Social media marketing has one goal: engagement. But while you can consider this as the primary benefit of social media marketing efforts, it’s not the only advantage you can get by promoting your brand on social media.
The real benefits of social media marketing lie in analyzing the various opportunities for engagement that it provides and the overall exposure you open your brand to when you decide to use social media. As the online hub of your customers, deciding how to best take advantage of social media’s benefits can be the key to making your strategy successful.
Here’s a guide on the possible benefits you can leverage from social media marketing. This post will explore how these benefits may apply to specific industries or your brand goals. We’ll also give you some ideas on how to leverage these benefits for your overall success.
- How can social media marketing increase audience and customer engagement?
- Using Social Media Marketing for Market and Competitive Analysis
- Retargeting Customers Through Social Media Marketing
- Building Your Brand Long-Term Via Social Media Marketing
- User Generated Content and Its Role in Social Media Marketing
- Wrapping Up
- Frequently Asked Questions
How can social media marketing increase audience and customer engagement?
Social media marketing (SMM) has one goal: to get your audience talking about your brand online. Engagement and traction among an audience are signs that your social media marketing efforts are getting somewhere.
But what exactly can social media marketing do for your audience and customer engagement? Let’s explore below:
Provide opportunities to answer customer questions
Social media marketing helps answer the first questions that your audience will have about your brand: who are you, and what can you do for me?
SMM directly or indirectly conveys your value proposition. It tells why your audience should take note of your brand, engage with it, and spread awareness of it to their own networks.
There are a variety of ways you can answer your customers’ questions via social media marketing. These include:
- Directly responding to comments or messages: Giving official answers as the brand on your social media posts or responding to messages on your social media profiles adds a personal touch to how you interact with your audience.
- Showcasing your products and/or services: Creating posts that center around what your brand is and what it offers can help clear up confusion about your value proposition. It may even help answer questions that your audience may have that aren’t directly addressed by your other material.
- Showcasing case studies: Instructional videos, interviews, or even an explainer can all help your audience better understand your brand’s unique offerings and help address any concerns. Because these content formats are inherently shareable, they also increase engagement—potentially to audiences outside of your target demographic.
Social media marketing’s capability to answer questions from your audience (sometimes before they even bring it up themselves) can help drive engagement for your brand. The value of your brand may not be immediate at first glance, so SMM is a great way to better explain who you are and what you offer.
Gather feedback on products
Social media marketing can also involve audiences that have already engaged with your brand, especially those who care enough to leave their feedback on your products and services.
Encouraging this behavior and actively engaging with these customers gives you valuable insight into how to improve your products. It also gives your customers the assurance that you care about their experience with your brand and its products.
This feeds into creating an engaged audience that feels like their opinions are understood and heard. Some ways you can further gather feedback via SMM include:
- Linking surveys: Aside from functioning as great CTAs at the end of your social media posts, surveys are also an immediate way to get actionable insights and data. Some social media platforms can enable surveys directly on your posts while others can link back to your website or domain. This gives you plenty of flexibility in how you gather audience feedback.
- Asking for audience sentiment: One of the advantages of using social media marketing for audience feedback is that the process can be simple, especially if you already have an engaged audience. Creating a post that simply asks “How did we do?” or “What do you think?” opens dialogue, which can increase engagement.
Social media marketing enables audience feedback because it directly opens a channel from you to your audience. By creating social media posts that ask for feedback (or at least leave the conversation open to them), you can give your audience a space to share their experiences with you.
Showcase user-generated content
User-generated content can be a potent marketing tool for social media. Not only does this affirm to interested customers that your brand is worth interacting with, but it’s also proof of your high levels of social media engagement.
By leveraging user-generated content for your social media marketing, you reinforce the engagement you already have with your existing audience while also creating avenues for newer customers to see the value of your brand.
There are several ways you can showcase user-generated content on social media:
- Highlight user reviews: Once you’ve managed to gather enough user feedback, you can turn these reviews and testimonials into content about your brand and/or its products. These highlights increase trust in what your brand has to offer and show how much you value your community’s insights.
- Showcase media about your brand/products: Videos, photos, and other media taken about your brand can be excellent ways to drive engagement among your audience. These are important to include because they can showcase your product or service in a new and more personal light.
