Question

Examine the reasons companies use social media marketing listed in Figure 9.5.

• Engage fans

• Increase brand exposure

• Avenue for customer interaction

• Increase traffic

• Generate leads

• Enhance brand image

• Improve search rankings

• Gather customer intelligence

• Develop loyal fans

• Increase sales

Rank the reasons from most effective to least effective based on your personal experience with social media and brands that use it. Discuss your rankings. Explain, with examples, your top three choices.

Answer 1

Digitization has come a long way. Digital marketing is an online marketing strategy used by companies to promote and market their goods and services. Small and medium-sized companies opt for digital marketing instead of traditional marketing because of low investment costs.

Social Media marketing helps companies to connect with their customers through social media platforms. It helps companies advertise and market their products online and reach the target audience with minimal marketing costs. There are various reasons companies use social media which has been listed below according to highly effective to least effective.

Rank	Reasons for using social media	Explanations
1	Increase brand exposure	Social Media Helps companies to market and promote their new products and brands. Companies can register under different social media platforms and post about their products & services. Creating a social media plan along with the target audience and the product positioning, brands can reach out to local as well as international audiences. Companies post visually appealing posts, engagement posts like poll, audience opinions to attract the audiences and make their presence felt in the market. Setting up your profile and keeping it up to date gives the audience an idea about your company. Join various groups on social media platforms, post a discussion topic and tag people associated with it.
2	Generate leads	Social Media accounts for a good amount of lead generation. Once your brand has made its presence on social media platforms, it becomes easier to generate leads for selling your products. To generate leads a company must understand which social media platforms have to be used, Is organic marketing or a paid marketing required to reach the audience and who are the target audience. Run contests or an engagement post hitting a buyer's pain points. Run an analysis of each social media channels and list out and decide whether that social media channel needs an organic or paid advertising.
3	Increase sales	You can reach out to the generated leads and market your offering and its benefits. Advertise your products and be frequent in all social media platforms. Always take a buyer's feedback and request the buyers to add a review of your page. Influencer marketing helps your product feature when they post on social media. Keeping sharing new offers with your existing customers and lure them with additional discounts incase of references they bring. By taking permission from your loyal customers share user-generated posts to add credibility to your brand. A valuable content marketing entices the audiences and is likely to generate leads and increase sales
4	Enhance brand image	Share content related to your company and product on social media. An informative content post is the best way to create and maintain a company's brand image. With every post, you get comments, likes, shares thus enabling your company's brand awarness.
5	Avenue for customer interaction	Social media is the best platform to interact with the customer. Unlike store sales, through online sales, you are able to keep in touch with the customer and request feedback or product reviews. The interaction in social media is instant. You get notified when a customer posts on your profile or comments on your posts. This helps you to reach the customer immediately.
6	Increase traffic	Building relatable content and publishing the content at the right platform increases the traffic to the website. Advertising the product online, sharing a blog, On-page SEO are a few examples of increasing traffic.
7	Improve search rankings	When a person uses keywords for searching a product, mostly he is likely to click on the options that he finds on the 1st or 2nd page. By using the keywords related to our product or services we can improve our search rankings through search engine optimization. SEO helps a company's website to appear at the top of searches.
8	Gather customer intelligence	Using a social media analytics tool, you can understand the preferences and feedbacks of customers regarding your products. It also helps you to be updated about new product entry to the market as well as helps you position your product accordingly.
9	Develop loyal fans	Retain your customers who have made an online purchase from you. Offer your loyal customers with various kinds of discounts. make them feel special by wishing them on important occasions.
10	Engage fans	Social Media Marketing allows you to understand your audience's preferences. Taking lessons from your past social media marketing strategies you can always improve them to attract and engage audiences. Engage fans into discussions via engagement posts. Run a contest or ask the audience to share their opinion about a product or service. Post a situation and ask the audiences to share their experiences.