In the age of social media, it becomes a sin not to maximize its use by marketing your business online. Learn how social media marketing can help transform your business.
Digital transformation is the process of using technology to improve business efficiency and enhance value delivery. With technologies like business software, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence, businesses can modify and enhance existing business processes, culture, and customer experience. This helps them to set themselves apart and capture a greater market share than their competitors.
But some of these technologies can cost a lot. For small businesses to remain competitive without breaking the bank, one inexpensive way is to use social media marketing to jumpstart their digital transformation. With social media platforms, you can easily reach out to your target customers, drive engagement and sales, and grow fast as a business—all without spending too much.
In this article, let’s dive headfirst into social media marketing and its role in digital transformation.
Using Social Media For Digital Transformation
When the pandemic started, people’s habits and behaviors began to change. To avoid getting infected, a lot of people around the world stayed home and spent most of their time on the internet.
In the Philippines alone, users spend over 10 hours a day on the internet, with 4 hours a day spent on social media. Their lives are so connected to the internet that it became their source of information, their go-to channel for shopping and entertainment, and their main communication platform.
This led to many businesses rethinking the way they engage customers on the internet. But what is the role of social media in all this?
More than half of consumers learn about a brand on social media
According to a report, around 55 percent of consumers discover new brands on social media. Many of these consumers are from the Gen Z and Millennial age groups, who use social media on a regular basis. As their spending power increases, it’s important for your brand to know how to effectively capture and engage these age groups on social media before your competitors do.
Social media allows customers to interact with brands
Interaction is crucial as it allows brands to build trust among their customers—and 68 percent of customers agree.
When brands are responsive, it’s easier for them to get necessary information from customers, which lets them personalize their services to address their customers’ unique and specific needs. This provides value and a sense of reliability on the part of the brand, which helps build trust among customers quickly.
Consumers buy from a brand they learned to like
When customers begin to like a brand, especially after a positive experience, they’re more likely to buy from them. This wouldn’t be made possible without social media, which helps brands establish an online presence, get discovered, and interact with potential customers on the market.
This will likely result in increased sales and increased customer retention, which are necessary recipes for business growth.
Social media helps boost your brand’s credibility
Customers can leave comments, feedback, and reviews on your brand’s page on social media. These comments help enhance your brand’s credibility. They also allow users to gauge your brand’s value based on other users’ experiences.
When such experience is positive, they’re more likely to attract potential customers and encourage them to make their first purchases with your brand.
Social media will continue to grow in use and in functions
According to a report, 80 percent of business executives believe it’s essential to invest in social media marketing. The same report also found that 91 percent of executives will increase budgets for social media marketing in the next 3 years.
This means that businesses are starting to see the importance of engaging customers using social media platforms. With companies investing more, these platforms are expected to grow in value.
New features are bound to be added to adjust to changing market needs and to make the user experience more meaningful. As people grow older, new users are bound to join these platforms as well.
Social media has useful data for business decisions
Data gathered from social media is a useful tool to guide business decisions and strategies. They speak of what customers want, need, and prefer. They also allow businesses to better understand their target consumer’s behavior and respond accordingly.
According to a survey, 72 percent of executives use data from social media to make business decisions—even more than market research. 85 percent of them agree that data from social media will become a primary source of business intelligence in the future.
How to Boost Business Performance With Social Media Marketing
1. Understand your market first
The most necessary aspect of any business strategy is understanding your target market’s environment. This involves knowing your target customers, scanning the environment for competition, and identifying the threats and opportunities, among others.
When it comes to social media marketing, choosing the right social media platform is key to successful business performance. If you’re planning to do social media marketing in the Philippines, Facebook is the safest choice. Its users comprise a wide variety of demographics and often you can target them all at once. Note, however, that there are crucial things to know when targeting different generations like avoiding stereotypes.
Additionally, Facebook’s Filipino user base continues to grow over time. In February 2021, there were around 88.4 million Filipino Facebook users recorded and over half of them were aged 18 to 34.
Before doing social media marketing in the Philippines, you must first understand its digital marketing landscape before making any decision.
There are other platforms to consider too.
a) Instagram: Because of its visual nature, businesses with good product design can effectively capture leads and drive engagement using this platform.
b) LinkedIn: Best used for business networking, marketers can use this platform to create trust and build authority for their brand.
c) Twitter: This platform is best used for target audiences comprising Gen Zs and Millennials. The content in this platform is often time-sensitive like news and trending topics.
d) Snapchat: Brands that want to build relationships with and through influencers should opt for this platform.
e) TikTok: If brands prefer to showcase authentic or witty experiences through short videos, this platform, which attracts mostly younger audiences, should be top priority.
2. Establish a strong online presence
After developing ample understanding of your business environment and getting to know your customers better, make it easy for customers to trust you. Build a brand that can speak for itself—from the looks, down to its story.
Advertise when necessary to improve your reach. More importantly, create engaging content that can capture leads and persuade them to make a purchase. Establishing a strong online presence is necessary to drive sales online.
3. Test, measure, and revise
When marketing on social media, it’s imperative for businesses to figure out what works and what doesn’t. This is why these three steps—testing, measuring, and revising action plans—are crucial.
Examine the social media channels you use for your business. Assess the quality of your content. Check how much engagement you’re getting from your posts. This includes likes, shares, comments, retweets, or favorites. And don’t forget to track your return on investment (ROI) from social media.
Here, you must know what’s working and what isn’t so you can optimize your strategy and improve your business performance.
4. Continue gathering data
Just like with any other business aspect, social media marketing requires you to continuously learn. It’s a constantly changing battlefield. One simple tweak of an algorithm can change the game for many businesses. That’s why social media marketers must remain aware and vigilant of emerging trends on the market.
To stay ahead of the competition, gathering data from the market is necessary. There are tools you can use for social media listening. These tools let you gather data about your customers, who they are and what they do, how they interact and engage with your brand, and which product or service you offer best suits their needs and goals.
It’s essential for businesses to know how to implement a data-driven social media marketing strategy if they want to be competitive. A data-driven strategy enables them to see which marketing effort is working and optimize those which aren’t to make them more effective than before.
Transform Your Business Today
Now that you know the role of social media in digital transformation, the next step is to determine what you want to achieve as a business. Is it time for you now to focus your attention on social media marketing? Will this be good for your target market? What kind of content should you produce? Which platform should you use to market your brand?
Remember, it’s not enough to create a page on these social media platforms. You also need to know how this drives engagement and sales, and how it can bring growth to your business in the end.
More importantly, keep in mind that social media marketers always continue learning. Learn from the data you’ve gathered. Make business decisions out of them. These may all take time but remember, successful brands weren’t built overnight.
Need help with social media marketing? Eight Media is a Philippines-based agency that offers full-stack digital marketing services, from content creation to ads management. With the help of our data-driven marketing campaigns, you can reach your next business milestone.