- Ask for contributions: With a loyal and large enough following, you can also ask for contributions from your audience to highlight on your page. You can even incentivize their contributions by doing a contest or offering rewards, which can help increase the quality of the content that you’ll receive.
User-generated social media content can be effective for engagement as it conveys to customers and non-customers alike that your brand cares about the people who interact with it. This is also another way to add more variety to your content calendar as a whole.
Using Social Media Marketing for Market and Competitive Analysis
At the end of 2022, more than $600 billion was spent on global digital ad spending. Estimates show that digital advertising is projected to grow exponentially to over $870 billion by 2026, showcasing a continued upward trend in using social media marketing as the primary approach to promoting brands. Most businesses in your niche will be on social media. This offers your brand a highly visible, trackable, and effective way to gauge your competitor’s performance compared to yours.
A brand’s social media marketing strategy often gives you a glimpse into its overall growth strategy, making it useful for both market and competitive analysis. Monitoring your competitors’ social media marketing also gives you better insights into your shared audiences, which helps you understand your customers better.
There are a few ways you can accomplish this, including but not limited to:
- Competitive intelligence tools
- Social listening platforms
- Social media monitoring software
- SWOT analysis
There are three areas in particular where leveraging social media marketing for competitive analysis proves to be beneficial:
Current Trends
Analyzing social media can be as simple as checking what’s trending among your audience and/or industry at any given time. Many current trends start from social media platforms or are triggered by social media marketing. Companies that pay attention to social media can even predict which trends will go viral, even before they gain prominence.
Knowing what your audience is talking about is crucial since it gives you a chance to insert your brand into what’s currently being discussed on social media. This helps you engage with your audience and can guide how you talk to your customers.
One example of this approach is trendjacking, where brands involve themselves in a conversation online. This can be effective if done well since riding the wave of the latest trends can propel your brand in front of new audiences. Brands will often monitor other brands’ strategies regarding the topic of the month and respond (either directly or indirectly) to their competitors, diversifying the discussion and driving more engagement.
For instance, to celebrate the April 8, 2024 total solar eclipse, several brands joined in on the fun to connect with their audience. Oreo posted a reel where a piece of Oreo acted as the moon, blocking out the sun. Meanwhile, Pizza Hut offered a total eclipse deal for anyone purchasing a large pizza on that day.
Competitive Insights
Monitoring the social media marketing strategy of your competitors gives you a crucial reference point. By analyzing competitors' social media activities, brands can identify which platforms their competitors are most active on and where they see the highest engagement. This helps them allocate their resources more effectively by focusing on platforms that yield the best results.
Furthermore, brands can also gain insight into what keywords their competitors are trying to rank for by analyzing their social media posts, hashtags, and content. This insight helps brands refine their own keyword strategy to improve search engine rankings and enhance their online visibility.
Competitive Advantage
When a brand has a competitive advantage, it can enjoy increased visibility, long-term engagement, and customer loyalty. You can use social media to know whether your strategy is working. One of the simplest ways to do so is by directly comparing your content to that of your competitors. Many social media platforms offer a close look at your engagement metrics for your content. You can then judge your competitors by the same metrics to see how far you’re ahead or how much work you need to do to keep up.
By keeping a close eye on both your and your competitors’ social media marketing campaigns, you can see and even address customers’ pain points in real time. Social platforms are a treasure trove of audience feedback on your products or services. If you don’t note common pain points and resolve them, they might end up switching over to a competitor instead.
I left ATT and switched to Verizon. I called Verizon for an issue and was floored at how good the customer service was. https://t.co/qzlZ0VjteY
— Amber- Detroit’s CEO (@SocialNTheCity) November 29, 2023
Retargeting Customers Through Social Media Marketing
Why Social Media Is Great for Retargeting
The ideal conversion rate in social media averages from 2% to 5%. This extensive range inevitably means that you’ll have customers that will fall out of your marketing funnel.
However, through social media, you can recapture these leads and convert them to actual customers through retargeting. To bring back customers that have fallen through your marketing funnel, you must maintain a robust social media presence and pursue a consistent marketing strategy.
While retargeting opportunities exist outside of social media marketing, these approaches require more work. Social media platforms already have systems in place that can retarget audiences effectively, like audience lists and integrations with retargeting tools/software.
Retargeting campaigns via social media also take into account the different reasons why customers fall out of your marketing funnel. A customer could have simply forgotten to finish their order. They could be waiting for a sale on your product. Or they may want to engage your services but simply don’t have the funds to do so yet. Retargeting addresses all these pain points in the least disruptive way possible.
