Abstract
Social media marketing is an ongoing business trend practiced by most successful small and large-scale businesses. It involves creating brand profiles on various social media platforms and promoting business services and products. Digital marketing is essential because it offers a company huge benefits, including brand awareness, a large audience, and increased sales revenues. A successful business deploys the most advanced plans to market in social media.
Some of the strategies involve the use of chatbots, personalization of customer experiences, effective marketing content, diverse content, and the creation of an audience community. Other businesses thriving also employ brand ambassadors to create relevant social media sites and run cross-channel campaigns for their products and services. Social media marketing helps businesses grow in terms of audience, culture, and sales.
Introduction
Social media marketing involves the application of social media websites including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Reddit to sell business goods and services. In a mission to promote organizational culture, tone, and vision, the business salespeople engage with loyal and potential customers on the platforms. Social media marketing is important because, among many other benefits attained, companies reach millions of customers from different parts of the world. Businesses use various marketing strategies to earn maximum benefits in social media marketing. Some of the strategies used include chat boxes, customized customer experiences, effective marketing approaches, diversified profiles, and brand ambassadors. Social media marketing is a trendy business model that helps businesses grow in terms of customer base, sales, and brand loyalty.
Importance of Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing is important for businesses seeking to grow beyond their local region and customer base. According to Nyagazda (2021), social media has become one of the most effective aspects of digital marketing because businesses earn incredible benefits, such as reaching more customers, increased brand awareness, and a boost in sales. Through these platforms, companies get a chance to reach a global market by reaching a diverse audience. Operating in an international market helps the business’s brand to become famous.
Digital marketing enables a company to improve its brand loyalty through social interactions. In the social platforms, the salesperson engages with customers; learns their needs and a way to meet them. That way, the brand can earn customers’ loyalty and retain them. During the marketing process, businesses introduce their brands to millions of people (Nyagadza, 2021). The platforms are also not limited to the creation of brand awareness but also promotional campaigns.
Existing and new products are advertised through paid promotions while the customers get a chance to directly communicate with the business salespersons. Social media marketing is also cost-effective compared to road promotions and expensive television advertisements (Arsenijevic & Jovic, 2019). The model of digital marketing helps the business reduce marketing costs and increase return on investment.
Social media marketing also improves the traffic of business websites. When businesses share content on social media, whether promotional or not, they add a website link through which customers reach their website for more details and other products (Nyagadza, 2021). Increased website traffic means more customers saw available offers on products and services, thus increasing sales. Digital marketing enhances the SEO rankings of businesses by making social media is a core factor. The frequent interactions of the firm in social media give it an algorithm that keeps its ranking evolving. Study shows that successful brands have a healthy social media presence (Nyagadza, 2021). The SEO ranking signals to the customers that the brand is credible, trustworthy, and valuable. However, the strategies used in social media marketing dictate the success or failure of the business.
Social Media Marketing Strategies for Businesses
Use of Chatbots
Chatbots are integrated into social media platforms to directly engage with customers and answer their inquiries. Chatbots are artificial intelligence robots used to replace humans in chats and comment sections (Arsenijevic & Jovic, 2019). The bots can communicate and resolve customers’ problems without the need for human interruption. They integrate with social media platforms mostly used by customers. Platforms like chatty people make it possible for chatbots to access other social media easily.
Chatbots used by the marketing company help to know more about their customers’ needs. The bots collect customer data which would help in marketing needs. Some bots utilized by companies can tell a customer’s location, age, gender, and product preferences (Arsenijevic & Jovic, 2019). Such customer information is critical in developing products and knowing to which regions to sell them. When employing the bots, the firm is communicating with potential customers while collecting information about their needs. Study shows that the best way to earn customers’ loyalty is by learning and meeting their needs (Arsenijevic & Jovic, 2019). Therefore, the utilization of chatbots also earns brand loyalty from the customers. Many successful businesses are using chatbots to learn and meet customer needs by knowing their preferences and their regions.
Creating Personalized Experiences for Customers
The most effective way to meet customers’ needs is by customizing their experiences. Other ways to personalize the customer experience include using chatbots. The process involves creating ads that redirect customers to the messenger window for chats with the bot (Jacobson et al., 2020). That way, the bot answers all customers’ inquiries and collects their needs to be met. The chatbots allow the sellers to break the traditional perspective of advertisements which is always about selling by allowing customers to inquire about anything else. Chatbots make the marketer’s experience better by boosting sales, creating a loyal fan base, and offering a personal customer experience.
