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How Social Media Plays a Role in Digital Marketing

Social media is quickly becoming the dominant way for businesses looking to build communities, inspire brand loyalty, and achieve success as the digital marketing landscape continues to evolve. Websites like LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook are not just social spaces; they are a depth of avenues leading to a total digital marketing strategy. At NEXAPENT, we understand that social media is an important platform for any successful marketing campaign. This article will detail social media's advantages to the digital marketing world and exhibit how it can help expand your brand.

The Impact of Social Media on Digital Marketing

Social media is not simply a venue for sharing announcements and important updates; it is a dynamic and multifunctional element of an overall online marketing strategy, which ranges from brand awareness to lead generation. Integrating social media into your digital marketing strategy provides multiple layers of channels to engage with customers or potential customers. This expands across the trajectory of the digital funnel while bridging consumer intent with engagement. 

Here are some reasons social media is important in a total digital marketing plan:

1. Increase Brand Awareness

Millions of users on social media are an enormous opportunity to showcase your brand. The right social media strategy ensures your business is being seen by the right audience, which requires the right content, hashtags, and ads.

• Impact: Regular posting with engaging content will increase brand recall and recognition, allowing your business to be front of mind for potential customers.

• NEXAPENT's Study: At NEXAPENT, we develop content suited to the platform for distribution (e.g., thought-leadership articles for LinkedIn, visually engaging content for Instagram) in order to maximize your brand experience and amplify its reach and resonance.

2. Encourage Engagement and Build Community.

Social media is, by design, not linear like traditional advertising and marketing platforms -  social media can promote conversation. When your business engages directly, whether it be through comments, direct messages, polls, and interactivity (live video content), you have the opportunity to foster direct engagement from your audience in a way that brings them together and builds community around your brand. 

• Impact: Engaged followers are more likely to trust your brand, share your content, and become advocates, and will create organic reach for you.

• NEXAPENT process: Our team serves as the community manager by moderating engagement and responding in a timely fashion, while all the while creating content that entertains, educates, and inspires brand loyalty.

3. Improve upon Content Marketing

Content is the foundation of digital marketing, and social is the megaphone. Social amplifies your content regardless of format; blog post, video, infographic, case study, etc. Social distribution will get parts of your content in front of a greater audience, drive traffic to your site, and help you in SEO efforts.

• Impact: Paying it forward by sharing informative content on social will increase click-throughs and improve other digital marketing efforts like email and website conversions. 

• NEXAPENT Approach: We link social media content to your content strategy, so you can create a consistent experience across your content and all channels, and allow for maximum engagement with that content. 

4. Enhance Targeted Advertising

Social media platforms have become complete channel partners with their robust targeting features. Paid social lets you reach specific demographics, interests, and behaviors in real-time. The paid social campaigns you create, such as LinkedIn ads and Instagram sponsored posts, as well as organic efforts, provide measurable outcomes.

• Impact: Targeted ads yield high-quality leads and help conversions, so social can be a very effective advertising medium at a lower price and with a much larger reach. 

• NEXAPENT Approach: We build campaigns on data to get the most from the budget while targeting the correct audience and achieving your digital marketing outcomes.

5. Provide Actionable Insights.

Every social media platform has analytics to offer valuable insights into audience behavior, content performance, and the effectiveness of your campaigns. These pieces of data can be applied to your overall digital marketing strategy and subsequently improve your SEO, content, and advertising. 

• Impact of analytics: It allows you to make decisions based on data and increases your return on investment, no matter which channel you utilize. 

• NEXAPENT Approach: We will also provide you with a detailed report on any, two, or all of the engagement, reach, and conversions components, and subsequently follow our engagement with data to determine how to better optimize both your social media and digital strategy as a whole. 

6. Increase Your SEO & Website Traffic.

Social media in and of itself does not have a direct impact on search engine rankings, but can impact SEO indirectly by improving traffic to your website and adding mentions of your business on the web.  Sharing your content on social media means creating linkbacks to your site and social signals, both of which are valuable metrics for search engines.

• Impact: More website traffic through social media increases your website's visibility and authority, and helps support your continual SEO goals.

• The NEXAPENT Method: We help your social media strategy within your SEO plan. Social media can provide substantial traffic if we are leveraging it to share optimized content. We can use social media, with optimized content, to drive traffic and rank your online presence.

7. Use Real-Time Customer Feedback

Because of social media, you now know what people are saying, in real-time, with comments, reviews, and messages. When you can use real-time feedback from your audience, you can respond quickly, change direction, and improve customer satisfaction.  

• Impact: By acknowledging the feedback, you will build trust with your audience to ensure your marketing products deliver on your customers’ expectations.

• NEXAPENT's Strategy:  Monitor social media channels, manage feedback, and make improvements to digital marketing campaigns through feedback.

The Importance of Social Media within Your Digital Marketing Strategy

A complete digital marketing strategy without social media is like a puzzle with one piece missing. Social media is a bridge to the touchpoints of SEO, content marketing, email, and paid efforts. Social media can be relevant to where you are in the customer journey - awareness, consideration, conversion, and retention.

At NEXAPENT, we want to focus on how you use social media, the influence it has on your digital marketing strategy. Here are a few services:

• Strategic Content Development: We create content on channels/platforms that deliver your message to consumers in ways that are authentic to your brand, and in ways that support your marketing objectives.

• Campaign Management: We then deploy organic and paid campaigns to engage and drive traffic, leads, and conversions.

• Analytics: We provide you with the ability to track your performance and optimize effectively, and use data to better plan for ultimate performance and demonstrate a return on your digital marketing investment.

• Community: We build relationships with your customers that go beyond the transaction and inspire loyalty and advocacy.

Ways to Leverage Social Media in Digital Marketing

To maximize the benefits of using social media in your digital marketing strategy, consider these ways:

1. Align: Campaigns on social media can be beneficial only if they align with the overall marketing objectives, like brand awareness or lead generation

2. Consistency: Consistent branding, language, and messaging across all channels, whether social media or digital engagement points

3. Cross-Promote: Like in email marketing, cross-promote your website as much as possible, particularly through the social media marketing channel. 

4. Curation: Content curation for selected audiences and platforms is important. LinkedIn means that your content will all be professional and will have a tone to match. Conversely, Instagram is much more visual if it's relevant.

5. Tracking: Identify and track your analytical performance of your campaigns and revise and tweak your methods to improve.

Conclusion

Digital marketing strategies should maximize the power of social media to connect with your audience, share content, and grow your business. Social media is unique in its capabilities to connect your business with your audience, share your business' content, and grow your business. When combined with other elements such as SEO, other content marketing tactics, and online marketing campaigns, you will have a smooth and consistent strategy that will create the most value from your marketing approach. Let NEXAPENT unleash the power of social media for you and accelerate your digital marketing impact on your business.

Reach out to us today to set a foundation for your business to thrive in the online market!

Visit: https://www.nexapent.com/