How social media presence can enhance your business performance
By: Regina M.
Social media marketing (SMM), also known as digital marketing or e-marketing, is the use of online social channels such as Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and X (formerly Twitter) to promote your business to current consumers and potential ones. In this day and age, having a social media presence is fundamental to any business’ success. Social media marketing is quite a potent tool. Not only does it provide an avenue for customer engagement, it also provides businesses with data and analytics, allowing marketers to quickly identify targeted efforts and areas for improvement. In summary, social media marketing has three main principles: connection, conversion and retention.
Read through to know the relevance of getting an SMM service for your campaign and brand.
Connection
Social media humanizes brands and allows them to become more accessible to the average consumer.
1. Being Relatable
On social platforms, you (or your social media manager, under the guise of your “brand”) are able to speak the language of your target audience through viral trends, memes, internet colloquialisms, or even through simple displays of relatability such as vlogs. These techniques can allow your client base to connect with your brand emotionally, and thus cultivate trust and loyalty.
2. Maximizing Visual Appeal
Our visually-driven online culture is also an important consideration. Your brand identity is on full display on your social media profile. As such, having a cohesive, consistent, and distinct visual identity can entice potential clients to follow you, even if it’s only for your “aesthetically pleasing” or visually appealing feed. Appealing to certain “aesthetics,” or subcultures of fashion and lifestyle—for example, the clean girl aesthetic or the dark academia aesthetic—can attract particular types of followers as well. Every organic follower is a potential customer, regardless of why they follow you.
3. Using Paid Ads
The content on your feed or story does not have to be the only means of engagement. Paid or targeted advertisements are also a potential avenue to reach customers. This feature can place your posts and other collateral in a vast number of user feeds.
4. Influencer Marketing
Your online presence, however, is not restricted to direct engagement. An important facet of social media marketing is influencer marketing. Influencers—social media content creators with relatively large follower counts—can conveniently connect you with thousands to millions of individuals who might not have even heard of your brand yet. They can be sent PR kits or product samples and post engaging content featuring your brand. In this way, they can use a more specialized voice which caters to their niche audience. Influencers can be your brand ambassadors so it’s equally important that the values that your brand speaks for are aligned with the values seen in your influencers’ pages. This also allows your message to reach your target audience from the grassroots because when you align your tone and values with your influencer, you are also connecting to the organic followers.
Influencers can be classified as “nano influencers” (those with 1,000 to 10,000 followers and niche audiences), “micro influencers” (10,000 to 50,000 followers and niche audiences), those in the “mid-tier” (50,000 to 500,000 followers), “macro influencers” (those with 500,000 to 1 million followers, who also possess a broader appeal), and “mega influencers” (who have 1 million upwards of followers).
Additionally, influencers serve as social proof, so potential customers know that your product or service is legitimate and proven useful.
Conversion
Now that you have curated your social media feed and are consistently engaging with
influencers and followers, how do these convert to sales? There are several features of social
media which can seamlessly convert your audience into consumers of your product.
1. Using In-App Features
Your business can take advantage of seamless, in-app features like Instagram, Facebook, or TikTok shops, appointment booking capabilities, and direct messaging, so that interested
customers can seamlessly avail of your products or services.
Furthermore, using your profile to initiate gimmicks such as livestreams and contests can also benefit your brand. It galvanizes your built-in following to engage with your content and
simultaneously absorb information about your products. Product giveaways and limited-time
sales and offers are usually promoted through these means.
Lastly, you can easily repost product reviews from satisfied customers and partner influencers and compile them into a post, or even create a story highlight of testimonials on Instagram.
2. Using CTAs
Calls to action (CTAs) on your profiles or captions are vital to conversions. These are phrases that direct a customer towards a particular move. This can be as straightforward as “Shop now” or something catchier, such as “Create your dream campaign with us!” Calls to action can also be subtle. Take for instance Nike’s iconic tagline, Just Do It, which motivates the reader to do “it”—whatever they want “it” to be—with the support of Nike’s products.
No matter how you phrase your call to action, it must direct the customer to learn more or avail of your products or services. As such, they may direct your audience to check your website, your Lazada or Shopee profiles, sign up for your email newsletter, or even lead them to visit some feature articles or press releases about your offerings. Platforms such as LinkTree or Lnk.Bio can neatly compile all of these links in one webpage.
Retention
To be able to retain your following and execute a well-performing online strategy, monitoring the following can greatly influence your outlook and strategy.
1. Posting Times
Often, social media sites can reveal the best posting times for your audience. Adhering to
these—and posting consistently—can maximize the reach and performance of your contents.
2. Content Performance
The performance of your post can be conveniently accessed through in-app tools such as Meta Business Suite, TikTok Insights, and X Insights. These gauge the number of impressions or views your post incurred, in addition to the number of interactions made, whether this is clicking, liking, or commenting on the post. These tools also display the performance of your content over time, such as the reach gained or lost by your posts over a certain number of weeks or months. Knowing how to analyze and use this data can allow you to identify patterns in your content: which resonate most with your audience and which content ideas could use polishing.
3. Customer Feedback
The democratized nature of social media allows customers to easily post their thoughts on a product or service. Whether this is through the comment section, a review section, or through individual posts, it is easy to summarize what your customer thinks of your brand or the niche your business serves.
Knowing others’ thoughts on your brand and products can also help in your content analysis, allowing you to determine what content niches or customer needs you need to address through the upcoming posts you are doing.
4. Competitors
Finally, social media can also be used to monitor your competitors’ actions, specifically by keeping tabs on their online posts and activity. Doing so enables you to juxtapose your online performance with theirs and identify your strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities for improvement.
Conclusion
Activating or fortifying your social media presence is fundamental in forging a memorable brand image and identity, upholding your brand’s relevance, relating with your audience, and seamlessly converting followers into a loyal clientele. Moreover, keeping track of customer opinion and content insights on this platform can provide you with data-backed feedback on your online performance. Interpreted correctly, this can help you strengthen or recalibrate your campaign.
At Verafede, we aim to understand your brand objectives and translate them into contents and campaigns that will help strengthen how you send your message across to potential and current customers. We have a pool of creators to tap for your contents, as well as influencers from different tiers and niches for more targeted comms. Increase your audience reach and let your brand voice be heard in the social media landscape! Contact us now and let’s begin posting!
References:
- https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/social-media-marketing#benefits-of-social-media-marketing
- https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/social-media-marketing-smm.asp
- https://www.wordstream.com/social-media-marketing
- https://www.syntacticsinc.com/news-articles-cat/social-media-conversion-rates-boosting-them
- https://www.cmswire.com/digital-marketing/social-media-influencers-mega-macro-micro-or-nano/
- https://home.socialbluebook.com/where-do-you-stand-influencer-tiers-demystified/