An Introduction to Social Media Marketing

Social media platforms are designed to allow people to share content quickly, efficiently, and in real-time. With a reach that is unmatched by any other marketing channel, every business must have a social media presence as part of your business marketing strategy, regardless of the industry or organization size!

Social platforms provide the ability to connect with customers, increase brand awareness, boost leads and sales, and generate a trackable ROI. The importance of social media marketing grows to higher levels as new platforms emerge, and the existing platforms continue to find new ways to reach and engage with your target audience.

Social media marketing helps you understand your audience. What separates social channels as effective marketing tools? The engagement and interaction you have with your customer base. You’re able to gain insights into their daily lives and consumer behaviors.

In this blog, we take a look at some of the fundamentals of social media marketing and why social media is important for your business marketing plan. The topics covered include:

 

  • Top Benefits of Social Media Marketing
  • The Platforms
  • Key Performance Metrics
  • Social Media Marketing & EYStudios

 

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Top Benefits of Social Media Marketing

Build and Grow Relationships

Social media allows you to build relationships with your audience by having an active social media presence. Many companies take a hard sell approach. However, customers don’t want to be pitched on social media – they want authentic engagement. Social media is a way for you to connect with your audience with high quality content that is relevant as well!

Increased Brand Awareness

Social media is one of the most cost-efficient digital marketing methods used to create content and increase the visibility of your business. Because of the fact that you will be engaging with a broad audience of consumers, your social media strategy will significantly impact your brand recognition.

Increased Inbound Traffic

Not marketing your business on social media will limit your reach to your usual customers. Social media is a melting pot of different people with different backgrounds and behaviors. Without social media as part of your marketing strategy, it is much more difficult to reach anyone outside of your loyal, repeat customer base. Social media increases your audience, which increases your reach, and this ultimately increases your inbound traffic.

High Conversion Rates

Increased visibility will provide your business with more opportunities to achieve conversions. Every image, video, blog, comment, or review may lead viewers to your website and increase the traffic. Social media provides your business with the ability to create a positive impression through a “humanization” factor. When brands are interactive by sharing content, comments, and posting status updates on social media, it personifies the brand. The better impression you make on visitors, the higher the likelihood they are to think of your business when the need for your product or service arises.

Better Customer Satisfaction

Every customer interaction on your social media accounts is an opportunity for your company to shine and your brand to be seen in a positive light. Whether this is a customer with a question or a complaint, social media provides the ability to address the issue with real, interpersonal dialogue.

Improved Brand Loyalty

One of the main goals of nearly all businesses is developing a loyal customer base. Customer satisfaction and brand loyalty are considered to go hand in hand, which places an emphasis on the importance of regularly engaging with consumers and to develop a bond with them as well.

 

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The Platforms

Facebook:

Despite the various social media platforms that continue to pop up and rise in popularity, Facebook is still considered one of the best and top performing platforms for businesses of all sizes, to market / sell their products and services to their target audience / consumer base. As originally published by Transformation Marketing, there are a couple of reasons why Facebook continues to be a crucial part of any businesses marketing plan.

  • Boost brand awareness with a Facebook Business page
    • One of the key features that separates Facebook from other social media platforms is that it provides users with the ability to build business pages to market their products and services. These business pages provide a great opportunity to boost brand awareness and engage with existing and new customers via such things as: link sharing, engaging content, etc.
  • Facebook Advertising is a powerful tool
    • Incorporating Facebook ads into your marketing strategy will provide the ability to achieve an increase in site traffic, and you have the ability to customize ads to specific target customer groups. Facebook makes it extremely easy to track and measure the effectiveness of your ads via the built-in performance measurement features.

Instagram:

Instagram provides businesses with a great opportunity to market their products to a more targeted and interested audience. Instagram is one of the most popular social media platforms, and it helps people tell various stories through pictures and videos. According to an article originally published by TheFourOhFive, statistics show that there are over 800 million active Instagram users every month, and on a single day, there are over 60 million photos posted. Some of the main benefits of Instagram are as follows:

  • Instagram is based on story telling:
    • Businesses utilize visual content to tell their story, and what their brand is about, which builds branding / awareness and engagement.
  • Reach a wider range of people:
    • Instagram has over 800 million active users each month. This a potentially huge target audience for all businesses.

