Social media Marketing
INTRODUCTION
The internet is one of the most epic human technological advancements that has revolutionized every aspect of human existence. Today, communicating to an individual located in the arctic, northernmost part of the globe with another one located in Puerto Williams, the southernmost tip of South America on the other side of the world cannot take more than a second either through a phone call, through the e-mail or any of the available social networking platforms. On the same note, the internet has infiltrated how we travel today making it more easy, convenient, and less costly. The medical field has seen immense changes that have been influenced by the internet. From the ability to perform complex computerized research studies that would have otherwise consumed thousands of hours of the most qualified world-class scientists to computerized medical equipment that have saved and continue to save millions of lives in the medical field. However, the field that has undergone the most profound change under the influence of the internet is the world of business.
The internet itself has undergone tremendous changes since the first inception of the internet idea back in the 1940s. initially, the internet was a simple static design built to transmit minute bytes of messages between two terminals. These terminals were a repository of data where information was published, stored, and maintained by few expert coders. In the late 1980s and late 1990s, the internet widened in scope to encompass university research centers, Information Technology (IT), public entities and private enterprises. The number of users grew tremendously from under 50,000 to over 70 million in less than a decade. From that point on, developers continued improving the performance of the internet which increased the scope of use (Constantinides, 2014). However, the emergence of the web revolutionized the use of the internet. Many people gained interest where people could be able to execute very basic functionalities using the internet. Crowd-based communication tools in the wake of the 21st century gave birth to interactive sites such as social networking sites where people could communicate with each other and create their content. New business entities that operated entirely via the internet began to sprout and grow exponentially.
In the medieval world, the eminence of a business was measured in terms of the number of employees, the ground space it occupies, the number of branches, and how far those branches are spread across the world. However, the internet has revolutionized how a business operates and removed the physical barriers that limit how much a business can grow. Today, we have mega businesses that are located entirely on the internet and have turnover rates that count in terms of trillion dollars with virtually no physical location. A person who lived a century ago will have a difficult time understanding what is Amazon, e-bay or Alibaba and how such businesses were able to top the ladder of the most profitable businesses in the world in less than two decades. The idea that an individual can operate a mega business owned and operated by a single individual operated at the comfort of his home can be rather fascinating to a person who is interacting with the internet for the very first time. However, what would be most interesting is the fact that the all-time most popular marketing channels such as billboard ads, print ads, live demonstrations, TV, and radio advertisements are all considered outdated and less successful. New channels that were virtually non-existent just about two decades ago are now the epitome of marketing. Such channels that in general make up the electronic marketing or simply e-marketing include affiliate marketing, email marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), display adverting, Pay Per Click (PPC), content marketing and Social Media Marketing (SMM) which according to experts is the single most important marketing platform. Apart from being extremely cheap compared to other forms of e-marketing, social media marketing gives businesses a chance to interact with a huge targeted audience
HOW SOCIAL MEDIA HAS REVOLUTIONALIZED E-MARKETING
e-marketing is the future of marketing across the world. With more businesses getting online, e-marketing is set to gain more ground on both online and offline marketing. Social media, on the other hand, has eased the way businesses find and connect with customers across the world to promote their product. Initially, social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram were viewed as merely the new generation interacting sites. However, as more and more people joined the sites to the excess of 2 billion, marketers sought ways that they could introduce the idea of marketing on these sites. Soon, businesses started discovering the potential that social networking sites held in terms of meeting potential customers that may require their products. Soon, businesses started flocking on these sites to tap on the huge audience that was at their disposal at virtually a fraction of the initial cost that marketers used to pay for offline marketing channels. Social media has revolutionized the marketing world in diverse ways as analyzed below.
Ease of complexity around marketing
A while ago, only business with the capability of investing heavily in marketing strategies enjoyed the huge customer base that marketing avails. However, social media equalized the odds, giving even the small businesses a chance to promote their products to potential customers at virtually no cost or at a fraction of the cost that marketing would have required through the traditional marketing channels. Social media marketing enables businesses to access a targeted customer base at their convenience. This means an individual will only get marketing messages once they are logged in to their phone or computer. With traditional marketing campaigns, targeted marketing was near to impossible and if it could be enacted, the audience was minimal. However, with social media, the audience is extremely large and spread across the world. Its nature of use makes it easy to target customers. For instance, customers
Allows for feedback
Feedback in the corporate world is among the most critical information that contributes hugely to the growth and development of a business. Such information helps the business identify areas of weaknesses that may need extra attention to avoid losing the client base to competitors. Marketing, in particular, requires fast feedback which serves both as a guide on areas that the business is making positive progress and as a warning on areas that the business is failing. One of the main drawbacks of the other forms of marketing is the inability to get feedback from customers and prospective customers on what they feel about the business or the marketing efforts.
