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Social media

Including social media in your marketing campaign offers an immediacy to your marketing strategy, in that you can track your impact, your audience, and your ROI quickly and effectively. Connecting with your customers in this way enables you to interact in real time, providing them with answers, services and information, while allowing you to obtain measureable feedback. The return on investment of implementing social media in your marketing campaigns can be high, as the costs are very low. The goals of using social media include increased brand exposure, trust and credibility, customer growth and retention, and lead generation. Marketers who use social media often feel they have better insight into and understanding of their marketplace.

Your marketing team must incorporate a strategy specific to social media. This includes data analysis (many social media platforms offer their own analytics), audience targeting, quality of service (creating loyalty and return traffic), content value in order to engage your audience, and the understanding that the measurement of a successful marketing campaign tends to be exponential and organic; results may take time to become apparent. You may also want to consider how to create or leverage influence (using celebrities or industry leaders, or your own thought leaders), to create trust in your brand. Engagement with your audience must be reciprocal to show the best results, as the nature of social media is reciprocal.

Marketing a product though the use of social media involves considering your business’s marketing strategy, and how your social media tactics will reflect this; how you will measure ROI (through sales, increased traffic, or brand exposure?), who is your audience (Twitter or Snapchat?), and which social management tools can you use. Some examples of popular social media platforms are Hootsuite, Buffer, SocialOomph, and Sprout Social.

The Social Media Examinator’s 2016 Social Media Marketing Industry Report offers some insight on how and why marketers are using social media these days…Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and YouTube are the most important and commonly used social media sites for marketers. B2B marketers tend to prioritize LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+, and SlideShare. According to the report, the most popular forums for paid social media advertisement are Facebook, Google, Twitter, and LinkedIn; and the favored content for B2B is blogging, visual, and video, in that order. A majority of marketers considers social media an important element in their campaigns (90%).