Note: We updated this blog on the importance of using social media in marketing with fresh insights to set you up for success in 2023.
As 2022 closed and opened to 2023, many markets entered into a recession. This has put a squeeze on marketing budgets, affecting headcount, marketing programs, and martech tools. But astute marketing managers and leaders can see why social media marketing is important, now more than ever.
This is a tough economy, and chances are that it’ll be harder to get new customers and, just as importantly, keep your existing customers. It’s not just about fresh leads, but keeping revenue up across every front. The use of social media marketing will be critical for engaging existing customers, reaching new audiences, building trust and loyalty (that carries into renewals, upsell and cross-sell growth, etc), and much more.
Because – today more than ever – buyers listen to real people, not brands. They trust the real- world experiences of their peers, not slick marketing copy. They value authenticity, not ads.
Basically, social media platforms (especially LinkedIn) are communities of real people. In fact, one can say that every individual LinkedIn post is a community in itself. People congregate to those posts to share ideas, give advice, answer questions, provide support, and much more.
Notice something? Brands aren’t starting those conversations, nor are they driving them. It’s all people. So, when thinking about a social media marketing strategy, you absolutely need to pair it with a brand advocacy program centered on your employees and customers.
Social media has become an integral part of marketing strategies for businesses of all sizes. With over 4.5 billion people using social media worldwide, platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and TikTok have become effective channels for brands to reach, engage, and convert target audiences.
In this article, we will discuss the key reasons why social media marketing is important for business growth and success:
Reach a Massive Audience
The expansive user base of major social networks provides an unparalleled opportunity for brands to promote products and services Facebook alone has close to 3 billion monthly active users. Even newer platforms like TikTok have over 1 billion monthly active users
This allows brands to increase awareness and get discovered by prospects who may not have been exposed to the business otherwise No other medium offers the same potential reach as social media marketing
Target Specific Audiences
Beyond just reach, social media platforms enable sophisticated targeting capabilities. Brands can zero in on specific demographics, interests, behaviors, and more to ensure content and messaging resonates with high-intent audiences.
Tools like Facebook Ads Manager and LinkedIn Campaign Manager allow you to define target segments and only show ads to those that meet the criteria. This results in higher engagement and conversion rates compared to broader targeting.
Build Meaningful Connections
Social media facilitates more meaningful engagement between brands and audiences. Unlike traditional print or broadcast advertising, it enables two-way communication in real-time.
Brands can foster relationships by directly interacting with prospects and customers. Simple actions like responding to comments, messaging followers, and asking questions can go a long way in humanizing a brand.
These social connections inspire greater trust and loyalty towards companies. Audiences that engage with brands on social media demonstrate higher retention and lifetime value.
Increase Website Traffic
Driving traffic to the company website is a key objective for most social media strategies. Networks like Facebook and Twitter enable users to click through directly to brand sites from posts.
Call-to-action buttons can boost click-through rates. For example, adding a “Learn More” button to a LinkedIn post can help send prospects to a landing page or product site.
Social referral traffic also converts better than other sources. One study found social convert at a rate 15 times higher than banner ads. The warm, qualified leads from social networks are more likely to turn into customers.
Amplify Brand Voice
Every brand has a unique tone and personality. Social media allows companies to creatively express their voice at scale.
Platforms like TikTok and Instagram, with a heavy emphasis on video and visual media, provide engaging storytelling canvases. Even B2B companies have opportunities to showcase brand culture and values.
This ability to amplify brand voice leads to greater differentiation and prominence within industries. Consistent social media messaging also reinforces positioning and identity.
Monitor Trends and Insights
The real-time, interactive nature of social media presents valuable consumer and industry insights. Brands can leverage social listening tools to identify trending topics, viral content, brand mentions, competitor activity, and more.
These qualitative and quantitative data points from social platforms offer powerful cues to evolving customer preferences. Brands can derive actionable steps from social analytics to create more relevant, timely messaging and products.
Provide Effective Customer Service
Today’s consumers expect brands to provide customer service through social media. Platforms like Twitter and Facebook are popular channels for customers to voice questions, concerns, feedback, and complaints.
An effective social media customer service strategy can improve brand sentiment and satisfaction. Quick, helpful responses to customer service inquiries on social media makes a positive impression.
According to Sprout Social, brands using its platform shortened response times to 3-5 hours on average, a 90% improvement. Better social media customer service boosts retention and advocacy.
Generate Referrals and Word-of-Mouth
The inherently viral nature of social platforms allows brands to spark real word-of-mouth at scale. Users sharing, liking, retweeting brand content expands reach and visibility.
Influential followers with large networks can be tapped to organically promote products as brand ambassadors. However, even average users sharing content to friends and family accumulates new impressions.
McKinsey found that positive social media buzz and interactions convert prospects at 2-3x the rate of paid advertising. Thus, brands should actively encourage social sharing, user-generated content, and referrals.
Drive Conversions and Sales
The popularity of social media shopping confirms its growing importance in directly driving conversions and sales for brands.
According to Sprout Social, 68% of consumers follow brands on social media to stay updated on new products and services. Social ads and organic content that highlight promotions and deals effectively move prospects down the funnel.
Retail brands in particular have leveraged shoppable posts on Instagram and Facebook to enable direct social commerce. However, even B2B and service businesses can include sales-oriented calls-to-action in social content.
Provide Competitive Intelligence
Monitoring competitor social media activity provides valuable intelligence on their marketing and business strategies. Brands can gain insights on competitor product launches, campaigns, messaging, audiences, and more.