Social media gives marketers an easy opportunity to get immediate feedback that analysts say can talk volumes about the opinion of both prospective and current customers on the company products. Such information can be used to curate products that would suit customers’ preferences to ensure that they do not go looking for other alternative products. Through social media platforms, customers view posts and live a comment. Analytic tools may be used to analyze this feedback and give a general view concerning them. Generally, negative feedback means the product or the marketing strategy that the company is using is not favorable and therefore the business needs to adjust accordingly. In case the analysis gives generally positive feedback, it means whatever the marketing strategy the business is applying is impressing customers and so the business should continue doing the same. Additionally, given the friendly and interactive mode of social media, corporates can ask the participants to participate in surveys or polls which are is a direct way of asking for feedback from customers. Twitter has specifically capitalized on this segment where it allows businesses to conduct polls. The platform has in-built analytic tools that perform analysis and give feedback immediately after the poll is closed which generally takes 24 hours or at most 7 days.
Targeting consumers is easier
Today, 50% of Americans do their shopping online. this means businesses have to improve both their marketing strategy and how they present their products to the customers. Business is always in competition in terms of the marketing strategy each applies in pursuit of customers’ attention (Constantinides, 2014). The advantage of social media marketing is that it has reduced the competitive nature of marketing due to its ability to launch targeted marketing strategy and also due to a large amount of audience it provides making it possible for every business to curve out a substantial following out of this huge audience.
Social networking sites make it easy for companies to build a strong relationship with their customers. Such kind of personal interactions that businesses create inspire feelings of loyalty in their followers who then might turn into customers in the future. Also, due to the ability of a customer to choose which brand to follow, it becomes easy for a business to convince such a follower to buy their products.
Access to the global market
No other platform that has the capability of interconnecting people as social media platforms do. Combined, all the social networking sites have a total following of about 3.5 billion people. This means about 47 % of the world population is on social media. Having such an audience at the disposal of marketers means huge opportunities both established businesses and start-ups as well. Today, a business can be located in one part of the world but through its adverts on social media gain a strong clientele base in a completely different part of the world. Such a breakthrough in marketing can be achieved without spending a coin to post the adverts or just a negligible amount when compared to what other offline marketing strategies require.
Interestingly, one does not require to have a strong established business for them to enjoy the product promotion benefits that social media sites offer. In fact, it is possible for a start-up that is barely known to edge out well-established firms in business by simply curating content that impresses customers and that compels them to buy their products.
Reliable customer service
The wake of the 21st century has seen the interpretation and response to customer care service change tremendously. Back in the early 20th century and before. Customer service was not accorded much attention as it does today. Corporate organizations believed that the business is the epicenter and customers need to come after those of the business. Due to this skewed notion, very few businesses survived past the 10-year mark. In fact, the business analyst agrees that about 96% of businesses fail within the first 10 years of their existence. However, with the revised definition of customer care service, businesses are embracing the importance of putting the needs of the customer first.
Social media platforms have created a great channel where corporate organizations can interact with their customers and receive their queries concerning their products or services. Today, it has become a norm that every business has adopted of hosting a 24 hours customer care service where customers can receive immediate feedback on their queries. Businesses that fail to adhere to the new standards face the possibility of losing clients which paint a negative image to the business.
ADVANTAGES OF USING SOCIAL MEDIA IN E-MARKETING
Social media marketing is one of the e-marketing tools that has gained prominence due to its ability to create fast and easy connectivity between brands and customers. The success of any business depends entirely on the amount of brand recognition that it’s able to create out there especially to a targeted audience. Marketers across the globe agree that the highest number of traffic that they record are sourced from social media platforms. This phenomenon is a result of widespread brand recognition by a large number of people giving businesses an advantage that was only enjoyed by well-established businesses that could manage to fund offline marketing and product promotions. Apart from brand recognition, social media marketing has other accrued advantages as analyzed below.
