Benefits of Social Media Marketing: Enhance Your Business Initiatives
When it comes to social media marketing, gone are the days when a small business could simply post a few times on Facebook and achieve its marketing goals. Now, small businesses are leveraging multiple social media platforms constantly to drive direct awareness, engagement, sales, and conversions.
As a marketer for a small business, you want to amplify your brand, get noticed, and ultimately drive more sales and revenue. Tapping into the power of social media is an effective strategy. However, it can often be very manual and time-consuming to schedule content, report on analytics, and experiment with new content mediums like Instagram Reels or TikTok. This is where social media marketing technology can help.
For marketing leaders in small businesses, social media marketing technology solutions offer a wide variety of automation help. You'll find solutions for basic social media management, ad optimization, content publishing, audience engagement, analytics, and more. Social media marketing tech is constantly evolving as social networks are constantly changing features, algorithms, and third-party access.
To better navigate choosing a social media marketing tech solution for your small business, check out the advice below.
What is social media marketing tech?
Social media marketing tech is software that helps marketers monitor, gather, and analyze social data; create, distribute, and promote content; and identify and engage with their target audience. This tech also helps monitor the performance and impact of any social media marketing efforts. [1]
Social media marketing tech reduces the workload for small businesses by streamlining processes, automating tasks, and speeding up data analysis or reporting. These days, they're mission-critical in leveraging the full benefits of social media marketing. Larger businesses might be equipped with robust teams who can handle the intense workload of social media; their team might even go as far as having a data analytics person to crunch results and successes. For small businesses, social media marketing tools can operate like a mid-level employee specifically dedicated to social media.
What are the benefits of social media marketing software?
The benefits of a social media marketing tool are endless. Robust tools help with more consistent content publishing, social media planning, audience and community engagement, analytics and tracking, and ad boosting.
1. Increased engagement with customer communities
Whether your goal is to foster a community of brand advocates, launch monthly product drops, or increase signups to your email newsletter, social media tech allows you to increase your engagement within different communities. Marketers have a direct line to customers’ questions and feedback, which can help inform product and business decisions.
2. Streamlined content creation from planning to publishing
The average business publishes several pieces of content per day across multiple social platforms. It’s incredibly difficult to maintain, grow, and optimize your brand’s accounts on multiple social platforms without a tool to streamline the content creation process. For example, social media marketing tech tools might have a workspace for drafting content or creating a social calendar, followed by a scheduling tool for cross-posting a single piece of content to multiple platforms. Some social media marketing tools even have photo editing and filtering options.
3. More visibility into top-performing content, platforms, and audiences
It’s critical to know what types of content perform best for your audience. Social media tech tools typically offer robust reporting and insights into the style of content that performs best, whether that’s a Facebook post, LinkedIn video, or Instagram Story. Tech tools allow marketers to monitor and analyze social conversations and data so you can invest more in top performers.
4. Improved collaboration between internal teams
Social media tech tools typically provide features like consolidated media libraries, easy team sharing, and streamlined access to social channels. Instead of sharing passwords and photos over email, different users can upload content into a singular, consolidated media library with immediate publishing access to social channels.
What are the key features of social media marketing software?
Social monitoring
One of the most difficult aspects of an effective social media strategy is staying on top of mentions, comments, followers, and more. Most social media tech tools offer social monitoring, looking at brand keywords, competitors, and trends. It also provides real-time alerts, which is incredibly helpful with the viral nature of social media.
Content development and publishing
With so much content to produce, social media tech tools provide workflow tools such as calendars, approval processes, scheduled publishing, and more. They also help aggregate and obtain consent for using user-generated content that followers and fans might post.
Measurement and analytics
Many marketers report that one of social media's most difficult aspects is accurately reporting on full-funnel business impact and value. Outside of sales and direct clicks, it’s hard to turn likes, followers, and comments into real business dollars. Social media tech tools allow businesses to measure the performance of campaigns across networks, aggregating analytics and engagement, and often giving an earned media value to the content. Marketers can compare engagement and sales across networks and tap into real-time tracking to identify trends and opportunities.
If you're interested in diving deep into social media marketing analytics, check out Software Advice's directory of social media analytics tools and the buyer's guide, which will give you more information on what these tools can do for your marketing team.
Deep integrations
Social media is just one of the parts of the online marketing flywheel. It’s important that the right social media tech platform for your business offers integrations with your other favorite tools. Syncing data back and forth in real-time with your sales data, customer service and support tool, or e-commerce team is important and allows you to get the most out of your social media marketing efforts.
Considerations when choosing a social media marketing tech
Because user-friendliness is often a top focus for these products, adoption is typically fairly seamless. For small businesses looking to implement social media marketing software, here are a few things to consider.
Focus on marketing efficiency, measurement, and insights: There are so many different features and shiny tools in social media marketing software, but stay focused on marketing efficiency, measurement, and insight. Ask questions about your marketing efficiency, like, "Can I work faster with this tool? Is it easier for me to post on multiple platforms simultaneously? Is it easier to engage with customers across the board?" As for measurement and insight, make sure your tool can measure social media analytics from top-of-funnel awareness metrics like impressions to bottom-of-funnel conversions metrics like link clicks and add-to-carts.
Examine existing tools: A different department might already have a communications tool or marketing tool that can be expanded to include social media management and monitoring. Talk with different teams to see what they’re using, and make sure you’re not paying for two very similar platforms.
Use a comparison tool to quickly narrow down choices: Social media marketing comparison tools help you quickly filter by price, industry, company size, and more to give you a rough guideline of platforms that might work for you. Then, request product demos and capabilities decks from a shorter list of platforms.
Double-check with IT and security: Depending on your organization, there might be limitations when it comes to integrating with other platforms and systems. Security is also a major consideration when dealing with customer data, so see if your security or IT team has any recommendations. As integrations play a key role in getting the most use out of your social media tech platform, make sure you can integrate it with other tools.
Seek out product demos: Comparing the multitude of social media marketing tech side-by-side is a daunting task, but the best way to get a feel for how it would work in your daily life is through a product demo. Write down the day-to-day tasks you do on social media as well as overarching business objectives. Ask vendors to explain how their platform could solve your specific use case and needs.
It’s time to leverage a social media marketing tech tool
Whether you’re looking to expand your social media reach without increasing headcount or you want to invest in a new revenue stream, social media technology helps your business reach its unique goals. There are so many different well-rounded tools to choose from; it’s simply a matter of defining your objectives and needs.
From industry-leading communications monitoring to a unique blend of workflow tools, the right social media marketing tool can help increase engagement with customers, streamline content creation, increase collaboration between teams, and grow direct-to-consumer revenue streams.