The Use of Social Media in Building a Successful Marketing Strategy

Social media is an important component in creating an effective digital marketing strategy. It provides numerous opportunities for brands to grow and for businesses to thrive. It is no surprise that more than 90% of brands have presence on one or more social media networks. In this article, discover how to effectively use social media to create a successful marketing strategy for the benefit of your brand or business.

Brand Awareness and Social Analytics

A strong social media presence can increase brand awareness as it has the power to promote the brand’s content to the target audiences. You can start by identifying important brand awareness metrics that you want to target. These metrics will show the strength of your brand’s social media presence. This includes average reach per post, website traffic, number of followers and brand mentions, social media activity (likes, shares and comments), and brand awareness or share compared to your competitors.  

Maximize the use of social media for creating engaging, insightful, and relevant content.  It should educate, inform, or inspire people. These kinds of content usually garner the most number of views, shares, and likes, which increase brand awareness. Airbnb, for example, uses its Facebook and Instagram page to showcase travel photos and stories from people who have used their service. The images are insightful and attention-grabbing, and their content encourages people to share their own experiences as well.

Lead Generation and Lead Metrics

If you want to generate leads and increase sales, you need to utilize social media, specifically its use of  hyperlinks and clickable media within posts. Again, analytics will track your social media efforts, such as social media referrals, bounce rate or social media referral duration, forms submissions ( email subscription, signups, and contact us forms), and social referral sales conversion rate.

To maximize lead generation, ensure that your content is engaging and relevant to its target audience. Also make sure that there is consistency between the brand, its profile, and the content being shared. It is also wise to invest in a highly targeted social media advertising. Gilt, a membership-based online shopping destination for high-end fashion at low prices, uses its Instagram page to generate sales. All images of available items are tagged with #LinkInBio which directs to a Like2Buy page. It is more convenient than click-to-shop ads.

Communities

An online community is composed of your brand’s social media page, influencers, and your followers. This is a powerful tool to build trust with your customers/audiences, to add value to your brand, and to increase brand engagement. There is no specific way to measure revenue on this particular strategy, but there are several metrics that can help, such as: brand mentions, follower growth rate, overall engagement (likes, shares, comments), and survey responses.

An online community primarily strengthens engagement and interaction with brands, and can be used to improve customer service. Amazon, for example, uses Facebook and Twitter to address customer service requests and concerns. Their quick response time is rather a feat, as they receive an average of 75,000 posts. Responsiveness is important because it makes customers feel valued by the brand, and social media platforms are real-time opportunities to show your brand’s engagement with its customers.

CSR Initiatives

Social media is also a great tool to improve and create awareness of a brand’s corporate social responsibility (CSR) efforts. These initiatives will get a lot of engagement from your audience because it is just one more way to show you care about them. A good example for this is Walmart’s Greenlight a Vet, which they ran on Veteran’s Day. Walmart requested people to put green lights on their porches as a sign of respect for veterans. A portion of their sales on this initiative will go to military service organizations. They used a live video to engage audiences and to demonstrate their support for the campaign. It received well over 4,500 comments.

Social Listening

Social media presents a good opportunity for brands to learn more about their audience through listening online. Social listening is especially useful in market research when you want to target a specific niche or to forecast trends for future products and innovations.

Measuring this can be difficult, but there are several good indicators that can indirectly correspond to social listening success. This includes brand mentions, sentiment analysis (positive or negative social perceptions), demographic responsiveness, and level of influence. You can track and monitor conversations regarding your brand and respond to as many queries and comments as possible. This will encourage brand-related interactions. To make the most out of social listening, there are several tools that can help streamline the work involved, such as Mention and Hootsuite.