A recent article featured in Marketing Week questions the effectiveness of social media usage in marketing campaigns in terms of ROI. Does investment in social media marketing really lead to increased profits and higher company performance? How do you measure the success of a social media campaign?
This has long been up for debate.
Social media advertising alone may not be sufficient to produce lucrative results for a business, but it is a key part of an integrated marketing campaign. Here’s why.
More than a logo
The benefits of social media marketing go way beyond potential financial gains for a company – increased brand recognition, accessibility and loyalty, and better search engine rankings are just a few of the potential positive outcomes.
Social media creates opportunities for action and engagement with your existing and potential customers. Having an active social presence demonstrates to your customers that you are transparent, open to dialogue and willing to offer customer service where they find it easy to access. It humanises your business.
Insight
Engaging with your audience also provides you with insight. Monitoring social media behaviours and responses helps businesses understand customers’ needs and interests. Do they respond better to cute cats or cute dogs? This is so valuable when you are planning campaign messaging and targeting.
Plus, if you play it right, it’s a great way to get honest feedback (good or bad!) that can help you improve your service and business as a whole.
It’s expected
Most B2C and many B2B brands have embraced, to varying degrees of enthusiasm, social media as part of their marketing and customer service strategies. You don’t want to lose out to competitors who undermine your legitimacy because they are happily active on Twitter and you are not. Give the people what they want.
Developing a social media presence is crucial to a business for relationship building and growing your audience, as well as improving the overall customer experience. The amount of time required to invest in social media marketing, set up and maintain profiles is minimal compared to the potential benefits your company is likely to gain in the long run.
In action: Deliveroo
The London based start-up and upmarket takeaway service, Deliveroo, has recently raised a huge amount of venture funding and is rapidly expanding its services to cities across the world.
Does Deliveroo have an established social media presence? An unequivocal YES, with Facebook and Twitter pages maintained and updated regularly, often multiple times a day.
However the key thing to ‘takeaway’ (couldn’t resist, sorry) is that while they’re making great headway with new audiences on social, this is only ONE part of Deliveroo’s marketing campaign.
They’re an internet business! You order on an app! Surely all their advertising is online? Wrong.
Recently I’ve seen a huge push in Brighton, where I live, with distribution of direct mail flyers, advertising on buses and uniformed Deliveroo staff out and about across town, highly visible and engaging directly with the public. They are still embracing traditional channels and as a whole, it’s working. They’re in the real world.
Social media is a huge part of their strategy that drives those conversions after initial awareness and offers a way to interact with customers.
But you can’t stop there.
Social media alone is not enough of marketing strategy on it’s own, but even though ROI can be less tangible than cold hard cash, social activity and advertising are key ingredients to a marketing campaign heading for success – make sure you’re on board!
For information on how SF Digital can assist you with implementing and managing a social media presence and advertising campaign for your company, please do get in touch for a free consultation.
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