What is Social Media Marketing?

Social media marketing is using social media channels to connect and sell to both prospective and existing customers. With many, many social media channels out there such as Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, TikTok YouTube, Snapchat and countless more the options to market your business are endless.

Social media marketing first started as largely as a publishing tool where businesses shared their content to send consumers to their website and ultimately lead to sales. But social media has matured far beyond this. Now businesses can use social media in any number of ways to maximise business potential such as engagement and reach monitoring, targeted ads, selling direct on social media platforms and other options.

There as 4.6billion social media users worldwide and these users spend an average of 3 hours per day on social media sites.

 Benefits of Social Media Marketing

Provides direct access to customers

Through social media platforms your business has a method to directly contact and stay consistently in touch with customers. Rather than having to go through other channels, your business can communicate directly with potential customers to market new products, sales, and any other news.

Easy to measure the benefit of your marketing campaigns

With social media there is always analytics in the background to track and analyse how well or how poorly any campaigns may have done. You can get data such as how many people seen your ads, how many people put items in their basket, how many people purchased an item, country sales breakdowns and many, many other statistics.

In comparison to other more traditional styles of marketing such as TV, you have no way of tracking who may have seen your TV ad and if they did see it what then happened. For example, you will never have accurate knowledge of who purchased a product based on seeing a TV ad.

Audience targeting

One of the major advantages of social media for brands is that it provides you with a direct line to your audience and consumers. When your business sets up an advertisement on a social media platform you can indicate the profile of the person, they want to view it. Therefore, as a result you can target your key market. Prior to social media, it was very difficult to determine how well an advertisement was targeted and whether it has reached the right audience.

Cost effective

Creating an account on almost every social media platform is free and it costs nothing to post content and interact with customers. Paid ads of course cost money, but in comparison to more traditional style marketing such as TV ads, this is still highly cost effective.

Often the initial costs with social media are the biggest investment, as you learn your target audience and how to fine tune your ads to meet demands. Then from this data analysis and insights can help target the correct audience and keep costs to a minimum.

Need some help making your social media marketing strategy?

We work closely with all our social media clients to ensure we know your target audience and how you would like to market your business to them. We will then use highly personalised data analysis to pinpoint areas for improvement and profit maximisation.

If this sounds like something that would benefit your business, get in touch, we would love to help!