In this modern age, the emergence of social media has been a talking point for almost everyone. Unlike the previous days when we used to get to know about the world through pamphlets or newspapers, things are different in 2022. Social media has simply taken away all the concepts of newspapers and people only need a healthy social media profile to create an online presence and get updated about all the happenings across the world. The influence of social media has also taken over the business sector. If you are a business owner, there is no way that you shouldn’t be understanding social marketing today.
If you can understand social media marketing today, it means that you can get your message across to the target audience. If a company can implement the right marketing strategies, it can be related to the behavioral changes in the internal or the external environment. It can also improve the brand image of the organization. Social marketing trends can influence customer behavior.
What is Social Marketing?
If you want to create an online presence for your brand or company, you must understand what is social marketing. It is defined as the usage of commercial marketing techniques and values that are used to improve people’s welfare or the surroundings in which they live. For example, if there is a new website builder in the market offering website development skills at no cost, you can use Facebook ads to bring that concept to the floor. The environment includes different factors, such as political, economic, social, and physical. Social media marketing has a huge influence on changes in customer behavior.
Image taken from Facebook
The four principles in marketing on social media are as follows:
- Product: Product is the item on which the marketing strategies take place. In social media terms, it causes the change in behavior
- Price: Cost of the product. In terms of social media, it is the investment required to do the marketing of the product
- Place: This is where the target audience can be reached. Marketing strategies bring simplicity within the behavioral changes to the audience
- Promotion: It is the messages sent to the target customers to generate behavioral changes. The message can be sent multiple times
Importance of Social Marketing
1. Brand Authority
When you go through the social marketing definition, you would understand that it has a huge influence on your brand image. If you are a beginner, it is never an easy step to increase your online presence. In today’s day and age, it is easier to create a website but very difficult to maintain the required standards from a website. If you can maintain those standards, it will increase your brand authority. To maintain those standards, you must implement relevant marketing strategies. Your website logo will be massively influential to your company or brand.
Image taken from Strikingly User’s Website
If you want to build a brand website today, you don’t need to look any further than Strikingly. We will provide you with all the functionalities and features to ensure that you create the best brand website that you can imagine. The best thing about it is that you don’t need to write any programming code to create a website design, nor does it take days to create a fully-fledged website on Strikingly. It will just be a few clicks before your brand website will be displayed on your computer screen. Once you are done with the design, make sure that you publish it. Strikingly won’t take over 48 hours to make the website accessible to the public.
2. Target Audience
As we have explained before, the social marketing approach is usually conducted through social media platforms. These platforms help you to reach different audiences in a short period. Apart from meeting the demands of your target audience, you must also prioritize the feedback left by them on your social media statuses or simply your profile.
Image taken from YouTube
If you neglect these online reviews, they won’t tell anything positive about your credentials being a business owner. Many customers would assume that you don’t have hard skin that can respond to criticism. However, you must respond to both sides of the reviews on your social media accounts.
3. Competitive Edge
If you consider the social marketing approach, it will give you a competitive edge over the rest of your companies. There is no way that the customers won’t buy products or services from an online store that has just stepped foot in the digital world. They would rather go for an experienced online store that has got the experience to handle customers. This concept is going to become so common in the next few years that people will only use social media campaigns to send their messages across.
If you are finding troubles related to the promotional strategies, you can do a competitor analysis and look into the strategies implemented on other Strikingly websites. When we talk about competitor analysis, we don’t mean to say that you should do a random copy and paste strategy. Instead, you should only identify the reasons why they have high online sales with the same niche and you don’t.
4. SEO
In the social marketing guide, one of the things that will be massively talked about is search engine optimization (SEO) strategies. For those who don’t know, SEO strategies are defined as the ways of bringing a website or any web page to the high rankings of Google and other search engines. The marketing strategies on social media are highly connected with your SEO strategies and Google rankings. They play a role in your popularity in the online world.
Apart from the influence of social media, Strikingly also enables you to focus your marketing strategies from an SEO perspective. Strikingly fully believes in implementing relevant SEO strategies to boost your Google rankings. For that, we provide you with an SEO checklist, which enables you to go through all the different website elements of your platform as per the regulations of SEO.
5. Customer Satisfaction
Image taken from Strikingly User’s Website
When you go through the social marketing definition, the most common thing discussed is the satisfaction of the customers. This point slightly links with attracting a target audience that we discussed earlier on. If you generate a high customer satisfaction score, your marketing strategies must be working at their maximum capacity. If your customers aren’t satisfied with your marketing strategies, you can write as much content or make your website as beautiful as you want, but it won’t be worth it. They will let you know about their perspective in the review section of your website.
6. Cost-Effective Advertisements
It is yesterday’s story that you cannot run advertising campaigns if you don’t have a television advert. If you go by social marketing, you can conduct campaigns on a tight budget. The best example is the Facebook ads, which you can organize on a low budget. Even if people aren’t following your social media account, the message will be conveyed to them through paid advertisements.
Examples of Social Marketing
In the social marketing guide, you understand that its basic objective is to influence people’s behavior. It presents long-term benefits to the online community. Below, we have shared a few examples of the marketing approach on social media. They change as per their targeting objectives and their interaction with the environment, physical condition, and social awareness:
Image taken from Strikingly User’s Website
- Vaccine campaign to reduce the chances of getting infected by the coronavirus
- Anti-tobacco campaign to minimize the influence of smoking
- Social media campaigns to promote energy consumption and minimize carbon footprint
- Avoid using environmentally unfriendly products. Apart from drugs, there are various forms of narcotics that can be promoted. There are many drugs that athletes use before entering competitions. It can also negatively impact them in the long run
- Promoting good eating behaviors. Informing the customers about the idea of taking packaged food, rather than exposing it to the air or heat (depending upon the temperature).
Conclusion
Social media isn’t just part of your office work or something you just associate yourself with when working. It has become part of our daily lives. The emergence of quality mobile phones may have a huge role to play in its influence on our daily lives. Understanding social marketing will take you to different heights in your professional life. If you are part of a company or you work related to your business, you must have an idea about relevant marketing strategies on social media and implement them properly.
Strikingly fully believes in implementing relevant marketing strategies on a website. Moreover, we also allow you to include social media platforms like social media icons in the last section of your website. You can directly link your website to the specified social media platform (and vice versa) to those icons. You must create quality captions on your social media pages to convince the customers. So, integrate social media on your Strikingly website and give more reasons for your customers to be impressed.
