How social media has changed the whole marketing industry

Before digital marketing has taken over social media, social media was only a platform for people to connect and virtually socialize. Businesses were using traditional marketing channels such as broadcasting, prints, billboards, and more. These marketing channels are costly and are no longer delivering impressive results as they once were because consumers are moving away from these traditional media to digital media. As more people are predominately active on social media, marketers as well as businesses see the potential of social media and started leveraging social media to their own benefits.

72% of Americans use social media and its usage has grown at a compound annual growth rate of 12% since 2021, according to Hootsuite. While social media is continuing to be one of the best marketing channels in today’s digital era, it’s important to understand how exactly it changed the marketing industry and how it helps your business.

1. Marketing and Analytics

Social media marketing has the capability to provide invaluable data and accurate insights to marketers and businesses, which traditional marketing channels could only imagine. Unlike traditional marketing channels, marketers no longer need to take the extra time to presume what the consumers would like to try and take risky moves. When running ads on social media, an abundance of insightful data will be readily available for your business to better understand the audiences reached to take further actions after analyzing data information.

90% of small businesses consider social media platforms as effective marketing tools, according to Neal Schaffer. Social media insights and the constantly updated data regarding ads contribute to the effectiveness of this marketing channel because its insights allow businesses to closely monitor the performance of their ads, and understand how the target audience interact with each ad. In addition, you could tailor your ads to target specific customer group, be it their age groups, locations, or genders. Your business could also gather every detail of customers including their buying habits, preferences, income and more.

2. Achieving more with less budget

Compared to traditional marketing media, social media marketing is possibly the most cost-effective aspect of a business’ advertising strategy. All social media platforms are free for businesses to sign up and create an online profile to post content and network. If your business decides to do paid advertising or promotion on any social platform, the costs would be relatively low compared to other non-digital marketing channels. This is a big advantage to small businesses and business start-ups who don’t have a large budget for marketing but still wants to effectively reach the target audience.

Another advantage of using social media advertising is that companies could see bigger return on marketing investments. Since social media ads can be highly targeted toward specific audiences, companies can choose who can see their ads display, and this will generate higher conversion. In addition, the results your business receive from social media marketing are often in real-time, saving you time and effort to get the results, performance details and allows you to make instant corrective changes if things don’t go as planned.

Therefore, social media marketing is cost-efficient, while being affordable, it also provides you more value for your budget and gives you real time results.

3. Customer service

Social media is not limited to running ads and posting content to the target audience, but it’s also a platform for your business to strengthen your customer service. Customer service has always been an important aspect of a business to help customers keep in touch with their queries or specific needs. A survey on customer experience has found that 94% of respondents believe companies that deliver great customer experience over messaging channels are more likely to have repeat customers.

With social media, your business can significantly improve your customer service and customer experience which wasn’t possible in the past.

You could leverage social media as another touch point for customer service because in this digital age, customers rely heavily on social media to get their questions answered within minutes at any given time. Social platforms such as Facebook and Instagram allow business accounts to automate responses to “frequently asked questions” so customers could get their questions answered instantly without having to write long emails or submit forms, which they might never hear back from. So, by having a customer service that is quick to respond, or message automation that responds to customers around the clock and tries to solve the issues quickly is what makes customers satisfied, and lead repurchase and become loyal to your brand.

4. Global reach

Social media has made the world smaller. Businesses were far more localized in the past. However, with social media and its power in connecting people across the globe, businesses can now have access to an international marketing, allowing you to expand your reach. This is extremely helpful for businesses that offer products or services to global customers.

Before the social media boom, it was difficult for businesses to advertise and reach target consumers overseas unless the business had a large budget for marketing efforts. However, it is no longer a complication with the current social media ad reach because businesses can easily choose to display their ad campaign according to their own needs.

For instance, you can choose one ad post to be actively running in one region and choose another ad post to run in another region.

Social media does not only help you reach the international market, but also allows your brand for multilingual branding as social platforms now offer the option to translate your posts into the user’s preferred language, eliminating the language barrier.

As it continues to grow, the power of social media has changed the whole marketing industry. Marketers and businesses also continue to put in more effort on social media marketing strategy to further boost ROIs. Social media platforms can provide businesses with comprehensive data to facilitate customer outreach and social branding strategies. Social media also plays a key role improving customer service by allowing businesses to automate their responses so customers can still get immediate answers when customer service agents are away. It has become an important customer touchpoint that businesses must not overlook.

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