Social Media Retargeting: How Can It Benefit Your Brand?
Retargeting has various other benefits for your brand aside from simply recapturing customers. By implementing a retargeting campaign via social media marketing, you can:
Segment your audience
Audience segmentation works well with retargeting since you now have an idea of the pain points that your audience may encounter when it comes to engaging with your brand.
Understanding your audience is crucial for successful growth marketing, and knowing what they dislike is equally as important as researching what they like. Not all audiences engage with brands knowing what they’re already looking for. Retargeting can give you opportunities to address points of friction in your marketing funnel, giving you ways to improve how your newer audiences can engage with your brand. For instance, if you’ve identified that added shipping costs turn away customers, you can create a retargeting ad that offers free shipping for purchases over a certain amount.
Source: stablewp.com
Improves your advertising ROI
A retargeting strategy should aim to recall all uncaptured customers, whether you’re going for direct or organic advertising. Since social media is already a consistent presence in the day-to-day lives of your audience, your advertising ROI goes up when your retargeting strategy captures both organic and direct customers. Running retargeting ads may incur short-term additional costs, but they pay off with customer loyalty.
Remarketing can boost your conversion rate by up to 161% and lower cart abandonment to 6.5%, resulting in a better return on your investment in the long run. The reason for this is that retargeted users have already been exposed to or shown interest in your brand, making them more likely to convert.
Upselling and cross-selling
One reason why “recommended for you” sections are so ubiquitous in ecommerce platforms is that they encourage further purchases from customers who’ve already committed to spending. In that same vein, retargeting via social media can lead to customer actions that are beneficial to your brand, such as them signing up for your newsletter or joining your community.
While not “sales” in the strictest sense, these opportunities drive brand awareness among retargeted customers. It gives them appealing reasons to continue engagement with your brand. This approach can also help increase customer loyalty instead of solely encouraging engagement. On Instagram, cross-selling and upselling typically take form in a collection of images, featuring products you may have already browsed before.
Source: instagram.com
Makes your marketing more cost-efficient
Social media retargeting is a highly cost-effective strategy for brands. By focusing on individuals who have already shown interest in their products or services, businesses can ensure their advertising efforts are directed toward a receptive audience. This targeted approach minimizes wasted resources and enhances the likelihood of conversions.
Retargeting ads operate on a cost-per-click (CPC) basis, meaning businesses only pay when users engage with the ad. This model ensures that advertising budgets are spent efficiently, paying only for actual interest rather than broad, untargeted exposure.
In essence, social media retargeting allows brands to maximize their advertising budgets by focusing on potential customers who are most likely to convert, making it an invaluable tool for growth marketing.
Encourages diverse content
Finally, retargeting can give your brand another chance to make up for any substandard or subpar first impressions. Different content types attract different people, and what may be unappealing in one format can be successful using another content format.
Not only does this encourage your brand’s creative expression, but it also allows you to track what content formats (and by extension, the social media platforms that you post them in) work best for you.
Building Your Brand Long-Term Via Social Media Marketing
Brands need to grow with their audiences, and social media can help you create the two-way conversation needed to spur this growth. With effective marketing, you can create an engaged community, which consequently helps inform the growth of your brand over time.
Social media marketing can build towards your brand growth in the following ways:
Establishing Brand Authenticity
Social media marketing is a great opportunity for your brand to build genuine relationships with your customers since social media offers platforms that encourage interaction. The interaction you have with your customers combined with the immediacy of social media means that your marketing is far more likely to be perceived as authentic. It’s no wonder that 43% of brands employ micro and nano-influencers to help achieve this type of engagement.
Building authenticity through social media marketing can include:
- Commenting on or posting about issues that are relevant to your target audience
- Ensuring that your brand responds appropriately to trending topics
- Encouraging interaction between different users in your community
- Growing your brand's story with input from your customers
- Collaborating on stories with other brands
Authenticity is particularly important for younger audiences, who are more likely to shy away from overly produced or corporate branding. Building a more authentic brand can also ensure that you maintain your brand messaging, allowing you to present a consistent image on social media.