Creating Effective Content Marketing Strategy
Using the right content in marketing gives the business an increased audience. High-quality SEO content helps the business get linked to the right customers. Prime marketing content seeks to be precise in giving information about the product or service (Jacobson et al., 2020). Other than attracting a large audience, an excellent content promoting approach can be freely applied. The most relevant hashtag should be posted alongside the content. Choosing related and trendy hashtags helps businesses attract more and relevant customers.
Creating a Community for the Audience
Social media platforms are effective in creating a community because they allow the audience to follow a brand. Once a community is formed, it expects to see and learn from the brand. In this case, the brand needs to keep the audience interested by posting relatable content (Jacobson et al., 2020). Businesses post blogs to ask questions through which the audience can relate to the brand. Other ways of making interaction with the audience interesting are gathering opinions of specific matters, sharing emerging news, liking and sharing audience posts, and engaging them by asking to like and share the brand’s posts.
Use of Diverse Content
The audience or the formed community responds to a wide variety of content. Instead of using posts all the time, marketers use imagery, interesting podcasts, and fun videos to capture the audience’s attention (Jacobson et al., 2020). The application of such media is another way of adding a personality to the brand. Posting plain texts all the time is boring and the audience is likely to ignore important future posts. Successful application of media entails creating fun videos or images containing brand content.
Use of Brand Ambassadors
The best promotional tool is employing people loyal to the brand. Brand advocates use social media to convince their followers that they need certain products or services. They also provide links and information on how to buy from the brand (Drummond et al., 2020). Today, brand advocates increase sales by double compared to ads by brand platforms. Current social media users trust celebrities and are more likely to buy the products they use.
Therefore, employing celebrities as brand ambassadors influences many new customers to love and shop for the brands’ products and services. For example, figure 1 shows a social media post for Fendi and SKIMS posted by their brand ambassadors (Hyde, 2021). Kim Kardashian, the owner of SKIMS, collaborated with Fendi to produce products and market them together. Kandarshin had over 263 million followers on Instagram, thus helping the two businesses reach all of her followers as potential customers (Hyde, 2021). A brand represented by popular advocates makes more sales and more revenues.
Creating Relevant Platforms and Running Cross-Channel Campaigns
Social media marketing requires firms to create profiles on the most popular sites to reach as many customers as possible. Platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Tiktok are known to have many people. Furthermore, choosing relevant media is key to marketing because not all sites contain the right buyers (Jacobson et al., 2020). For example, Gucci is less likely to use Twitter for marketing as compared to Instagram because while Twitter is better for sharing ideas, Instagram is fit for showing fashion and lifestyles.
Brands also run cross-channel campaigns on all their social media platforms. While creating such campaigns, the brand content needs to be outstanding and emotional to attract the audience. The campaign may contain same or closely different content depending on the social media platform used (Jacobson et al., 2020). The content should be posted on all the social media at the approximately the same time to capture the attention of the brand’s audience. An effective cross-channel campaign tells an engaging story, links the landing page for more details, and has a unique name and several hashtags.
Conclusion
Social media marketing is the most effective means of marketing today as social media is taking over the world. Businesses use the most advanced strategies to reap the most benefits from the platforms. Other than reaching a high volume of audience, the marketed brand is widely known, makes more sales, and is run on cheaper ads. Successful businesses take social media marketing a notch higher by investing more, especially in brand advocates. Digital marketing will take charge of the marketing industry in the future as technology evolves daily.
References
Arsenijevic, U., & Jovic, M. (2019). Artificial intelligence marketing: Chatbots. In 2019 International Conference on Artificial Intelligence: Applications and Innovations (IC-AIAI), 19-193. IEEE.USA. Web.
Drummond, C., O’Toole, T., & McGrath, H. (2020). Digital engagement strategies and tactics in social media marketing. European Journal of Marketing, 1-6. Web.
Hyde, S. Y. (2021). SKIMS and Fendi partner for an epic new collaboration. Harper’s BAZAAR. Web.
Jacobson, J., Gruzd, A., & Hernández-García, Á. (2020). Social media marketing: Who is watching the watchers? Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, 53(1), 101-774. Web.
Nyagadza, B. (2021). Search engine marketing and social media marketing predictive trends. Journal of Digital Media & Policy, 1-4. Web.