Improved search engine rankings
Today, human lives are so much interconnected with computers and the internet such that without them, life would be virtually unbearable. People have become so engraved on the internet such that even simple things as ordering a meal, making inquiries about the day’s weather, or looking for suggestions on which color of clothes to wear today are done via the internet. Businesses have picked up the challenge by ensuring that they increase the probability of customers ordering whatever product they need via their websites. This has created a heated competition between businesses that sell the same products in their pursuit to get the customers’ attention. To create fairness, google and other search engines created algorithms that give priority to websites that have been able to amass the highest quantity and quality content. This practice of creating interesting high-quality content that helps websites rank on the search engines generally referred to as Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Having a strong social media backing gives websites a better chance at ranking on search engines (Saravanakumar & SuganthaLakshmi, 2012).
According to surveys conducted on businesses that have been active on social media for more than a year, analytics indicated that such businesses performed better in terms of search engine ranking than those without active social media accounts or those that had been active for less than a year. Generally, business websites that rank better on search engines stand a chance of attracting more customers than one on the 10th page (Felix et al., 2017). This is because a customer interested in finding a certain product would most probably click the top websites that appear on their search tabs because of various reasons. For one is that customers believe that ranked websites are more credible and hence trustworthy in terms of quality of the products that they offer and all the services that pertain to such a transaction. Two is that search engines rank websites using various criteria, customer reviews, and the number of people visiting such websites being considered. Customers use such valuables to determine which business is worth putting their money into. Today, businesses use various tactics to attract following on their social media sites. Such tactics include paying influencers to like and share a business website’s content on their social media walls. These are individuals with a huge following that trust them and therefore, whatever they share on their timelines attracts the attention of their followers who may turn into future customers for the business.
High conversion rate
Increased visibility on social media means the opportunity to convert the following into customers. Once a business website has managed to attract a substantial following. Converting such a following into potential customers is easy. To achieve this, a business needs to clearly identify its target market and invest heavily in that. For instance, if a business is targeting young people between the age of 18 to 29 years old, the highest number of this group is on Facebook. Therefore, a business should invest in creating captivating content that suits well with this type of audience to increase the conversion rate. Similarly, if the business’s target audience is people in the age group of 60 years and above, such an audience would probably be found on twitter and linked-in. therefore, a business should prioritize curating articles that such an audience will relate with and post regularly on these particular social networking sites to increase the chances of converting such an audience to customers.
Another tactic that a business can apply to increase conversion rate is to leverage user-generated content (Hoffman & Fodor, 2010). Customers feel more appreciated when their favorite brands recognize them and even hour them. Marketing surveys conducted indicate brands that actively engage with their following and recognize them strengthen s their loyalty to the brand and increases the chance of converting them to potential customers. Additionally, brands can ask their loyal customers to share their content on their timelines. This has the potential to increase conversion rates because customers trust user-generated content than adverts generated by business entities. 82% of respondents in a survey admitted that they trust user-generated content and would definitely buy a product that a fellow social media user has shared because they feel that the user has already interacted with the product and therefore their positive review means its usefulness is proven.
Finally, offering customer care services on social media platforms increase the conversion rate. Users follow keenly how brands respond to queries and complaints posted by followers on social sites. The time that such queries take to be answered determines how the followers will relate with the brand in the future. Fast responses increase the trust and loyalty of followers. Also, the type of response matters a lot. Followers want to see responses that adequately address what was being asked. This increases the confidence level of followers on the brand’s credibility and the trust that in case they buy a product from the brand and may need assistance, they know that their query will be answered promptly and in the right manner.
Cost-effective
Another advantage of the use of social media marketing is cost-effectiveness. compared with other marketing tactics, social media is among the effective marketing method. For starters, creating a business profile and promoting products on such sites is absolutely free. Although, some may require that one pay for advertising on their platform, the cost is still negligible compared to other forms of advertisement. This feature is important because it gives small businesses and startups a chance to thrive without having to incur exorbitant marketing costs. Also, social media gives marketers a chance to evaluate who are the most potential audience that can convert easily. This gives the business an easier task since the marketing content curated will only target such an audience. If the business opts for paid ads, they will only target a specific group and therefore would only need to draw a much smaller budget that will see a large return on investment.
