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How Social Media Helps Define Brands as a Marketing Platform, Make the Most of It!! Social channels have become effective marketing tools with the way they facilitate interaction with your customer base

By Sumit Mittal

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Did you know that 90per cent of all marketers say social media marketing has increased their business exposure? Or that 66per cent of marketers that spend at least 6 hours on social per week has seen more leads? With the advent of social media, traditional marketing methods no longer seem enough to sustain a business. Social connectivity has become the key to marketing and building the brand's image for the buyers. Analytics and other measurement tools can enable entrepreneurs to find how they can take advantage of social media as a marketing tool and also how to use data to optimize their social marketing campaigns.

The Great Panorama of Sites

Social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram are here to stay, which means that marketers can leverage this popularity and use it for their brand's growth and also to pad their wallets. One of the greatest benefits of social media marketing is that it helps you reduce marketing costs, without sacrificing the results.

Not only can you reach a global audience with limited resources but social media can get you a target audience. Having access to all these customers will help boost traffic. When a new blog or update is put on the homepage, it can take time to get traction through Google, which means that few customers will know the new content if they are not searching for your product or service. Using social media for business also boosts your site's SEO.

Understand Your Customers Better

Social media marketing will help you understand your audience. Social channels like Twitter and Instagram become effective marketing tools with the way they facilitate interaction with your customer base. As a matter of fact, many brands use YouTube to beta-test their ads before launching TV commercials. The reason is obvious: investment is low, the market is huge and the results are almost instantaneous. Brands for starters have started off by promoting itself in viral videos.

Another reason brands are taking to social media platforms to get their name out is that they have got most of the early adopters. Youth are the most likely target market for food delivery and car rental apps. It makes sense for brands to test their adoption online.

Also, by reading their tweets and status updates, brands can easily gain insight into the daily lives of users, thereby allowing you to gauge their behaviour as a consumer. Social media marketing, or SMM, can allow you to easily understand the kind of products that they are buying and why, their hobbies, the kind of posts that they share, the websites that they frequently visit.

This knowledge is bound to have obvious marketing benefits. If you understand your customer, you can write better content and more compelling posts, which leads to more traffic. But the benefits can sometimes go far beyond – it can help you in identifying customer pain points, refining your product strategy and also in improving sales.

Adds on Socia Media and Their Reach

Talking about social media ads, they have another plus point -- they allow targeting and retargeting. Social media platforms offer highly targeted advertisement that can be customized based on the customer's needs. For instance, Facebook ads can target customers by several factors -- like age, education level, location, industry and even user behaviour (the number and the kind of pages the user has liked).

Businesses that have high selling frequency can benefit more. Have you ever wondered why you see brand ads on your Facebook dashboard? Well, Facebook and Google allow you to retarget, making it easy for the brand to capture user information and share more offers with users that have used the service already.

Through social media, you can help get noticed and also earn media coverage. The success of an event heavily depends on effective promotion. And what better way for promotion than social media? An active social media presence is always an advantage. Brand image thrives on social media marketing. The way your brand is presented on social networking sites, nowadays, has more power to create an image in any potential customer's mind than TV commercials. Since almost everyone is on social media and people constantly keep checking their phones, regular updates about the brand can also be given – like the launch of a new product or the betterment of an earlier service or sales and discount offers.

Brand Value and Loyalty

A strong media presence will also build brand loyalty. It can considerably reduce your customer response time as these days if there is a problem with your product or service, the consumer expects it to be solved right away. It was found in a report published by Texas Tech University that brands with an active social media presence are likely to have more customers.

Engagement with people on social media helps marketers develop a connection and a rapport, which in turn enables them to widen their customer base. It is a positive step in providing your followers with useful information and help, along with some entertainment that manages to keep their interest peaked. This will also project that you value your customers as people and not just a source of revenue. Customers will see you as an entity that cares about them and they too will be able to understand the brand's vision. In the competitive business world of today, this has the ability to make a huge difference. Social media can also be perfect for a well-suited PR strategy.

Not only can you develop stronger relationships with your customers, but it will also enable you to acquire more customers. It has been estimated that 70per cent of business-to-consumer marketers have acquired customers through Facebook. So, yes, social media plays a great role than you can imagine in increasing your sales through its obvious innumerable benefits.

Sumit Mittal

Founder & CEO - VentAllOut.com

Sumit is a young dynamic finance person turned entrepreneur who has over 19 years of experience in Payments industry with exposure to various functions and countries. Sumit has travelled and worked across countries in South Asia, Middle East and Africa with assignment within GCC countries focusing on Kuwait, Qatar and Oman. He has expertise in financial planning, corporate structuring and banking. Sumit’s work experience covers top financial services in multinational companies such as GE Capital & Mastercard International. Tailored with solid education foundation in Mechanical Engineering and Master’s in Business Administration (Finance & General Management) makes him a versatile business strategist.

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