One important thing to keep in mind when pursuing brand authenticity is that it will often involve you having to take unconventional approaches to branding and marketing. Some good examples of this include Domino’s Pizza partnering with the local government in its Paving for Pizza campaign and the decidedly non-corporate tone that Opera GX uses in its social media posting.
Source: pavingforpizza.com
Can you put edge farther away from me please https://t.co/m7F7u2Ois3
— Opera GX (@operagxofficial) May 30, 2024
These unconventional approaches don’t come without an element of risk, especially if brands fail in their messaging. However, these are also the approaches that more and more customers want to see from brands. Using social media marketing to build authenticity is one of the best ways to handle this approach organically, which builds more trust.
The Importance of Content Creation and Storytelling
Authentic connections are only one aspect of content creation and brand growth. Your audience also needs an emotional attachment to your brand. Stories drive engagement, but they also help retain audience attention and develop the growth of your brand. Storytelling emerged as one of the two top "key skills" among digital marketers (34.2%) aside from content creation based on our Digital Marketing Benchmark Report 2024. Data interpretation and analysis ranked second (25%).
Storytelling provides the following benefits for your brand:
- Lets you showcase what your brand is about
- Gives your audience a way to relate to your brand
- Ensures that your brand is presented in the most engaging light
- Makes your brand more memorable compared to others
Storytelling is effective for social media marketing. A well-crafted video or an engaging post is more likely to be shared by your audience, which can increase your brand visibility more compared to advertising.
It’s not uncommon for brands to stand out due to their ability to tell stories. Dove’s 2004 campaign remains memorable to this day and was instrumental in the brand becoming more relatable to its audience.
Dove’s campaigns today still echo its core values and commitment to celebrating real beauty, staying true to the brand image that made it a trusted brand among its audience. This is evident in its #KeepHerConfident campaign.
In more recent campaigns, Patagonia’s sustainable business branding improved its visibility to audiences looking for more eco-friendly brands.
Nurturing Audience Engagement and Relationships
How you interact with your audience is directly linked to your brand image. When done right, your social media marketing strategy can help humanize your brand and push your audience to keep engaging with you and discuss your brand positively.
Nurturing relationships with your audience through social media benefits a brand in the following ways:
- Making the audience feel that the brand understands their needs
- Increasing loyalty among their followers
- Giving the brand insights into customer experiences
- Increasing brand visibility
There are several ways to engage your audience via your social campaigns. However, what’s essential is staying true to your branding and being prompt. Take Wendy’s social team, for instance. They engage with their audience by being witty, but they also ensure to respond promptly to followers with issues under the same post.
Managing Brand Reputation
Social media helps tremendously in building your brand image and cultivating your audience. However, it’s also where just one bad review or mention can make or break your brand’s reputation. This is where reputation management on social media becomes critical, as consumers are likely to share a negative experience on social platforms. Around 43% of online users leverage social media in making purchase decisions. For these users, seeing negative reviews unaddressed can leave an unfavorable impression on them or make them turn to your competitors. That’s why ignoring negative comments shouldn’t be an option.
When a brand manages its brand reputation well on social media, it gains the following benefits:
- Ability to shape customers’ perceptions of the brand
- Lets it proactively seize opportunities to engage audiences
- Opens up opportunities for increasing revenue and retaining customers
- Builds trust among new and existing audiences
- Ability to gain valuable customer insights
Some brands even have a dedicated account for handling reputation management. Adobe, for instance, leverages social listening to help people who may need additional support, assistance with troubleshooting issues, and quick answers to their queries.
Hey, sorry to see this! Would you like help troubleshooting? Does it seem to crash on a certain action? Try resetting preferences and clearing media cache. https://t.co/SsL3x4F1kF
^CS— Adobe Care (@AdobeCare) June 24, 2024
The Role of Influencers
In our latest Influencer Benchmark Report, 60% of respondents plan to expand their influencer marketing budgets in 2024. These social media personalities hold a lot of sway over audiences—especially the younger generations—which can directly contribute to brand growth. Influencers thrive in social media spaces, which makes them ideal partners for brands wanting to build their branding long-term.
Influencers can help your brand grow by:
- Giving you access to an already-loyal and engaged audience base
- Helping establish credibility and trust in your brand
- Acting as a brand spokesperson or ambassador
- Promoting your brand to audience segments you may have missed
Most importantly, influencers can help give your brand a sense of familiarity to their audiences, which is a crucial benefit that companies may not even realize that they lack. People are more likely to trust recommendations from those they know, and influencers play into this dynamic on a larger scale.