Marketing insight
Among the most valued advantages of social media by marketers is marketplace insight. Social media gives brands an invaluable chance to know the thought and diverse needs of their customers. Through following keenly on the conversations that followers are engaging in on a business timeline, it is easy to understand what the followers feel about the brand and areas that they think should be improved that the brand may not have prior knowledge of. Similarly, a business may get great insight concerning what the competitors are doing differently compared to what they are doing. Getting such insight does not need the business to incur any additional cost to acquire. Marketers need to only review the business’ timeline and see what they are doing to attract traffic. Thereafter, a brand may use that knowledge to improve on the marketing tactics that they are already using. This ensures that one does not lose following or their customer base to the competitors (Tuten & Solomon, 2017).
Additionally, a business can use analytic tools on the various social media platforms to measure the conversion rate from each site. This will enable the business to know which social media platform suits the business more than the others in terms of attracting more traffic and which type of content customers love the most. Such insight will guide the brand in creating more similar content on the same on the particular platform giving the brand a better chance to increase its customer base and market share.
Becoming a thought leader
There is nothing that attracts followers more to a brand than thought leaders who can curate insightful and original content that is useful to followers. Business entities that have established themselves as thought leaders in their respective fields receive unparalleled brand loyalty and support from followers. Social media makes achieving such a feat less difficult because the audience is readily available and the brand only needs to curate original and authentic content that will grab the attention of followers and consequently grabbing their attention in the hope that they may consequently turn into customers in future. Although there are no set standards for becoming a thought leader, brands only need to display a substantial insight on knowledge pertaining to their respective field. Also, being able to curate that knowledge into content that followers can apply in their lives makes followers look up to such a brand which is basically what makes a business a thought leader in a particular field.
CONCLUSION
Social media has proven to be one of the most useful aspects of e-marketing in terms of reaching out to customers worldwide. Apart from its cost-effectiveness, social media marketing has increased the customer-brand relationship which mutually benefits both parties. Small and medium businesses have benefited the most since they are spared incurring the exorbitant marketing expenses while at the same time enjoying the full benefits that marketing avail to businesses. Today, through social media marketing, small brands can compete on the same platform with established corporates. A business, irrespective of the size needs only to learn a few ropes around social media marketing strategies. Such strategies include identifying a brand’s target and capitalize on creating content that the audience can relate with, analyzing competition, understand how to use and interpolate metrics and connecting with customers at a personal level.
Despite being a new marketing channel when gauged against the other well-known marketing strategies such as Per Par Click and email marketing, social media marketing has gained a lot of recognition in the corporate world. Today, every business entity, irrespective of its size has at least one active account in every social networking site. Their popularity has grown such that they serve as customer care inquiry location. People prefer using social networking sites to make their queries. This norm has gained footing due to the fast-responsive rate that brands display on social networking sites. this improves brands’ credibility and which consequently increases the conversion rate.
Apart from business, customers have benefitted a lot from social media marketing. Since different businesses selling different products can be easily located on social networking platforms, customers do not need to waste time searching for their favorite products in brick and motor stores. A few minutes on social media will be enough to locate a business entity that is availing the products with even better customer care terms such as home delivery, money-back guarantee if the customer does not like the product and warrant that can extend up to two years. Additionally, customers can get genuine reviews from other customers who have bought and used the product that the customer is interested in buying. Customer reviews indicate whether whatever the business is offering is genuine and whether they are committed to customer satisfaction. The advantage is that such information cannot be altered which makes it easy for customers to trust the reviews. Although social media marketing is still in its developmental stages, its achievement in terms of linking businesses with customers is unmatched. Marketing experts agree that social media marketing is a field is has already revolutionized how brands will be promoting their products. The potential that social media marketing holds in terms of giving brands a platform an opportunity to interact with clients at a personal level and promote their products is yet to be fully exploited.
References
Tuten, T. L., & Solomon, M. R. (2017). Social media marketing. Sage.
Hoffman, D. L., & Fodor, M. (2010). Can you measure the ROI of your social media marketing?. MIT Sloan Management Review, 52(1), 41.
Felix, R., Rauschnabel, P. A., & Hinsch, C. (2017). Elements of strategic social media marketing: A holistic framework. Journal of Business Research, 70, 118-126.
Saravanakumar, M., & SuganthaLakshmi, T. (2012). Social media marketing. Life Science Journal, 9(4), 4444-4451.
Constantinides, E. (2014). Foundations of social media marketing. Procedia-Social and behavioral sciences, 148, 40-57.