10 Reasons Why You Should Use Social Media In Your Marketing Strategy
Now in its teenage years, we can safely say that social media is here to stay. With whole brands building their businesses off the back of their social accounts the power of social media simply can’t be denied. Yet many businesses are still using a seat-of-pants approach to social media, and not treating it as strategically as they should. If this sounds like you, don’t worry. We’ve put together an easy-to-understand guide that takes you through 10 ways you can turn your social media approach around, and how to make social media integral to the success of your brand.If you are looking to leverage social media for consumer brand marketing. Here we present 10 most important use cases that will have a positive impact on your Business.
(This article has been recently updated in 2020.)
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Website Traffic and Sales
Social media is a brilliant source of website traffic and new customers. Why? Because it is very likely that your target audience is already there, you just need to create some thumb stopping content that will entice them off-platform!
Nearly 50% of the world’s population uses social media according to a study by Statista. That is over 3 billion people! These people are highly engaged too, on average social media users are spending at least 144 minutes scrolling through their feeds a day according to another study from Statista.
And it turns out that their mind is in the right place too. 54% of social browsers use social media to research products, so it is only right that you try and send these people to your website ASAP!
Brands can harness the traffic from social media by posting engaging and relevant content via their owned channels with carefully thought-out calls to action that give the user a reason to click.
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Grow a Digital Presence
Digital presence is just a fancy way of saying how easy it is for people to find you or happen upon your products whilst online, which is highly important in a competitive market. In a world where everyone is online chattering you want to make sure your socials are in good shape and that people are talking about you. One of the ways you can grow your digital presence online compared to your competitors is by increasing your Social Share of Voice or SSoV. By growing your SSoV you have a chance to increase your market share. Social media is not just an arm of your marketing strategy anymore – entire brands have built themselves on the back of social media. How? Read on…
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Social Listening
Wouldn’t it be nice if you could find out where people are talking about your brand, what they are saying and why they are saying it? Before you wax your time and research budget on secret shoppers, focus groups and surveys, get social listening! Social listening is the art of tuning into relevant conversations on social media so you can spot trends, keep an eye on what your competitors are up to, and catch issues before they become major problems. Miappi’s brand advocacy reporting service will deliver valuable social listening information for your brand that you can then use to shape your future marketing strategy and ensure that you build and maintain that all important Social Share of Voice.
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UGC and Brand Advocacy
Despite relatively recent leaps in technology and the popularity of dreamy locations and up-and-coming influencers, the truth is nothing beats good ol’ fashioned word of mouth and social proof. User Generated Content (UGC), also known as earned media, is a catch-all term for the images, videos and comments that your customers are sharing to social media which clearly feature your brand. The nature of this kind of content can range from simple reviews and demonstrations, through to creative applications that delight and surprise. Smart brands have caught on to this and are republishing UGC about their brand on their social media, on their purchase paths and anywhere else they can imagine. Usually, finding, curating and licensing this content manually is incredibly time consuming and difficult, but Miappi’s Content Aggregator makes the job a cinch. So don’t exhaust yourself trying to be a #content generating powerhouse – let your most engaged fans share their enthusiasm with you.
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Customer Service
Not only can you use social media as a means to take and answer queries or complaints, with social listening you can pick up on issues before you’re approached. By using social media to handle complaints, you allow your customers to communicate with you in an accessible and informal way, and reduce the chances that your competitors get a foot in the door. Also, by bringing down barriers between you and your customers and making your brand approachable, you can use customer service as another way to continue to shape the tone of voice and values for your whole brand.
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Service Updates and Promotions
Stop press! Your social media channels have always been a great way to quickly update your customers on essential aspects of your business such as delivery times and changes to processes, as well as a place to share news and get flash offers started.
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Paid Social
You’ve got a great post that’s achieved loads of engagement from people who follow your brand. Now what? It’s time to think big and expand your social media marketing’s reach by using Instagram and Facebook’s paid social tools. By adding some of your marketing budget to a sponsored post campaign you’ll help your content get seen by new audiences. Leverage posts that have previously earned a lot of engagement to increase the likelihood of reach beyond your followers, or kick start a competition or UGC gathering campaign by putting some money on promoting a clear call-to-action.
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Give your brand personality
We’re a long way from branding being about a stylish logo and a pithy slogan. Authenticity reigns supreme in the land of social media, and skin-deep gambits will not fly. Appearances are important of course, but your brand comes to life when you embody your brand values in the interactions you have with your customers and potential customers. By emphasising your humanity and your values in casual conversations you have a powerful way of increasing brand affinity with customers, and crucially- developing loyalty.
Showing your funny side certainly helps humanising the brand, but showing that you align with the causes that matter to your audience will also help develop long lasting brand affinity
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Stay current
Long term strategizing is great, but social media gives you the ability to immediately react to seasonal or viral moments without having to change your whole campaign. By quickly responding to things that are relevant and meaningful to your audience, you appear flexible and unstuffy, again increasing that likelihood that people will warm to your brand on a personal level.