These competitive insights allow brands to differentiate their own strategy. They can identify competitor weaknesses to capitalize on and gaps in the market to fill. Such social listening essentially enables real-time SWOT analysis.
Several tools like Sprout Social make this competitive analysis easy. Brands that ignore competitor social media activity miss out on key intelligence.
Enhance SEO and Content Marketing
Social media engagement and shares help content rank better in search engines like Google. Higher social signals correlate with improved organic search visibility.
This allows brands to leverage social activity to enhance overall SEO and content marketing performance. Strategically optimizing and promoting content across social platforms leads to a positive SEO impact.
Brands should actively cross-promote new blog posts and articles on social channels to maximize exposure, engagement, and search ranking benefits.
Provide Marketing Analytics
Robust analytics and reporting across social platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter enables brands to quantify success and optimize efforts.
Key metrics like engagement rate, click-through rate, reach, impressions, follower growth, lead generation, and conversion rates should be diligently measured. These social media KPIs showcase marketing ROI and progress.
Tools like Sprout Social make it easy to generate visual social media analytics reports across multiple platforms. Brands can splice data on post types, formats, topics, audiences, keywords, etc. to glean actionable insights.
Enhance Brand Authority
An active social media presence with a large engaged audience strengthens brand authority and clout. Brands with higher follower counts and interaction rates signal credibility and trust.
This authority boost instills confidence among prospects to purchase that brand’s products. In this way, social media success becomes a self-reinforcing virtuous cycle – higher engagement and followers leads to greater authority and conversions.
Authority signals like verified profile badges on Twitter and Instagram also lend brands more legitimacy. Social media activity is becoming essential for building brand authority.
Facilitate Crisis Management
Social media has become the first public forum where brand crises unfold today. Angry customers often vent on Twitter and damaging stories go viral on Facebook.
Proactively monitoring and listening helps brands spot rising issues before they erupt. More importantly, social media allows brands to directly engage affected audiences during crises.
Speedy, empathetic, and transparent responses on social media can mitigate reputational damage. Social PR and internal social collaboration is crucial for navigating difficult brand situations.
Recruit Talent and Employees
Beyond marketing functions, HR teams are using social media more for recruitment marketing and outreach.
Platforms like LinkedIn and Twitter enable promoting job openings to qualified candidates where they digitally congregate. HR can nurture talent communities and build the employment brand.
Referrals and employee advocacy on social media also aids recruiting. Current staff sharing open roles with their networks surfaces quality applicants through trusted social connections.
Improve Internal Collaboration
Internal social networks like Workplace by Facebook, Slack, and Microsoft Yammer drive better collaboration, knowledge sharing, and communication.
They enable staff to digitally interact, brainstorm ideas, share best practices, participate in groups, and collaborate on documents. Streamlined internal social collaboration ultimately boosts productivity.
These private platforms also foster employee advocacy by making it easy to share company content externally to personal networks. Employees become influential brand ambassadors.
Given the billions of active social media users worldwide, it is imperative for modern brands to develop comprehensive social media marketing strategies.
There are now proven benefits ranging from increased reach and traffic to brand building and lead generation. While trends will evolve, social media platforms will only grow as indispensable marketing channels.
Brands that fail to make social media central to their digital marketing and communication strategies risk falling behind competitors. The multitude of business benefits highlighted in this article demonstrate the indispensable and growing importance of social media marketing.
Why Employee Advocacy is a Great Use of Social Media for Marketing
One way companies can think differently about their social media strategy is by developing an employee advocacy program.
Employee advocacy is the promotion of a company by the people who work for it. When employees are proud to be working for a company, they’ll want to let the world know. And when they do so, their voices go further and gain more trust than traditional branding.
Study after study shows that word-of mouth marketing is effective. When employees share their experiences, their social connections are more likely to see their content, leave a comment, and trust the post more.
A study from Fleishman Hillard even found that consumers trust a company’s employees three times more than the company leaders.
Employees should be encouraged to share original posts that promote the company in order to boost organic reach, build brand credibility, and attract better-qualified leads.
Implement Social Listening
Listen to customers and what people are saying about their company. This gives you a chance to get candid feedback about how others view your brand. It opens a window into improving the weaker areas of your business while reinforcing aspects that already resonate with people.
Social Media Marketing In 5 Minutes | What Is Social Media Marketing? [For Beginners] | Simplilearn
Why is social media important in marketing?
Social media is important in marketing because consumers often use the platforms to seek information about a brand and shop its products or services. Using social media strategies for your marketing campaign can ensure you’re spreading your messages to every area where your target audiences are present.
How can social media marketing help a brand?
These include management tools, social listening tools, and content creation tools. Very few brands avoid marketing on social media completely. That’s because developing a social media marketing strategy and building a few high-quality accounts has some pretty big benefits. Social media can significantly increase brand awareness, for one.
How does social media marketing work?
In a nutshell, social media marketing works by promoting your brand to social media audiences. Businesses get a platform to say who they are, what they do, and why you should buy from them, and customers get to see a wide range of products, services, and offers all from the comfort of their phone or computer.
How social media can benefit your marketing campaigns?
Learning how social media channels can benefit your marketing campaigns can help you develop strategies to reach target audiences in spaces that they frequent. In this article, we define the importance of social media in marketing endeavors and list eight benefits of having an active social media presence for a brand.
