Social media recently overtook paid search as an advertising channel
Everything is changing, and so is the trend in industry marketing strategy. The American businessman Alvin Toffler predicted 50 years ago that “the illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn and relearn.” The same goes for evolving strategies in marketing and promoting a business. They need to learn, unlearn and relearn to get more traffic and satisfy the user’s requirements.
Social Media Marketing (SMM):
SMM is marketing that uses social media platforms to build brand awareness. The major social media platforms include Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Snapchat, etc. SMM uses the online market for the promotion of a business. The primary goals of SMM are brand awareness, promoting services and products, and driving traffic toward the website. SMM includes Social Networking, Image Sharing, Video Sharing, Social Blogging, etc.
While SEO (Search engine optimization) is also good for the quality of traffic toward your website by organic search engine reach. SEO includes sites like Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc., for specific keywords. SEO refers to both On-Page SEO and Off-Page SEO. The On-Page SEO includes Meta Title, URL Structure, Meta Description, Headings, ALT Text and Internal Linking. At the same time, Off-Page SEO includes Backlinks, Social Bookmarking, review websites, etc.
Most of the time, one doesn’t have the time to search for trends or check on what other people are providing. In today’s world, everybody needs visibility. Fortunately, people in this century can have this opportunity through social media. Therefore, SMM plays a significant role in gaining reach for your services. Making a social media page for your brand and connecting with your customer is one of the best ways to keep them aware of your business. It could be done through posting stories, making the post, and adding content to your page that helps your customer to connect with you and get everything on one platform. Social media helps a lot in sharing information with customers all across the world and helps in keeping them updated. The SMM helps increase traffic to landing pages, websites, and blog posts; it also helps produce money with a trackable return on investment, and it fosters engagement and positive interactions with consumers. It’s a great way of sharing creativity while adding value to the micro-contents by using images, text, or video formats with the users on social platforms.
Social media marketing is the new game changer:
In today’s world, social media is proven to be a game changer for the home services industry. Nowadays, in every community, home service companies are essential. Before the advent of the Internet and social media platforms, connecting to the customer was difficult and was just through word of mouth. But the Internet revolutionizing the world has benefited this industry as well. It plays an increasingly significant role in helping people find the right service providers.
According to a survey, the average American spends 2.7 hours every day using social media, checking their social media timeline 17 times a day. Through this, we can estimate how much reach we can gain through social media marketing. There has been a long list of online platforms for reaching out to new customers and gaining more traffic.
Invoca, based on home services, is specialized in its work and provides countless other home services like plumbers, electricians, roofers, and general contractors. Social media has benefited in gaining new customers. It is due to the reason that social media platforms do play the role where customers go and share the voice of their opinions and experiences with their family and friends. Products are discussed, and recommendations are made. It is accessible to everyone, and anyone can join the conversation and can share the voice of their opinions and recommendations on a particular product or service. A particular business must provide the best quality service and encounter all the problems faced by the customers. It’s an excellent opportunity for all potential customers to get to know the business and stay connected with the current client. Maintaining a profile and consistently adding new content are two important things that may be done in order to build a positive reputation and get the word out about the available home services. Additionally, there must be a chance for clients to ask questions, in order to encourage them to communicate about their experiences with the service.
Tips for creating a social media marketing strategy:
- Research and target the audience according to your services consistently and access the competitor’s performance.
- Curate the content that shows relevancy to the provided services.
- Regularly post and respond promptly.
- Optimize the content.
- Make a proper analysis of the strategies that work in your favor and eradicate those who don’t.
Reason for Social Media Marketing being powerful:
The reason for social media being powerful lies in the unparalleled capacity of social media in three areas, i.e., connection, interaction, and customer data.
- Connection:
Social media is a great platform to connect industries to reach out to their customers in many ways that have been impossible previously. Social media provides an extraordinary avenue to connect businesses with their target audience. Whether it be a content platform like YouTube or the social media sites like Facebook, or other microblogging services like Twitter. Social media platforms, therefore, help a lot in providing a connection between industries and the online business market.
- Interaction :
You can create a dynamic nature of interaction by using social media platforms. Whether it is about direct communication or passive linking, it enables industries to leverage free opportunities to showcase their services between the existing and the potential audience.