LinkedIn:

LinkedIn is actually one of the oldest online social platforms. Over the years, LinkedIn has become a very powerful tool for businesses to increase connection, generate more leads, promote their brand, and one of the most important – become a thought leader. LinkedIn is especially important if your business has B2B products and services. According to an article published by Techno Oyster, there are six reasons LinkedIn marketing is important for your business.

  • LinkedIn is more important than Facebook for B2B companies.
  • Amongst business owners, LinkedIn is now one of the most popular social media platforms.
  • LinkedIn has emerged as an effective platform for lead generation.
  • Linkedin in a powerful tool for thought leadership.
  • LinkedIn improves face-to-face relationships.
  • LinkedIn offers increased brand visibility.

Twitter:

“Twitter holds the power of the people”, which is the strongest tool towards building brand awareness and also establishing a strong digital marketing campaign, according to an article from WatchTech.com. Twitter marketing campaigns reach a large audience, and these campaigns can be setup by interacting with influencers on Twitter, which will, via word of mouth, generate even more brand awareness and to act as ambassadors of your brand. The following provides a few important reasons why your business should utilize Twitter as part of your business marketing plan:

  • Twitter followers can help your brand.
  • Twitter can be utilized to monitor competitors.
  • Twitter provides a top social media platform to engage with customers and prospects.

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Key Performance Metrics

When reviewing social media marketing performance metrics, it’s important to understand the “social funnel” breakdown, which includes the following four key customer journey stages, as originally published by Hootsuite in 2018.

  • Awareness: These metrics illuminate your current and potential audience.
  • Engagement: These metrics show how audiences are interacting with your content.
  • Conversion: These metrics demonstrate the effectiveness of your social engagement.
  • Customer: These metrics reflect how active customers think and feel about your brand.

Awareness Metrics:

  • Brand Awareness is the attention your brand gets, across all social media, during a specific period of time or reporting period, that yields statistically relevant data.
  • Post Reach defines how many people have seen a post since it went live. This metric is easy to find and to understand. Most importantly, it’s actionable because it’s impacted by the timing.
  • Audience Growth Rate measures the speed at which your brand’s following increases on social media. How quickly you gain followers.
  • Potential Reach measures the number of people who could, realistically, see a post during a reporting period.

Engagement Metrics:

  • Applause Rate is the number of approval actions (likes, favorites) that a post receives relative to your total number of followers.
  • Average Engagement Rate is the number of engagement actions (likes, shares, comments) a post receives relative to your total number of followers.
  • Virality Rate is the number of people who shared your post relative to the number of unique views (i.e. impressions) it had during a reporting period.

Conversion Metrics:

  • Conversion Rate is the number of visitors who, after clicking on a link to your post, take action of a page (i.e. subscribe to your newsletter; download a gated content asset; register for a webinar) against that page’s total visitors.
  • Click-Through Rate, or CTR, is how often people click on the call-to-action link in your post.
    Bounce Rate is the percentage of page visitors who click on a link in your post, only to quickly leave the page they land on without taking an action.
  • Cost-Per-Click is the amount you pay per individual click on your sponsored social media post.
    Social Media Conversion Rate is the total number of conversions that came directly from social media, expressed as a percentage.
  • Conversation Rate is the ratio of comments per post to the number of overall followers you have.

Customer Metrics

  • Customer Testimonials are any customer review, assessment, comment, endorsement, or interview relating to a brand.
  • Customer Satisfaction Score, or CStat, is a metric that measures how happy people are with your product or service.

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Social Media Marketing & EYStudios

Here at EYStudios, we provide award winning website design and development across the biggest platforms in eCommerce, including but not limited to: Magento and BigCommerce. EYStudios also provides a Full Suite of Digital Marketing Services for your business to take advantage of as part of the EYStudios Runway Program.

EYStudios Full Suite of Digital Marketing Services includes: Email Marketing, Pay per Click (PPC) and Social Media Marketing across all platforms!

EYStudios has the ability to integrate the management of your website, with custom digital marketing services that will deliver measurable results! Our team of expert consultants are extensions of your team and will provide strategic leadership to guide you across all of the services offered at EYStudios!

Give us a call at 678-402-6378 today or email us at info@eystudios.com to learn more.

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