Business growth is the central aim in any business strategy; better growth means more opportunities for investment, more opportunities for workers and ultimately more money in the bank. But cornering your market in order to facilitate growth is not an easy thing to do. As such, social media should be forming a major part of your business’ marketing strategy.
What is Social Media Marketing?
Social media marketing is the leveraging of various social media platforms to advertise your product, grow your customer base and increase engagement with your brand. The social media landscape is ever-changing, as audiences slowly trade one platform for another, and innovative new ways to share information are introduced. This makes different platforms suitable for different purposes, enabling your business to achieve multiple aims via a single, cohesive brand strategy. Facebook, Instagram and Twitter have been the heavy hitters in social media spaces for some time, but relative newcomer TikTok has been a runaway success with its adoption of short-form media sharing and algorithmic media selection.
How Can Social Media Marketing Help Your Business?
With different platforms offering different experiences and hence different kinds of audience, a good social media marketing strategy can utilise these differences to expose wider audiences to your brand and engage the right demographics in the right way. Social media, being social, also presents a unique opportunity for your brand to engage directly with existing and prospective users, elevating customer service to a much more personal-feeling experience. Social media strategy, as part of a broader marketing campaign, is a crucial modern-day tool for improving your sales funnel – raising brand awareness, piquing interest, influencing decisions and eventually inspiring action.
Ways to Incorporate Social Media into Your Business Plan
There are platform-specific ways you can achieve the above, and specific aims you can include in your social media marketing strategy to greatly increase how much you get out of it. Like any marketing strategy, social media marketing is not free – and oftentimes, the more you spend the wider your scope. Taking out a business loan can increase your marketing ROI, especially if it enables you to invest in loss-leader products to incentivise email list sign-ups.
You might be angling to drive increased traffic to your business’ website, for which targeted promotions and banner ads on Facebook would work wonders. You might be aiming to increase awareness in a specific product or service, at which point the visual medium of Instagram can provide the most benefits; influencer marketing such as product placement, as well as promoted posts, can expose your offering to new demographics and audiences by followers or by hashtag. Timed content like Instagram stories also allows you to add an air of exclusivity to your offering, in tandem with limited-time discounts or one-off loyalty offers. Twitter, as a short-form content platform with robust features for threading content, sharing material and directly replying to customers means you can incorporate conversation into your strategy, answering consumer queries directly and even sharing content relatable to your industry.