In some cases, influencers may even directly help with the growth of your brand over time, especially with repeat sponsorships or long-term collaborations. Because they bring a concrete and relatable face to associate with your brand, audiences are more likely to have a positive reception of you.
An excellent example of influencer marketing in action includes Ice Spice’s collaboration with Dunkin’ Donuts.
america runs on MUNCHKINS pic.twitter.com/FQRpmRuz0s
— ice spice ☆ (@icespicee_) September 10, 2023
Influencer marketing is forecasted to become more popular with time, and brands that haven’t considered them for their marketing or brand growth should start doing so. With the right influencer, your brand can have a personality that enriches your brand story and encourages more engagement.
User Generated Content and Its Role in Social Media Marketing
Because social media focuses on engagement, there are plenty of opportunities for brands to involve user-generated content in their marketing campaigns. If your brand already has a dedicated following, further engagement through marketing will help you acquire user sentiments, impressions, and interactions with your brand. All of these can be used for future marketing campaigns.
Some examples of user-generated content you can use for marketing include:
- Customer reviews of your services or products
- Discussions of your brand by your audience
- Collaborations with influencers in showcasing your brand
- Other online interactions your brand has with customers
By featuring user-generated content, you foster a better sense of community among your audience. This builds goodwill, trust, and loyalty in your customers, which makes them far more likely to engage with your brand long-term.
Brands that integrate user-generated content into their social media marketing also tap into the organic networking that comes with social media platforms. By featuring your audience, you effectively turn your entire customer base into advocates for your brand, which can promote visibility and engagement in marketing segments outside your campaigns.
Wrapping Up
Social media users will rise to 5.85 billion by 2027, according to forecasts. No matter the reach of your brand, being on social media offers you a myriad of opportunities for engagement—and more ways to grow your brand, if you capitalize on these opportunities well.
It’s difficult to overstate the benefits that social media marketing can have for your brand. For marketers, leveraging these benefits is often the key to ensuring that their brand manages to stay on their customer's radar while also encouraging long-term organic growth.
In the future, as social media platforms and their users continue to change with new developments in trends and tech, brands will need to adapt to the changing landscape while keeping the best practices in social media marketing in mind. By focusing on the benefits, you’ll be able to keep up with the demands of social media while also laying the foundations for your future successes with marketing.
Frequently Asked Questions
What are the pros and cons of doing social media marketing?
While social media marketing can have an impact on your brand perception and overall audience engagement, it can have positive and negative effects depending on how it’s handled. Here are some advantages and disadvantages of doing social media marketing:
|
Positives |
Negatives |
|
Increased visibility and awareness of your brand on social media/outside digital spaces |
Requires significant investment of time, effort, and resources (that companies may not always have) |
| Access to powerful targeting features that allow you to advertise to select demographics |
Can be a source of negative publicity if branding, marketing, and advertising are handled poorly |
|
Adaptable to different strategies, sizes, and types of campaigns |
Social media marketing strategies are dependent on the platform itself; any changes can drastically affect ongoing and future campaigns |
| Offers an immediate channel to engage with your audiences |
An increased negative impression of ads requires most marketing strategies to be more organic, which requires more work |
|
Get access to important information and metrics about your audience with social media tracking tools |
Marketing must keep up with evolving industry changes, trends, and audience preferences |
| Gives your brand a global platform that can reach audiences beyond your initial reach |
Brands may not be able to comply with data privacy/protection laws for their customers |
How does social media marketing increase brand awareness?
Social media marketing can increase awareness of your brand once you leverage the various features on social media platforms to increase your visibility. Features such as hashtags, direct advertising, sponsored content, and influencer marketing can all increase awareness of your brand on social media. These marketing strategies can also be tailored based on your company size and overall messaging.
How does social media marketing contribute to cost-effective advertising?
Social media marketing contributes to cost-effective advertising because it lets businesses reach a wide audience even without paying for ads. Through high-quality organic posts that your audience can engage with and share, your marketing efforts can drive significant traffic and increase brand awareness. This makes SMM handy, especially for smaller companies with limited budgets.
Social media marketing posts that deeply resonate with users have the potential to go viral. And once it does, your business can gain huge exposure across social networks even if you didn’t have a big ad budget to begin with.
