Businesses and brands use advertising as a way to boost sales, increase growth and generate quality leads. Advertising methods are, however, changing.
Some of the methods we deemed irreplaceable are today lagging behind such as Radio ads or when it comes to the new media mediums the online banner ads are not as effective today as they used to be few years back.  One of the most promising methods today is undoubtedly social media marketing. There are 5 key advantages you stand to gain with this method.
1. Competitive advantage
Connecting through the social media, helps you improve customer service, product and service development. The relationship you establish with your customers is more intimate as opposed to through television and/or radio marketing. You can tailor a campaign to the specific needs of a target audience. Simply put, social media marketing increases your competitive advantage by:
- Creating a stronger community – with two-way communication
- Expanding market reach Beyond boundaries
- Maximizing your return on investment Social media as compared to many other platforms is cheaper and fully traceable
- Gauging the sentiment of customers – it helps you understand the lifestyle of your customers much better
- Manage crisis – Easily managing brand identity and reputation
- Boosting traffic to your website!
2. Improved customer support
Though the aforementioned point lists almost all the benefits about social media marketing for SMEs , let’s look deeper into certain points.
How well you treat your customers determines whether they will be happy with your services or not. Social media marketing helps boost customer support. You can use your social media page as a customer support center where customers post their feedbacks, inquiries, concerns and questions. You can then respond to the posts and give detailed information via personal email or through social channels itself. Social media can hence serve as a cost-effective customer support center leading to better customer relationship.
3. Promote internationally
Social networking sites are used everywhere in the world. So long as your social media page has been liked and shared, anybody, anywhere in the world, can visit your page and communicate with you. If using Facebook, you should consider creating pages in different languages to appeal to an international audience.
As per Mashable–Â Creating multiple regional Pages increases the localization of each Page.
Another great way, is to join international communities and groups on various social channels and start a dialogue.
4. Boost your SEO
The question everyone setting up a website has is –  how to drive traffic to my website. Social media marketing answers this question. Recently, Google and other major search engines started including social signals into their ranking algorithm. If your website is linked to social media, you can expect increased quality traffic. Social channels especially Google+ plays a part in boosting specific pages from your website. And I say this from personal experience.
5. Affordable advertising option
Needless to say, you don’t have to pay anything or not as much as to traditional media channels to run your campaign on YouTube, Facebook, Google+, Twitter and other social networking sites. Considering you will find millions of prospective yet targeted clients through the social media, it is probably the most affordable and effective advertising channel today.
The above are just a few advantages of social media marketing for SMEs . Though the process may sound simple, it is not as straightforward. Not every strategy you implement will bear the results you need. You have to learn how to create a marketing campaign, when to add your posts and how to measure results. Working with a social media marketing consultant will certainly give you an upper hand.
Tags: SME's marketing, social media for small businesses, social media for small companies, social media marketing for SME, Social Media Marketing for SME’s
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