Introduction
It is no secret that social media has changed how companies communicate with their clients and how they do business. Enterprises have increasingly started using social media tools to intercommunicate with their existing and potential customers and protect their brand awareness and image. Social media marketing (SMM) is the critical process of producing content for social media websites to advertise goods and services, foster community among the target market, and increase customer traffic.
SMM has caused some fundamental changes: the ability to communicate with and influence customers in unconventional ways, to manage relationships intelligently, and to make better business decisions (Li et al., 2021). SMM is continuously changing as new features and platforms appear daily. It aims to reach the target market and customers where they are in their social interactions and businesses. Social media today is one of the most effective and efficient marketing tools.
Benefits for Business Growth
SMM is a pull marketing strategy, allowing consumers to access brands, products, and services they are interested in. It provides everything conventional marketing does, only within the boundaries of specific media platforms: Facebook, YouTube, WhatsApp, Instagram, TikTok, and more. One can use any marketing promotion tools for traditional channels, but only concerning social media. In other words, for companies in SMM, advertising, PR, promotions, and direct marketing are available. Within today’s reality, SMM is perceived as an integrated model of organizational activity that transforms networks and influences into valuable strategic tools for achieving desired marketing results (Li et al., 2021).
The online audience is used as an actual focus group. Businesses focus on social media marketing processes to carry out social media correctly and sustainably. Information readily available on social media is especially useful for marketers to implement strategic analysis and digital marketing (Jacobson et al., 2020). SMM has many possibilities for business promotion; it reinforces a brand’s overall communication strategy and can act as the necessary channel for interacting with the audience.
Marketing Communication and Brand Awareness
The most crucial issue in promotion activities in marketing is to communicate with existing and potential customers without time and space restrictions, and to increase brand awareness. For these purposes, one of the tools that businesses can use to achieve their goals is social media platforms and SMM. In addition to traditional media tools such as television, radio, magazines, and newspapers, businesses have enabled them to establish effective marketing communication with social media tools that offer the opportunity to interact with clients on social media platforms. Besides traditional media, social media tools have brought a new perspective to companies’ marketing approaches (Jamil et al., 2022).
The innovations and features offered by the Internet differ from “classic” media tools. In addition to direct communication between individuals and organizations, it has provided opportunities for social communication and relationship building. Social media tools offer businesses options for sales promotion activities. Companies can select target audiences, and unique campaigns can reach the target audience through social media. Brands talk about themselves, generate discussion, determine consumer sentiment, and get candid, honest feedback.
Social networks create significant opportunities and possibilities for businesses to engage in commercial and economic activities. Brands can increase popularity by sharing information and prices about their products and services. Social media tools offer opportunities for companies to strengthen their relationships with consumers and increase closeness. Companies using social media platforms can communicate interactively with people, leading them to think positively about their brands (Jamil et al., 2022).
When these people recommend a specific brand to other users on social media and share their experiences, it impacts the purchasing behavior of other social media users (Ebrahimi et al., 2022). Social media platforms are a part of consumers’ lives today, creating significant opportunities for companies. Companies’ use of social media is necessary and valuable in strengthening their brand image and providing prestige.
In general, social media actively attracts people and engages them in communication with real friends and virtual acquaintances. Users’ friendliness is attractive for brands that want to get into the circle of communication with their potential consumer audience. The low entry threshold compared to traditional media reinforces the desire of businesses to have a presence on social networks. A company must have an account and more than one to start its SMM campaign.
There are a lot of media platforms with social networking features. Each of them has its characteristics and, as a consequence, its advantages and disadvantages. A registered account should get a design that reflects the style of the brand to which it is dedicated. A group must actively live, and to do this, one must create occasions for interaction with its audience, represented in the social network, and do it regularly. It is content, which in social media is commonly called posts: photographs, graphic images, videos, text, and more.
Social networks are attractive to businesses because of their popularity with a broad audience, including almost any brand’s consumers. Despite the entertainment nature of any platform, companies pursue the goal of sales through their presence there. Notably, only some realize a direct link between activity in the social network and increased company income. One way or another, the purpose of being on a social network implies creating communication with consumers, which will sooner or later give its result, a purchase.