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Discover and nurture communities
As your digital presence grows, you will reach people and places that you never anticipated, and communities will develop around your brand. Miappi’s tools enable you to seek out such communities on social media, which may inspire new use cases, products or services.
Using the soon to be released ‘Miappi Communities’, you will be able to communicate and nurture long-lasting relationships with your most productive, talented content creators. Not just paid influencers but super-talented consumers who are naturally aligned with your brand and its values.
Your one-stop shop for harnessing social media for consumer brand marketing.
Just because the world of social media is huge, doesn’t mean your job has to be. Our Miappi platform allows you to easily harness the power of all of the above and more with little effort, enabling you to maximise the efficiency of your marketing campaigns and saving you time and effort from doing the above manually. Get in touch to find out more today.
10 Reasons Why You Should Use Social Media in 2018
Social media has rapidly become big business, even though the technology is still young in terms of what we’re normally used to. Social media and business management go hand-in-hand because it allows you to receive information and to act upon it in real-time.
The good news is that if you’re looking to learn how to market your business on social media, we’ve got you covered. We’ve put in the work on your behalf to identify just ten of the main reasons why using social media for your business is a good idea. Let’s get started.
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Sales
If you’re wondering why your business needs social media, the most obvious answer is that it can lead to direct sales. If your company isn’t making sales then ultimately it isn’t making money, either. That said, don’t make the mistake of measuring your social media efforts only by the number of sales you make, because it can take time for it to deliver a return on investment (ROI). Be willing to be patient.
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Research
One of the big benefits of using social media for business is the fact that it can be used to carry out market research. People are already out there on social networking sites talking about either your company itself or the industry it’s in. You just need to look at the right hashtags and see what people are saying. You’ll find that people are literally crying out for products and making plenty of suggestions that your company can take and run with to bring in new customers or to deliver more value to existing ones.
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Bring your business cards to life
Business cards are boring, right? Well, not necessarily. Using social media icons for business cards can point potential customers and contacts to corporate or employee social networking profiles. This helps to bring them to life and to remind people that there’s a real person behind the business card. It also makes your business cards work harder by growing your overall corporate social networking presence.
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Customer service
It’s easy to see that social media is changing business communication. Part of the reason for that is that it allows consumers and customers to talk to each other directly, and part of it is that it also makes brands much approachable. That’s why so many companies are turning to social media sites to offer customer service. They can answer questions in real time and even identify problems that can be fixed for the future.
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Measurability
Social media marketing is a form of digital marketing, and digital marketing is so popular and so powerful because it’s inherently measurable. Social media business statistics can be monitored over time so that you know exactly when your campaigns are working and when they’re not. This measurability makes it much easier to allocate funds and to decide where to prioritise your efforts.
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Availability of tools
One of the biggest advantages of using social networking sites is the fact that so many tools are available. The best social media tools for small business owners tap directly into the APIs of the social networks in question. For example, here at Miappi, we use APIs from social networking sites to identify user-generated content and to create branded galleries to show it off.
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Protecting your IP
If you’re still looking for reasons why your business needs social media, there’s also the fact that even if your company doesn’t have its own official presence on social networking sites, that doesn’t stop someone else from pretending to be you. As your company’s notoriety grows, you run the risk of imposters trying to take advantage of your good name. It’s much better to pre-emptively create a social presence of your own so that they know which account is official.
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Encourages growth
One of the best ways how to use social media to expand your business is to use it to trial new products and services which can help your company to grow. That’s why many companies tweet out ideas before they create them or work with social media influencers to raise the profile of new products. It helps you to cut through the clutter.
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Sets you apart
Using social networking sites to make your company’s voice heard sets you apart from competitors who don’t have as much to say. This effectively makes it easier for consumers to tell who’s passionate about what they do and who’s just doing it for the money. If you’re just doing it for the money then you might be in trouble, but if you’re doing what you do for the love of it then social media sites will help that to shine.
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Adds legitimacy
We’re now at a point in society at which people expect you to be on social networks, and where it’s unusual for a company not to be active on at least the main sites. We’re now at a point at which if a company isn’t active on social networks, it’s unlikely that people will want to do business with them. If you’re not present then you’re not visible. It’s as simple as that.
Why Your Business Needs Social Media?
Ultimately, the benefits of social media for business heavily outweigh any negatives to it, including the miniscule risk that something will be taken out of context or that you’ll go viral for making some sort of mistake. In fact, one of the biggest risks of social media marketing is failing to take advantage of it altogether.
Your competitors are already using social media sites for business and so if you’re failing to take advantage of them then you’re at risk of falling behind. That’s because there are multiple benefits to using social networks, from branding and sales to business intelligence and social media engagement.
Looking for new ways to make the most out of your social media presence? Look no further than Miappi. Our software makes it easier than ever before for you to find and display user-generated content on websites, point of sale devices and more. Get in touch with us to find out more!
