How To Use Social Media In Business Marketing: A Detailed Guide

What is Social Media Marketing?

Businesses engaging with customers and prospects through one or more social media platforms for brand awareness, brand building, driving sales, product or service promotion, increasing website traffic, and other purposes, but without any payment is termed as Social Media Marketing. Contrary to this, the businesses following all these agendas or operations, by adopting paid services to specific platforms to reach a wider audience is termed as Social Media Advertising.

Social Media Marketing and Social Media Advertising, both are excellent ways for companies to educate their customers on new products/services or industry trends under digital marketing and reach a wider audience without much manual effort. It is quite similar to the form of word-of-mouth marketing, which empowers customers to post user-generated content, such as comments, reviews, etc. These are more positive for businesses that deploy paid marketing strategies.

How to use Social Media for Businesses?

There are multiple aspects in which Social Media Advertising can help businesses, such as

• Marketing
• Sales
• Customer Service
• Recruitment & Hiring
• Crisis Management

Social Media for Business Marketing Every business demands marketing to sustain itself in the highly competitive world. So, if you are adopting social media marketing strategies with a business-specific plan, then you can quickly scale up your business by reaching customers and prospects in global locations. Some of the most beneficial reasons for businesses to adopt social media advertising are:

• Increase brand awareness
• Generate more leads and boost conversion
• Build new and rejuvenate your relationship with customers
• Follow and learn from your competitors

To achieve all these aspects, it is important to craft effective social media advertising strategies such as;

1. Plan your mode of interaction: It means defining your post style, such that how you like to introduce your business to your customers, your mode of communication i.e. directly through posts or interacting on previous comments, and more.
2. Post consistently: To make your presence visible, with social media advertising it is important to post regularly in an organized manner to connect with customers. But, don’t overdo anything, it may put off the customers and works negatively as well.
3. Define a Communication Structure: Study your audience and define a tone to interact and advertise your business that resonates with your audience. Try to be interactive, friendly, and relevant with your words.
4. Study your Audience: Prefer Social Media Analytics & Insights Tools with all social media platforms to study customer behavior, the latest market trends, and all details based on demographics as well. It will help you to engage more effectively with your prospects and customers.
5. Create Unique & Engaging Content: You need to define your USP to make the most out of it. It will help you to present creative and attractive posts that raise engagement and ultimately promotes social media ROI for your business.

Social Media for Sales The ultimate goal of any business is to generate revenue while raising brand awareness and customer shopping experience. The intelligent usage of social media platforms will help any business to attract customers, attract word-of-mouth referrals, and increase sales for your business. To gain ROI by engaging through Social Media Platforms, businesses can adopt the following best practices:

1. Use engaging & informative content for advertisement: To engage with customers through social media advertising the intelligent usage of words would be in the form of running polls or contests rather than being too much pushy. It will grab customer attention and provide them with information about your products & services in content marketing.
2. Showcase user-generated content: To engage with customers and raise sales, highlight customers’ great experiences and feedback with you during social media engagement. Moreover, you can even adopt this tactic and share user-generated content on your business website.
3. Engage with brand ambassadors & influencers: For new entrants, influencer marketing can do wonders to raise sales. Whereas established brands can collaborate with their brand ambassadors to highlight the brand presence and use their influence on customers to raise sales.
4. Run flash sales: Flash sales are one of the latest marketing tactics that businesses are adopting for brand awareness and to generate FOMO and raise sales. It could be run randomly on your platform or can advertise about it to attract more and informed customers to sales.

Social Media for Customer Services Adopting a social media engagement strategy for customer services will support your business to communicate one-on-one with your customers. It builds a sense of comfort, makes customers acknowledged, and encourages them to recommend your brand to others. Some of the benefits that you can avail by following social media customer services for your business are:

• Increases openness in communication between customers and employees
• Regular interaction builds trust between customers and the brand
• Allows customers to easily connect with respective departments to share their feedback or complaints

To avail all the social media marketing benefits with convenient customer services you can prefer implementing the following social media marketing strategies;

1. Respond quickly: Monitor your social media channels regularly and try to respond to customers’ comments, queries, and complaints quickly to build a healthy and b relationship. According to research, about 42% of customers expect a response within 60 minutes on social media, especially to a complaint.
2. Strategic use of hashtags: Use hashtags to keep your content/posts organized and easy to navigate on social media platforms. However, update your learnings regularly, as the algorithm’s likely to change frequently.
3. Connect with complainant privately: People often use social media platforms to share their bad experiences with companies to a wider audience. Try to connect with such customers personally and adopt best practices to resolve their issues.
4. Standardize your voice: Define a mode of communication and tone of presenting your views and response to customer queries. Having multiple people operating social media handle increases the chance of voice dilution, and you need to avoid that.

Social Media for Recruitment & Hiring Some of the major benefits of eying on social media platforms for recruitment and hiring are:

1. Most of the time, passive job seekers turn out to be a great asset for companies. And through social platforms, you can not only connect with active job seekers but also passive job seekers, who would consider a better offer easily.
2. Taking social media for recruitment & hiring will be more cost-effective for companies and seekers than traditional hiring platforms. It brings high-quality talent in a significantly short time duration and expenses.
3. Most job seekers visit companies’ profiles on social media platforms. That’s why it is important to build a good social profile and works as a business showcase builds brand awareness to present your organization’s culture, values, and various positive points.

Social Media for Crisis Management From a business’s perspective, a crisis could be an event or situation that negatively impacts your brand reputation. On the other hand, global crises or incidences can also be considered under this, but it is up to you, as to what types of issues you are acknowledging on your social media platform. During a crisis, exercising social media engagement demonstrates you are interacting with the brand and can impact your brand’s business, market image, operations, and community. As a social eye, it is crucial to understand when you need to respond and when to remain silent under not-so-friendly situations. Make sure, with your words during crisis you are providing clear and empathetic information to your followers, which supports customer retention. Some of the preventive steps you can adopt during crisis management are:

• Pause all your campaigns and scheduled posts
• Establish a communication plan for effective crisis management
• Acknowledge people’s expressions, but don’t argue during the crisis period
• If you don’t have anything nice or positive to say, it’s better not to say anything rather than make things worse
• Look for various modes through your business that can extend meaningful support to those who need it.

Social Media portals have become a widely adopted medium for top talent recruitment. A majority of companies prefer social media platforms to connect and hire excellent and active candidates as well as passive candidates.

Start Marketing on Social Media

A huge number of populations are regularly using social media platforms and on average, about 80% of users spend about 2+ hours daily with these platforms. So, it is a great opportunity for businesses and marketers to avail of these channels to promote their products/services and engage with customers. You can use social media advertising to serve all these above-mentioned purposes. But an intelligent and planned way of usage can yield the best results for your business. So, start working on building your social media strategies, social media engagement patterns, customer retention, social media engagement, and more. For more details and assistance, you can connect with our digital marketing experts, who can help you formulate business-specific strategies and implementing them accurately.