As a rule, the objectives of SSM include familiarization with the brand and maintaining the interest in it by the target audience, informing customers about essential events related to the brand, getting leads (motivated to buy potential consumers), and implementing sales. Companies can address issues such as: attracting targeted traffic to their website, branding, an online store, or a company’s marketplace on an online marketplace, creating a community, increasing brand awareness, communicating with disgruntled customers and resolving conflicts, and developing audience engagement in the values communicated by the brand. Before starting, a company needs a social media presence strategy.
It should include goals, a description of the target audience, the choice of sites, the concept of content, stages of page development, a set of activities, a plan for their implementation for at least a year, the necessary budget, and a measure of effectiveness. With all the apparent simplicity of social media marketing, work in this area can be very versatile and require significant resources. Much of the answer depends on the company’s size and the business’s scale.
Key Concepts and Tools
Several concepts of specialized promotion are associated with social media marketing. These include targeting, content marketing, influencer marketing, and others. SMM promotion technologies can be divided into two groups.
The first includes methods to increase natural coverage of the audience. The second involves the paid promotion of content in social networks (Dwivedi et al., 2021). Organic outreach tools include account design, content marketing, hashtags, stories, live broadcasts, and contests. Paid social media outreach tools include promotion posts, targeted advertising, advertising in other groups, and blog advertising.
Traditionally, businesses have been attracted to environments where there is a broad audience of consumers. That is why advertisers have always been and will always be at sporting events, concerts, exhibitions, and other mass events. Social media nowadays acts as a giant magnet for people all over the world. To a large extent, they have played a role in the fact that communication has become possible without borders.
All this is extremely attractive for businesses, as with relatively small resources, even a small company can get a lot of attention through such media platforms. Therefore, commercial organizations are trying even more to adapt social networks for their tasks, and they, in response, are adjusting their algorithms to make them pay more often and more for access to the desired audience. The target actions of commercial SMM are to get direct contact with the audience for live communication and feedback, to have your controlled mouthpiece to convey messages and brand values to the audience, to develop recognition and knowledge of the brand among users, to attract new consumers and maintain relationships with regular customers, to increase sales, to test hypotheses, to collect feedback, to respond to negative and to resolve conflict situations.
Conclusion
In conclusion, SMM is a significant tool for any business, offering a lot of opportunities for small, medium, and large enterprises. It can help and support a brand’s broader communications campaign. Still, it is also quite capable of acting as a primary and necessary channel of interaction with the audience.
The most striking benefits of digital marketing activities for businesses are that they can reach large masses, promote and sell their products or services, perform customer analysis quickly and easily, and, most importantly, do these at low costs. As for the benefits to consumers, they can contact businesses anytime, communicate their requests and complaints, and direct them in line with their wishes by participating in product or service development processes.
References
Dwivedi, Y. K., Ismagilova, E., Hughes, D. L., Carlson, J., Filieri, R., Jacobson, J.,… & Wang, Y. (2021). Setting the future of digital and social media marketing research: Perspectives and research propositions. International Journal of Information Management, 59, 102168. Web.
Jacobson, J., Gruzd, A., & Hernández-García, Á. (2020). Social media marketing: Who is watching the watchers? Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, 53, 1-12. Web.
Jamil, K., Dunnan, L., Gul, R. F., Shehzad, M. U., Gillani, S. H. M., & Awan, F. H. (2022). Role of social media marketing activities in influencing customer intentions: A perspective of a new emerging era. Frontiers in Psychology, 12, 1-12. Web.
Ebrahimi, P., Basirat, M., Yousefi, A., Nekmahmud, M., Gholampour, A., & Fekete-Farkas, M. (2022). Social networks marketing and consumer purchase behavior: The combination of SEM and unsupervised machine learning approaches. Big Data and Cognitive Computing, 6(2), 1-18. Web.
Li, F., Larimo, J., & Leonidou, L. C. (2021). Social media marketing strategy: Definition, conceptualization, taxonomy, validation, and future agenda. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 49, 51-70. Web.