The Top 3 Biggest Points of Value You’ll Get Out of Your Social Media Marketing

The new age of being a social human being is here—and like with all things—there's marketing involved. Wherever the people are, the marketers are too, right? So, you're wondering how are marketers making the most of social media for their brand and business, and you've come to the right place to find the answer.

You’re here because you’re trying to figure out all the tips and tricks of social media marketing and how posting silly pictures on Facebook can make you (and your clients) money. If you’re already a genius on the topic and are just looking for some tips for your social media tools, scroll to the bottom for our great guide on that! If you're looking into ways to scale your marketing agency, check out our white-label social media services.

So where does the value come in? Let’s take a look:

1. It increases brand awareness

What are the chances you’ve heard of the Apple company? Trick question, we know you know all about it. Whether or not you’ve seen any of their advertising in the last week (which you probably have anyway, due to their excellent brand management), this company has done an amazing job of making themselves a household name.

Imagine if this were true for your clients—all thanks to your agency. Your client's restaurant name could be nearly synonymous with food; your orthodontic practice client could be nearly synonymous with braces. Now that you’ve wiped that drool off your mouth, let’s look at how this brand management works.

Image Source: HighSnobiety

People spend between 1 and 40 minutes on each social media channel each day. This isn’t a total, this is separate for each of Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, and Youtube. If you use all of these social media tools every day for the average amount, you’re spending basically two hours of every single day browsing them.

Let’s put this into perspective: If you’re anything like me, (which you very well may not be), you have an average of 4 hours of free time when you get home from work. Spending half your time swiping to and fro doesn’t leave much time for hobbies, does it?

We aren’t here to guilt you about your social media use, but rather to teach you to harness it. Now that you’ve seen how much time everyone spends swipin’ and clickin’ and clackin’, don’t you think your client's business would fit nicely into some of that screen time?

This is the greatest asset of social media tools that business owners overlook. The bottom line is this: The more a business’ name shows up in front of consumers’ faces, the more they’re going to remember it when the time comes to buy. A high volume of screen time for your cilent's company also means a huge increase in brand recognition—perfect for your agency's brand management.

Wrapped into this are share of voice and SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Share of voice refers to how large a share your client's business has in the total advertising of similar brands. For example, when someone searches “Sandwiches”, what percent of the results is for your client's sandwich shop, and what percent is their competitors?

Using SEO to amplify your search engine marketing strategy will allow you to choose keywords within the scope of your client's brand and increase their share of voice with that word. The best part of this? Every time your social pages use these keywords, they increase the chance that your client's business will be at the top of the search result list.

Before long, your clients could be everywhere that consumers look! This reason is enough for you to go signup your clients and start implementing a social media strategy for them right now, but there is much more value to dig for here.

2. It delivers robust marketing analytics

As a business owner, your client must love numbers—at least, when they’re in their favor. And you love numbers too—at least, numbers that prove your value to your clients. Another fantastic benefit of great social marketing is that it creates tons of numbers for you and your client to feast your eyes on. While it is indeed very difficult to track where any of your customers are coming from and why they’re buying, your social marketing can provide analytics that will help a ton! Hello, proof of performance!

This article by Forbes breaks down which metrics businesses use to evaluate their social marketing, which are interesting because they have shifted away from financial numbers toward social media-specific marketing analytics such as shares, likes, friends, etc.

What this means for you is that even if you can’t put an exact price on every like or share, you can trust that these are becoming more important because they benefit you financially in the end, and they boost your client's brand awareness every step along the way. In this study, 43.6 percent of marketers said they were planning to increase their spending in marketing analytics the most.

Google Analytics makes tracking your social media progress extremely easy, and so social marketing is an increasingly important place to invest those crucial analytics dollars. By harnessing social media metrics, you'll be able to provide your clients with robust ROI reports on your social media efforts. Start by checking out the analytics tab in our Social Marketing platform, and read up on how to measure social media ROI!

Image source: Michael Leander

The numbers themselves aren’t the only analytical benefit of social marketing, either. Half the fun comes from choosing which numbers you want to watch. As you read above, more people are interested in tracking the social aspects, but there are still several financial benefits here. If your business thrives on leads and/or lead generation techniques, then social marketing is a great way to add some method to the madness.

Do you have online surveys? Contests? Newsletter sign-ups? Every like and share you get is a potential lead that has just presented itself, in full name, to your Facebook, Twitter, and other social profiles.

Speaking of numbers, social marketing can be one of the most cost-effective expenses out there! Consider the cost of a TV commercial or a huge billboard. They’re probably aimed at everyone who watches a specific channel or drives a certain route, so they have a decent chance to bring in some revenue, but are the expenses always recouped?

Boosted Facebook posts and strategic Facebook advertising campaigns, on the other hand, are relatively inexpensive and can actually target very specific demographics of people. Your expensive TV commercial or billboard probably won’t sell custom patios to children, but your social marketing doesn’t have to waste a even a penny marketing to those little tikes in the first place!

💡 Read more: How We Generated 2,000 SQLs in Two Months with Facebook Paid Advertising

3. It creates customer engagement

Here’s the last huge reason you need what social marketing has to offer. Picture yourself once again under the looming banner of Apple’s corporate logo—the apple with the famous bite taken out of it. Does that company seem…faceless to you? If you aren’t engaged with their brand or their social marketing, it may seem like just another big corporation. However, if you join their contests, click their entertaining links, and have your reviews responded to, it might actually feel more like family to you.

That’s the thing—you have the power to feel like family to your consumers through your social media tools using these exact same strategies. The more your consumer interacts with you, and the more you interact with them, the better engagement you’ll get. This engagement is linked to a few other important places.

Ever heard of online reputation management? To put it in basic terms, it has to do with the online reviews people leave you, the ratings you get, the responses you craft, and just the general feeling people have towards your company. Social marketing is a great way to handle your reputation. You can post things that make people happy, share positive online reviews, respond to your consumers when they have questions, and so much more. Unlike an expensive TV commercial, you can even pull accidental social posts that don’t jive with people down at no cost to yourself. No wasted dollars; no unhappy business owner.

Reputation management is an amazing tool to have in your toolbox, but have you seen the scope of what it has the power to do? Your reputation has the potential to make or break your business. One of the best examples of this is the success of recommendations. 92% of consumers read online reviews prior to buying, and another huge portion of them follow recommendations from their friends.

You’ve probably bought something based solely on what others have said—even before the digital age. Here’s the difference: now the reviews and recommendations never go away. If you’re not interacting with your consumers as well as keeping your reputation in check, you’re losing money due to the sway of others!

Give your business clients the power to improve their reputation with Reputation Management!

Bonus!

By now you should have stopped asking “What’s the value of social marketing” and started asking, “Where do I start with my clients?”. You can get Social Marketing and Reputation Management platforms from us, plus an agency to fulfill the work for you. Not sure what to post for your clients? Luckily for you, we even have a great blog explaining what kinds of posts work best for each social media channel!

💡 Read more: Social Media Content: What Businesses Should Post

What value have you seen from social media marketing efforts? Let me know in the comments below! Stay social.