Gone are the days when Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and others were just foreign terms to us. Now, the world binges on these social platforms, with businesses leveraging content-driven marketing through blogs, videos, infographics, podcasts, and social media. People are more connected virtually than ever before.
This era of strong social virtual connection brings out so many opportunities for the business world as now it is not just a platform of sharing trip pictures, sharing emojis and sending videos but a lot more can be achieved by using these platforms in an effective manner.
One of those opportunities is using these platforms for marketing and customer engagement. Social media platforms give us the opportunity for branding to a large audience as big as 4.5 billion.
In social media marketing, businesses use the power of social media networks to achieve their branding goals. Nowadays branding over media has become very efficient as well as cost effective.
From big giants to small scale businesses all are using social media for enhancing their brand image and engaging their customers.
Before moving ahead to find out strategies to enhance business through these virtual platforms, let’s find out what actually meant by customer engagement. Customer engagement pertains to the interactions that a customer encounters with a particular brand across the entirety of their customer journey.
Engaging customers ‘means creating good relationships, keeping them loyal, and giving them value. This creates good experiences that make customers want to continue buying from a brand and tell others about it.
There are so many types of marketing strategies through which businesses can reach up to the potential customer. Here are few:
1. Content Marketing
Today businesses are using various forms of content driven marketing in the forms of blogs, videos, infographics, podcasts, and live streams—to engage their audience. Video content is gaining immense popularity among users and consumers.
Many platforms like Instagram, YouTube provide the platform to showcase the product in the form of video content. Video connects users and consumers more easily than any other content form. Nowadays many brands and businesses use this as an effective method to reach their customers. Brands also promote their products by sharing behind the scenes videos.
2. Influencer Marketing
In this category marketing, brands move towards the people who have an ample number of followers and people connected with them. These people are called influencers, and they can actually influence the buying behavior of consumers. These influencers can be popular youtubers, technical experts or celebrities of any domain.
These people endorse the company’s product and influence the buying behavior of a great number of people who are their followers. In return, they get a huge amount of money from businesses.
This kind of marketing brings out a huge customer engagement for the brand as it has been promoted by someone they trust and follow. This is also referred to as paid promotion.
3. Social Media Advertising
Social media advertising means targeting a specific group of people based on their behavior, interests and location. Businesses target consumers who are searching for similar products.
In contrast with traditional advertising where each and every consumer is targeted, advertising just spends resources on that set of customers who are looking for similar products as brands are offering.
Platforms like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and X are such applications which provide opportunities for brands to run paid marketing campaigns for their target customers.
4. Social Commerce
Around the buzz of social media marketing, a new feature called social commerce has come into existence.
Social commerce integrates e-commerce functionality directly into social media platforms. Features like Instagram Shopping and Facebook Marketplace allow users to discover and purchase products without leaving the app. This seamless shopping experience enhances convenience and drives sales.
So marketing is creating a big number out there, the dramatic growth of interactive digital channels took social media to levels that challenge even the reach of television and radio.
So, it is creating a lot more consumer base and thus helping the brands in customer engagement. Use of technology over social media is now creating a lot for the companies then it used to a decade ago.
References:
1. Social Media Marketing for Businesses
2. Why social media is the key to customer engagement
3. How to Manage Customer Engagement on Social Media
4. What Is Social Media Advertising? Definition, Costs, Best Practices, Benefits, and Examples
5. Social Media Marketing (SMM): What It Is, How It Works, Pros and Cons
Bio of Author-
Name- Ms. B. Sumbul
Assistant Professor-BBA
Personal Interest- Exploring new places