3 Big Reasons Social Media Is Critical to Your Multi-Touch Marketing Strategy As part of a multi-touch marketing strategy, social media brings your brand to life, enables you to engage directly with your target audience, and cost-effectively expands your reach.
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The buying process has transformed significantly in recent years, with consumers interacting directly with brands right from their living room sofas. Social media is a huge part of that interaction — as people scroll through their social feeds and stumble upon brands they otherwise would have never heard of.
Oftentimes, social media is the first touchpoint you have with customers and a key driver of traffic to your website or brick-and-mortar store. In a sea of competition where everyone is fighting for customers' attention, social media needs to be a key component of your multi-touch marketing strategy — which may also include email, PPC ads, SEO and other digital marketing mediums.
If you don't, your competitors will, and they'll win over your customers before you ever get the chance to convince them to choose you instead. When a company lacks a social media presence, they're missing out on a huge opportunity to engage with their audience and grow their business.
Take a look at three big reasons to include social media in your multi-touch campaigns.
Related: The Top 5 Online Marketing Challenges — and How to Overcome Them
1. Social media is everywhere
According to Pew Research Center, around seven in 10 Americans use social media to connect with one another, read news content, share information and entertain themselves. Facebook and YouTube top the list of popular platforms, followed by Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn and Pinterest.
Statista notes, too, that an estimated 4.41 billion people globally will be using social media by 2025. With that many people on social platforms, social media has become one of the primary ways consumers discover new brands and choose to interact with companies.
In many cases, customers arrive at your website after seeing your business on social media — through an ad, a social post of yours, an influencer post, or even a customer comment or review. Indeed, social media can be a powerful touchpoint for your business if you build a strong presence on the platforms where your audience spends the most time.
Related: What Is Your Brand Saying About You?
2. You tap into different buying stages
People go through several stages in the buyer's journey before making a purchase. This may include awareness (problem identification and research), consideration (evaluating your product or service as an option), decision (making the purchase) and loyalty (sharing their experience with others).
That means that when you're designing your content strategy in order to reach potential customers, you need to create content for each stage of the process. With social media as part of your multi-touch marketing strategy, you make it easy for customers to find you and connect with you at any point in their buying cycle.
The great thing about social media is that it enables you to publish content simultaneously to people at various stages of the buyer's journey. This way, you can target individuals who have never heard of your brand before and help them become aware of what they need. You can also retarget those who are already familiar with your brand and have interacted with you at some point in the buyer's journey.
Related: 8 Simple Ways to Make Social Media Work for Your Business
3. Social media is cost-effective
Social media is a cost-efficient way to engage and influence customers — both existing and potential — and achieve desired levels of ROI. When it comes to multi-touch marketing strategies, social media is one of the most affordable and effective channels for businesses.
In addition to paid advertising — where you can get highly targeted with your desired customer base — you have low-cost and free opportunities to engage with a broader audience. You can use social media to encourage consumers to share and discuss your products or services, recommend them to others, and provide valuable feedback.
More than just a customer service or customer acquisition tool, social media allows you to tap into sophisticated audience targeting and data analytics. You're able to create a detailed buyer persona and make data-driven decisions about how to reach the right people, at the right time, in the right place.
Ultimately, you'll have a holistic strategy that considers how a prospect might interact with your brand across multiple channels over time. As part of this more holistic approach, social media enables you to gain deeper insights about your customers and what drives them to make purchase decisions — all while building trust, forming relationships and driving sales.
Related: Top 5 Social Media Marketing Pitfalls
Tips for getting started on social
If you're not sure how to get started or have been dabbling with social but haven't seen results yet, here are some tips:
Start with goals. Do you want to drive website traffic? Improve customer satisfaction? Boost engagement? Generate leads? Establish your goals before you make any posts or start advertising so that you can measure the results of your efforts.
Research your audience. You can't create an effective strategy without understanding who you're talking to. Identify key demographics, including age, location and interests, as well as where they congregate online.
Limit the number of channels you use. Trying to have a presence on every social platform is a recipe for overwhelm, and it's not likely to yield results. Don't spread yourself too thin by trying to be active on every platform; instead, focus on two or three that fit your needs best and tend to be where your audience spends the most time. Still unsure where to begin? Facebook and Instagram are typically good starting points for most brands.
Focus on posting real photos and videos as opposed to stock photos. These forms of media create more engagement and are more likely to help you connect with your audience.
In the cluttered world of digital marketing, social media can be an effective touchpoint in your overall multi-touch strategy. Start small and build on your success, using your audience insights as your guide.
