Five reasons to use social media marketing

Most people with a business know they need to do social media marketing but don’t really think about why. There are many reasons but they all lead to the same good outcome – to boost your business. Let’s look at them in detail.  

To promote your content

You may have a lot of great content on your website or you may have started a blog. That’s great but you also want to push that content out to a wider audience instead of hoping that they just stumble across you online. You could boost your messaging in an e-mail newsletter for subscribers, or start posting regularly on your preferred platform. 

To boost the algorithm

One reason why you’re putting out content on these social media platforms is algorithm awareness. Algorithm is literally just a fancy word for saying computer software. This computer software knows if you’re using the platform and if you are, it’s designed to help promote your channel or your brand. If you don’t engage with it, then your content doesn’t get promoted as much. If you engage with certain types of people, your content gets promoted more to those types of people. 

I wish there was a handbook for the algorithm but there’s not – each platform is different. So there’s no real way that you can game the system. But you can experiment and test and see what works, then build your playbooks off of that. When people recommend posting a certain number of times a day, it’s because they’ve been experimenting too. 

Brand awareness
Think of brand awareness as your kids watching the cartoons, and the commercials, where at the end of the show they say ‘I want this toy, I cannot live without this mom and dad, I have to absolutely have it.’ Every time your child sees this toy, they want that toy. That’s what you want for your business. 

So you put your ads out there, you put your social media content out there such that when they see it and they have a need, they’re gonna choose your product over someone else. In business, there’s the concept of know, like and trust. People buy from who they like and who they trust. You build that relationship with this brand awareness and engagement on those social media platforms. 

Sales, sort of

Social media activities are designed to drive brand awareness about your products so that it pre-qualifies them in a sense. If they know that this product or service is for them, they will engage more with your platform. The sale will come later. 

This doesn’t replace a paid marketing campaign or strategy. A lot of people think that by just doing social media marketing, they are going to be set. But social media marketing is not designed to sell products and it’s not designed to replace a paid marketing campaign. 

A marketing campaign will put your product where it needs to be and when it needs to be. Think about going to the grocery store during Super Bowl weekend. There are hats and nachos and beer on display. That’s not accidental. Someone paid for that. The technical term for that is a slotting fee.

In the digital space, when you’re looking for a cosmetic dentist, what do you see? You Google it and at the top of your search are paid ads. People might organically find you too but that takes a lot of search engine optimization work. 

So again, our objective here is not to replace that, just to prepare the audience to buy later.  

To follow your social media calendar

This is another plug for the social media calendar, which I’ve talked about – the outline of all your social media outreach. A social media calendar is differentiated from a sales calendar which outlines the ideal times for you to sell your products and services. The social media calendar is an overview of your upcoming social media posts and promotions. Your content may dovetail a bit with the retail calendar but it is its own thing. You make it to help you stick to your social marketing plan, but you can modify it if necessary.

In a nutshell, all of these reasons keep you connecting with these potential customers. It can be a long online relationship, but by the time someone walks in your door, they are committed.