25. Conclusion: The Importance of Social Media in Marketing

The best way to evaluate the importance of applying social media in marketing is to realize the importance of social media in everyday life of people who are likely to become your customers. Social media marketing has become a necessity, one that is imposed to the business by the overall presence and impact social networks have on the users. 

In spite of the fact that social media presence has become a necessity, there are numerous ways to leverage social media presence into improving your business, and here are some of the major benefits.

Building a loyal community

Ability to create a community of people who are loyal to your brand and to foster this relationship is what makes social networks such a perfect places for modern businesses. You are now able to gather those who are interested in your business or your area of expertise by building your online community. In addition, you are able to broadcast your message, to promote your company by introducing it to the community of loyal followers. Working on engagement and creating an authentic and valuable environment, you will be able to make the most out of that community, which will result in multiple benefits for your business.

Learn from the community

The feeling of community will allow you to create an atmosphere from which you can learn about your customers and about your products as well. Interaction with buyers will help you explore their motives and needs when buying from you, as well as what inspires them to buy. Interaction with potential buyers will help you discover dilemmas they might have, as well as what drives them to make a decision to buy or not to buy.

Your online community will help you learn about your target audience, how they feel, how they react, what they expect, etc. This kind of feedback is valuable information, as it will affect other aspects of your business in a positive way.

Work on product development

Having learnt from the community, you can now integrate the knowledge into improving your products, improving packaging or perhaps your relationship with the clients. You will learn the things buyers like and do not like, so that you can work on developing your products even further, in order to adapt to the demanding market.

Furthermore, you have to compare the trends on the global market. Staying competitive on the market is only possible if you are familiar with the current conditions and demands, which have tremendous impact on sales. Besides product development and improvement, social media is a good way for introducing products.

Improve sales

Another major benefit of social media marketing, which results in increasing profit of your company, is improving sales, regardless if you own an online shop or you want to encourage people to visit your business on a specific location.

When it comes to online shopping, social media can help you drive traffic to your online store, where you can convert the social followers into buyers. Your goal is to maximize the click-through rate, which will ensure that the visitors are actually visiting your online store. As a result, they are more likely to buy from you.

Local businesses can also benefit from social media, as you can ask users to share images, to check in to the location, which will increase visibility of your business on social networks.

In both of these cases, social media is good for working on branding and establishing loyal relationship with the customers, which is something that will help you improve sales in the future.

Conclusion

In the world with over 70% of internet users active on social networks, who spend at least one hour a day on average on those social networks, we have to conclude that social networks have become a sort of reality in which people communicate, interact, and obviously trust. We also have to be aware that over 60% of those users access social networks via mobile devices, with strong indicators that this percent will only increase in the future years.

In such world, we have to admit that social networks are a new dimension of reality that has become a part of the business world as well. Over 90% marketers report they are or will be using social networks for business, while over 60% of them claim to have acquired new customers over social networks.

The findings published by business professional and marketers support the fact that businesses can have a lot of benefits from using social networks, which is why implementation of those has become a part of business practice. This is why social media marketing is no longer considered to be on probation, but instead it has become an important part of the business world.