If your marketing department doesn’t have a social media strategy, you are missing a huge opportunity to engage with your consumers. According to Oberlo, 3.5 billion people have a social media account. This equates to a lot of potential leads for your business.

Other than its large audience, social media marketing is a time saver and cost-effective. It’s free to create a social media account as well as make posts. Advertising on Instagram or other social media channels is also much cheaper than traditional advertising and can help improve marketing for your brand.

Must Read: Meme for Marketing: A Guide to Adding Spice to Your Social Media Strategy

Optimal use of social media can be a game-changer for your marketing. But you must know which strategies to use for your social media marketing to be effective. Keep reading for 7 of our best ways to improve marketing using social media.

1. Use Business Intelligence From Social Media

Communicating with customers requires you to know who they are, what drives them, and what their needs are. Social media is a goldmine of business intelligence that you can use to improve marketing. For example, you can learn what customers think about your brand or product from reading their comments and messages to you and others.

You can also use social listening tools that email you whenever someone mentions your brand online. This helps you to promote any good discussions about your brand or mitigate the damage if your brand is being criticized.

Social media is also a great tool to use to profile customers. This is because you can read the personalities of your consumers from what they post about themselves online.

2. Use Social Media To Analyze Your Competition

Social media has forced companies to communicate transparently with their audience. This makes it a great tool for analyzing the strengths and weaknesses of your competition to improve your marketing. You can discover the marketing strategies your competitors are using to engage with their customers and what consumers love/hate about them.

Follow your competitors’ social media accounts to learn what promotions they are currently running, how they respond to current events, and how their audience responds to their communication style. This will help you to analyze your social media marketing to take advantage of any gaps in your competitors’ messaging.

3. Use Social Media to Upgrade Your Customer Service

Social media can improve marketing by transforming your customer service delivery. Clients are increasingly using company social accounts to ask questions, seek technical support, and complain about products or services. In fact, social media has been the downfall for many companies following complaints on their social media pages.

Prospective clients, employees, investors, and even competitors are watching how you engage with your customers. Friendly and engaging responses to your clients will earn you loyalty points from your clients and attract new buyers.

Comments and messages that go unanswered will make your company appear cold and unbothered. To prevent this, hire someone to manage your social media accounts and respond to any client questions.

4. Social Media Can Provide Proof Of Your Brand’s Authenticity

Word of mouth marketing has consistently been praised for its effectiveness. These days social media can help you leverage customer testimonials to increase your sales. Establish a social media hashtag for your company and encourage your followers to use it.

Restaurants, for example, get many new clients from pictures that clients took at their establishment and tagged them. Five-star customer ratings and reviews on social media posts are also effective at bringing in new clients.

Smart brands curate all the mentions, photos, and videos that they get on social media posts. Then they share these with their users as proof of their great products or services. It is a great way to show that people genuinely love your brand─ especially in eCommerce advertising.

5. Use Your Social Media Accounts to Beat Your Competition

Social media is a great way to prove to consumers that you are better than your competition. consumers will perceive you to be a better brand if your social media pages have active followers. You also want to show lots of engaging content and communication with the audience.

When people search for the product or service you are selling, the first pages that show up will be yours and your competitors’ websites and social media activity. If your social media marketing is superior, the consumer will buy from you. This is why you can’t afford to be silent on social media.

6. Advertise On Social Media

According to Adweek, Gen Z consumers are responding less and less to traditional advertising and are more accepting of authentic e-commerce advertising. These include influencer marketing and user-generated reviews and promotions.

To survive the current and future marketing landscape your company must develop skills such as marketing with Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and other popular social media platforms. Marketers must keep up with trends and learn how to communicate on whatever new platforms appear.

7. Fuel Client Engagement By Being Real on Social Media

The last way in which you can use social media to improve marketing is by giving your brand a human face. Modern-day consumers want to align with brands that share their values. They may expect you to take sides or make a stand on social and political issues.

Social media is an effective tool to communicate what your company believes and where it stands. To do this successfully, you have to be clear about your brand values and make sure they align with those of your target customer base. Dropping the ball on this could lead to great losses for your business.

Safer ways to communicate who you are could be to post candid photos of your employees while they are hard at work. Some brands also have regular blog posts from the CEO whereby they share snippets from their real lives.

Social Media is a Must-Have to Improve Marketing

The key takeaway is that social media is a tool that can amplify your marketing messages. You can improve marketing for your business just by being consistent on one platform.

Consumers enjoy engaging on social media and don’t respond as well to traditional advertising. So your brand must have social media as part of its marketing strategy.

For more tips and advice, check out the rest of our blog.