What is the Importance of Social Media Marketing?

Social media is digital communication media for most people. But, for businesses, the importance of social media marketing can’t be overstated.

Social media is an incredible marketing platform. Billions of people worldwide use social media every day, and social media platforms offer a more direct connection with customers than legacy media.

Additionally, social media advertising offers businesses far more control over what their customers see and delivers better intelligence about how customers interact with marketing.

Every social media platform is a bit different. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, and even WhatsApp all have different user demographics and marketing platforms.

However, all of these social media platforms offer key benefits which are so valuable you can’t afford not to be using social media marketing.

## 5 Benefits of social media marketing

These are the benefits that make social media marketing a must for businesses.

## Increased brand awareness

Social media platforms enable businesses to create social media profiles which are similar to personal profiles. Using your company’s social media account, you can tell your business story and network with people within and outside your industry.

This builds brand equity because you can share information informally, provide entertainment and education, and expose new customers to your brand through conversation, rather than one-way advertising.

In short, customers can interact with your brand on social media, instead of just seeing marketing messages.

## More effective competitive analysis

Your competitors are also on social media. However, this is actually a good thing, because you can see their ads, their posts, and how they interact with their customers.

This gives you a ton of insight into what’s working for your competitors and where there’s room to sweep up market share. You can even analyze competitor reviews for product development.

Even better, you can do all of this competitive analysis without any specialized tools. All you need is a social media account. Of course, there are tools for doing competitive analysis on social media, but most of them offer convenience and data aggregation, not additional information.

## Better customer engagement

Building brand awareness on social media is largely a matter of posting regularly and engaging social media groups, which offers some level of customer engagement because people can comment and interact with your posts.

However, customers can also comment on and interact with your ads, without having to click on the ad.

A comment or a like may not be as valuable as a click, from a marketing perspective. But it offers an additional layer of engagement that you can’t get from other marketing channels, and it’s a direct channel for customer feedback on your ads.

Additionally, most social media platforms also offer direct chat functions, which enable your business to have one-on-one conversations with customers.

Social media chat is incredibly popular. So popular, in fact, that apps such as WhatsApp—which were originally designed for direct messaging—have become de facto social media platforms, because there’s a huge demand for merging chat and social media capabilities into a single app.

Businesses can use automated chat technology, such as the Telnyx WhatsApp business API, to provide online customer support and automated ordering, or to quickly connect customers with customer service representatives.

The best part is that all the chatting is done inside the social media app. It removes almost all the barriers to contacting your company, because customers can do it by tapping a button while they’re scrolling.

There are more benefits of social media, but this one is where social media really separates itself from other marketing channels. There’s no other marketing platform that offers such convenient one-to-one contact between customers and businesses.

## Improved marketing intelligence

There was a time when measuring advertising effectiveness relied on a single metric: conversions. Some marketing channels make it difficult to even measure that. For instance, it’s difficult to prove that a customer made a purchase because they saw a TV commercial.

Social media has changed that by offering incredibly granular advertising performance data. Every step of the buying process can be tracked and measured, from how many people saw an ad to how many of the people who saw an ad actually followed through and made a purchase.

However, this gives you more than just a connection between ad exposure and conversions. It also enables you to create more granular marketing objectives.

You’re probably already familiar with the marketing funnel. Social media offers such specific marketing intelligence and control over your ads that you can create ads that encourage prospects to take the next step in the buying process, rather than just hoping your ads will entice people to move through the entire process on their own.

Basically, you get to hold the customers hand and walk them through the entire buying process, from awareness to conversion. Having more involvement in the buying cycle enables you to create the most effective marketing campaigns possible.

## Solid brand loyalty

Being able to interact with your brand on a social level builds brand loyalty, full stop.

If customers can have a casual conversation with your business by interacting with your posts or in direct messages, they’re much more likely to come back and make a second or third purchase (or a fourth, who knows).

## The benefit that proves the importance of social media marketing: ROI

All of these benefits add up to achieving one major marketing goal: better marketing ROI.

Every company wants to spend less on marketing and generate more revenue, or bring in more revenue per ad, or some other variation of measuring ROI.

All of these benefits directly contribute to increasing your marketing ROI, regardless of how you measure it. If you’re not doing it, you need to start marketing on social media.