- Customer data:
Nowadays, new technologies and tools have been integrated with social media, enabling businesses to evolve their strategies and reach many people. SMM also plans to deliver invaluable resources to boost marketing outcomes, i.e., customer data. Based on the 3Vs of the big data (volume, velocity, and variety), SMM collects the customer data using different tools. The more information you have through these tools, the better you understand the customers, and it becomes easier to meet their expectations. It predicts the customer’s behavior, need, and interests.
Key for SMM:
The key here is to:
- Make an analysis on which platform your customers are reaching to you.
- Then fully understand the requirements of the customers. For example, if your brand is affiliated with providing a service. For example in the case of Invoca blogs based on the home services industry. Listen to customer demand when asking for plumbers, electricians, roofers, or general contractors. Satisfy the customer well, as this is how the reach is made and customers are satisfied enough that they come to the same place again.
- In SMM, a product or service, like the home service industry, comes across customers while surfing social media. It remains in their mind for quite a time. So when a particular problem occurs, they reach the site for the solution to their problem.
Using SMM, businesses may increase their brand’s personality, customer service, social media presence, two-way communication, and the quality of the goods and services they offer their customers. All of this helps better in gaining more brand awareness for a particular brand through the use of SMM. When it comes to the home service sector, we come up with interesting and entertaining stories to which the clients may connect. Make some discounts and special deals available throughout the year on the products and services that we offer. Moreover, SMM tries to grab customers’ attention through such things as the aim to keep the audience engaged and interacting with the content.
For a brand with a reasonable budget for marketing, you can surely use Facebook advertising and reach your desired audience in quite a short time. Social media platforms are a great way of connecting with people and different groups of people belonging to different countries. So, when a particular group of people needs any service they can reach out to your business.
Tracking Metrics of social media marketing:
According to Sprout Social, the important SMM metrics are tracked on the customer, including the engagement they make (likes, clicks, comments, sharing), impressions (number of times a post shows up), and the reach (number of unique views the post have), the share of their voice (far a brand could reach in the online market), referrals (number of times the user lands on a particular site ), and the conversations made( the purchase the user makes on a site ). At the same time, one crucial matrix is the response rate or the time the business takes to respond to its customers. Everything counts in the promotion of a brand and helps the service to reach its target audience. Strictly keep an eye on all the data provided by these platforms and try to incorporate every change the tools show and reach out to the sites where customers show more interaction.
Advantages of social media marketing:
Social media marketing strategies have proven effective for business and other services-related industries. It includes the following advantages:
- It helps a lot in business to reach a wider audience, as 3.6 billion users use social media. So even a single post can make exponential reach in a brand’s exposure.
- It has made noticeable improvements in customer satisfaction. It has created a one-to-one relationship and has enabled markets to connect with their customers through the social media platform.
- It has cost-effective tools that, when properly executed, can decrease the program’s cost.
- It helps a lot in increasing website traffic. It drives much traffic to the brand’s website through social media posts. Through clicks, a blog post can be promoted, and the landing pages help engage with the brand.
- Analytics tools provide better insights. Social media platforms give analysis reports which help the business to give an insight into who their followers are and what content they want to see, which helps a brand get a clear view of the user requirement.
Conclusion:
Social media marketing (SMM) helps a lot in building a brand, driving traffic toward a website, and increasing sales. It connects people to connect globally and thus increases their reach. Market your business as fast as possible to your audience by using social media. Use fun content that adds value to the profile to engage with the users.
Due to this, customers don’t use to like a brand that sells the straight- forward content for their promotion. They like content that tells them a story with all the imagery and content they can connect. That is the reason social media marketing has been referred to as storytelling.
SEO is drawn more toward organic traffic, while the SMM’s primary purpose is brand awareness.
Following are given some of the statistics and results for SMM:
- 54% of people use social media to research the product (GlobalWebIndex)
- 90% of people follow a business on Instagram. (Instagram)
- Markets need to put on video content and images as it’s liked by 54% of the people, and that’s how social media platforms are an excellent place to begin. (Hubspot).
That is how the organic traffic is generated from a digital asset, which significantly helps in the long run. SMM programs are much cheaper than SEO and play a vital role in the long term. SMM drives the traffic to your website from paid online advertising. Google is paid for the Google AdWord tool, and ideally, the content you post gains more visibility and comes first while driving more traffic and awareness. In today’s world, the cost of PPC (Pay Per Click) has gone significantly high due to the saturation in the market while leading to the next phase, i.e., SEM (Search engine marketing).
Appendix:
https://www.socialpilot.co/blog/seo-vs-smm
