How Does Social Media Marketing Influence Consumer Behavior?

Introduction

Day by day, the Internet’s importance is growing and changing how people communicate.

It has enabled people to connect on multiple levels, whether trading with each other across the globe from different geographical locations or interacting with someone with a similar hobby.

It has been possible for the Internet to accomplish this through social media.

Statista suggests that there are 3.96 billion social media users globally as of January 2022.

In the age of social media, where even a teenager has their own social media account, it has become important for brands to have an active presence on the social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, etc.

Social media has not just been a way of promoting businesses’ products but also has helped them to effectively communicate to their audience and get an idea about their customer’s perception of their product and overall brand.

The top brands are taking advantage of their social media presence to be in the eyes of their potential customers. They have developed a positive online reputation through social media, contributing to their brand’s success.

Here we’re going to discuss the importance of social media and how it has been important for businesses to influence the behavior of consumers/how social media marketing can influence consumer behavior.

The Importance of Social Media Marketing

With the increasing importance of social media, businesses must ensure that they’re including it in their marketing strategies and utilizing it effectively. Below are some points that will make you understand the importance of social media marketing.

Building Brand Awareness

Social media is a great platform for businesses to build awareness about their brand. To grow the existing customer base, brands can utilize social media as a highly interactive channel with influencer marketing, affiliate programs, and referrals. Additionally, paid social media advertising campaigns can have extremely high returns if they are targeted and customized to target specific audiences.

Lead Generation

Lead generation on social media refers to implementing strategies designed to capture qualified leads and get them into your sales funnel through marketing tactics. Social media is part of many marketing strategies since it can be a valuable lead generation channel if used correctly. Businesses can identify people who are interested in them by generating leads on social media.

Nurturing Leads

Generating leads is not enough for a business; you must nurture it. With today’s longer sales cycle, nurturing leads is essential to maximizing profits and conversions. A company’s ability to nurture leads effectively can help increase sales. This can be accomplished when it connects with clients and prospects. Social media can be a great medium for the same.

Social Listening

The ability to listen to social media helps companies understand public opinion about their brand and the products and services they offer. Companies can use this feedback and opinions to measure brand awareness and improve their products and services. So, noticing what people say about your brand on social media becomes crucial.

Connect Social Posts to Opportunities

Using social media is a great way to connect to your target, as you can use specifically targeted ads that are intended to sell certain products to certain people. Using different features provides you with the chance to promote your products in different ways, and if you’re creative enough, then you will have opportunities to stand out from your competitors through social media strategies.

Grow Your Audience

The use of social media can encourage potential customers to express interest in your business and products in a very simple and low-commitment way. Social media lets you reach a large number of people at once through both organic as well as using paid ads. You can build an audience for your business by offering what people want, and they will certainly buy from you.

Also read: Importance of Social Media Marketing for eCommerce

Also read: Personalized Marketing

The Role of Social Media in Marketing

Social Media plays a vital role in the overall company’s marketing strategy over the digital landscape. It has opened up opportunities for marketers to help companies promote their products easily to the people who use social media platforms. Social media impacts business in various areas and businesses need to understand those areas and aspects. We have mentioned some points that will help you understand the role of social media in marketing.

Reach

Social Media allows businesses to reach and stay in touch with consumers or potential customers. Through this, they can better understand an audience’s likes, dislikes, and interests, allowing marketers to devise better marketing strategies to attract them.

Increasing Web Traffic

The use of social media provides web publishers and online marketers with a new and potentially highly effective method of driving traffic. Despite this, many marketers and website owners ignore social media or put little effort into it. To maximize their online marketing efforts and paid campaigns, publishers should include a social media plan in their marketing strategy.

Interaction With Customer

Digital landscapes lack the physical experience element of customer engagement; However, social media can be used here; brands can use motivational drivers such as customer reviews or social media posts to impact a customer’s emotional and cognitive nuance.

Brand Awareness & Promotion

Businesses are utilizing social media to fulfill their brand awareness and brand promotion motives. Using social media to promote brand awareness allows brands to build and nurture relationships with their target audiences.

Targeting Audience Accurately

Social media allows your business to identify its audience and focus on those most likely to purchase from you by identifying your target audience. Businesses can determine their target audience with the social media behavior of the audience, their likes and dislikes, their demographics, and more. This makes it easier, more efficient, affordable, and effective for businesses to generate leads.

Content Promotion

The promotion of content is one of the most effective methods for companies to increase organic traffic, reach new audiences, and improve conversion rates. Both startups and well-established brands develop content creation strategies and plan to reach their audiences on a long-term basis, and social media is an effective medium.

New Product Launches

Your social media presence is key to attracting new followers, generating sales, and converting existing audiences into customers. A brand can now reach thousands of potential customers with social media, and it is much more effective than those promoting to a small group of people in a store.

Gaining Trust Of Customers

A company’s engagement in social media ensures a certain level of accountability when it encourages audience interaction. Using social media aggressively allows brands to hold themselves accountable for delivering high-quality products and services.

Remarketing

Remarketing through social media is an effective way to reach and nurture leads that interact with your ads but don’t. You can reach shoppers who have already visited your website through social media retargeting while interacting through your social channels.

Enriching Customer Experience

Social media lets businesses enrich their customer experience by interacting to know about their issues and problems. It allows them to quickly solve their issues by providing them with effective solutions, which creates a good impression of the business in customers’ minds, making them repeat customers.

