Everything You Need To Know About Social Media Marketing
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Social media marketing is a powerful way for all businesses to reach new customers. Whether you offer products, services, or a mixture of both, this marketing approach can help increase exposure around your brand and draw in customers you wouldn’t be able to attract via more traditional marketing methods, such as print advertising.
There are many social media platforms that companies use to drive website traffic, increase sales, and build their brand. Learn more about what social media marketing is, why it’s beneficial, and how you can start using these platforms to improve your business.
Social media marketing is a marketing method in which companies rely on social media platforms to drive sales, increase website traffic, and promote their brands. This marketing tactic involves creating and sharing content via social media networks in an effort to reach branding and marketing goals. Businesses can use a variety of social media platforms to achieve these goals, with the most popular platforms being Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, and YouTube.
Image via Flickr by Sean MacEntee
The most important reasons why you should incorporate social media marketing into your marketing strategy include:
Social media marketing is so effective because the majority of a company’s customers are already using these platforms in their everyday lives. With 3.8 billion social media users worldwide, social media is one of the best ways to quickly and effectively reach a massive audience base.
Social media users spend an average of three hours per day on social media platforms, and 90.4% of millennials, 48.2% of baby boomers, and 77.5% of Gen Xers all use social media. These statistics show that much of today’s population not only use but trust social media, making it much more likely that users will be more receptive to marketing seen on social media than other marketing methods.
While nearly everyone uses social media, not everyone uses the same social media platform. For example, Gen Xers and millennials are more likely to use Facebook, while millennials are the most prominent users on Twitter and Instagram. This means that you can use particular platforms to reach specific audiences based on your target customer.
Social media marketing is often extremely cost-effective, but most platforms let you create a business account for free and only make you pay to run ads. And, what you pay to advertise on social media is typically a fraction of the cost of what you’d spend advertising elsewhere. For example, advertising via broadcast TV costs an average of $28 for every 1,000 impressions, while social media advertising averages around $2.50 per 1,000 impressions.
There are several steps you should take when creating a social media marketing strategy for your business. These steps include:
No matter what type of business you have, social media marketing will likely help increase sales and boost awareness of your brand. By using resources that can help you build an effective strategy and taking the time to develop a solid social media marketing plan, you can better set yourself — and your business — up for success.