is not easy to manage different kinds of social media accounts at once. Each has its own distinct elements to work on, and may have a specific type of audience to reach, which may have different needs and engaging elements to work on. Focusing on one social media platform narrows down the full advantage, but it is also crucial to work with many because one failed use of social media platform can directly affect the others.
Social media management tools enable you to reach your goals faster and more efficient. A successful social media marketing campaign is always a product of ingenuity, creativity and technology based tools. Your journey towards implementing your social media marketing strategies will entail you to make important decisions. What are your objectives? Who are your target audiences? How big are you willing to invest in your social media marketing campaigns? What tools do your competitors use? By answering these questions, you can assess which kind of social media management tool that is right for your needs.
Typically, social media management tools are categorized into two – self-service tools and enterprise-hosted tools. Depending on the scale of your business, the investment you are willing to shell and the nature of your goals will determine which one will work best. To know more about the top social media management tools in the market today, check out CrowdReviews.com.
The importance of social management enables a marketing manager to stay on top of all its social media campaigns. It allows him or her to monitor and measure the performance of each campaign and apply improvements where it will deem appropriate. Through analytics and business intelligence, he or she can discover opportunities and insights from the data out of the campaigns and the customers’ feedbacks. These are valuable with decision makings, and in preparing for future trends that may arise.
For a detailed and updated social media management tool reviews from actual clients that utilizes the, see CrowdReviews.com.
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