Social Media’s Role In Decision Making

Having learned about the role of social media in marketing strategies in the previous points, we will now understand how social media influences consumer decision-making and will be able to understand Social media and Consumer behavior as a whole. Before digging more into the the content, let us first look towards some of the interesting stats posted in the image below:

Reduces Customer’s Path To Purchase Through Social Media

Social media is a great way that businesses use to influence people to buy their products. Social Media provides social proof to people through reviews and feedback from various people who have already used products provided by brands. Also, when businesses integrate their website on their social media handles, it makes it convenient for the buyers to buy products directly.

Encourages Trust Through Stories and Short Videos

Short videos and stories have been great ways of encouraging people to buy. Video formats have allowed businesses to show their audience what their brand is about instead of just telling them. Customer testimonials are one the best examples that have been used by brands to impact the way people view their company and products positively.

Provides Instant Results

Social media has proved to be one of the best platforms for providing social proof of how good or bad a company’s product is. By referring to brands, social media handles can give the customer ideas about business. This helps customers decide whether to buy a certain product or not.

Offer Discount Codes

One popular way businesses promote their products on social media is by providing discount codes in place of small promotions by their audience. They can either provide them in the form of giveaways or tell people to promote a particular story that allows them discounts and even gifts.

Consumers Do the Best Ads

Customer testimonials are one of the best ways businesses can win the trust and create a good impression in the minds of their audience. Businesses make the best use of social media influencers with a good audience who endorse a particular brand and create a desire in people to buy that brand’s products as they have faith in the influencer.

People Share What They Like With Their Connections

People who feel good about any product or service usually recommend it to their friends or relatives. Social media is one medium where you can also see this practice regularly. We usually see people posting about what products they’re consuming in their stories or posts and what they feel about them, which leads to great word-of-mouth publicity and creates an impression about a public company’s product

Improves Conversion Rates

Social media is a great way for businesses to increase the visibility of their product. It is common for advertisements to appear repeatedly on the screen, and the more times the person views those creatives where brands have nicely shown their brand, the more likely he is to take action when brands lure them with any great offer.

The Three ‘P’s’ of Social Media Marketing

Until now, you must understand How Are Marketers Using Social Media To Influence Consumer Behavior and what role social media play in the overall marketing strategy. A most important part of the overall social media marketing is that you consider using the 3Ps framework for your content strategy, as using the framework can assure you’re able to reach your target audience at the right time. Below are the 3Ps of Social Media Marketing.

Plan

A social media marketing plan is important for businesses as it guides them toward the action they must take at a specific time or duration. Although having a plan doesn’t mean that you won’t fail, it assures you that when you fail, you know what part of the plan has failed, and next time you will be wise enough that you’re not repeating that.

Publish

Businesses need to understand each social media platform’s differences and where their target audience is. Also, brands need to know what time to post, where to post and how often they should post, and they should also pay attention to how their audience is interacting with their brand.

Promote

Promoting content is as important as creating it, and many companies don’t understand its importance. They need to keep a separate budget for the promotion part of their social media strategy to increase their post’s reach and engagement. Using analytical tools, you can also know how well your paid posts are performing, and you will also be able to calculate the ROI through these paid promotions.

Also read: eCommerce Digital Marketing Strategy

How to Hire a Social Media Marketing Agency?

We’re sure that you must have understood how whole social media marketing works and how you as a company can take advantage of that. But again, all the above work needs a lot of effort and consumes time from your daily schedule. So it will be a better idea here that you should hire someone who can come to assist you in handling the whole social media marketing aspect. For that, you can opt for hiring a Digital Marketing Agency that can assist you with social media marketing services.

Decide Your Budget

The first and foremost thing before you look out for any social media marketing agency is knowing how much you can spend on social media marketing activities, as this will help you know how much to spend and avoid overspending.

Know Your Requirement

You need to know what you are looking for in terms of service and requirements, as this will help you to communicate with the company what you need so they can know what you’re expecting in terms of work and service.

Reach Out To Different Agencies

Once you have decided on your budget and know your requirements, you can search for different agencies. You can either get some references from any of your friends or search on the Internet and check the lookout for agencies providing Social Media Marketing Services.

Checkout Their Testimonials

When looking for various agencies for social media marketing services, looking out for testimonials and reviews by the people who have worked with the company can help you know a lot about their past work. This way, you can choose which one you feel is right for the job and who will work with you.

Shortlist The Best Ones

Once knowing about their work, you need to shortlist the best ones. This way, it will be easier for you only to reach the worthy ones and avoid spending much of your valuable time, which you can utilize in other activities.

Know The Scope Of Work

Discussing the scope of work with the company is essential as here you will come to know the services you are getting at the specified prices by the agencies. You can either ask them to handle your entire social media marketing or only ask them to help you with any specific work.

Choose The Appropriate One

Until now, you would have had an idea of which companies would meet your requirements and preferences. Go for the one you found the best among all and get the paperwork done with them to ensure your confidential data is not compromised.

Get To Work

Are you done with selecting the Social Media Marketing Agency of your choice? Then start working once you have done all the documentation and explain your requirements in terms of work.

Conclusion

With more people joining social media platforms, the scope of social media marketing is expected to grow. Social media platforms will become more advanced with the changing times, making it more challenging for businesses to maintain their online reputation and differentiate themselves from their competitors. Still, with the right support, businesses can easily deal with all the challenges that have been put forward.

If you’re seeking social media marketing services for your company, we’d be happy to assist you. At Huptech Web, we have a dedicated team of experienced social media marketers that will handle your entire social media marketing work and will also help your business to scale higher using the best practices!