How Social Media Has Changed Marketing?

Social media is everywhere. If you look at your phone’s menu, you will find at least three to four applications in the social media space. It wouldn’t be incorrect to say that social media shapes our personal and professional lives. You will find yourself using these applications directly or indirectly to complete even mundane tasks. Social media helps us to connect, complete tasks, and even stay connected with the outer world. One more aspect that social media has touched on is marketing! Have you asked yourself one simple question? How social media has changed marketing? In a recent survey by kepios, around 59 percent of the world’s population is actively using social media applications. This would be approximately 4.70 billion people. Now, who wouldn’t want to market their products to these 4.70 billion people? Social media has given marketing new dynamics. It is changing how marketing was done traditionally.

If you go a day without social media, you will realize you are missing out on a lot of your daily routine tasks. This is how important social media has become for us. This is what makes it a perfect candidate for marketing. Social media changing the marketing domain is what we would touch upon in this article. We will touch briefly on how traditional marketing evolved and then how social media entered the space.

Marketing Without The Internet And Social Media

Even when the internet was available to people, it was not used for marketing from day one. Marketing before the internet is what we can call traditional marketing. This is what you see on radio, television, newspapers, magazines, and anything that does not require internet connectivity. Now, this approach is not obsolete. You will still find newspapers filled with advertisements and promotions of products. You will still hear multiple advertisement-related announcements on the radio.

The main reason traditional marketing is still alive is trust!

Marketing using the internet is a decade old. However, traditional marketing is decades old. People still process traditional marketing material with trust and reliability. Moreover, it is cost-effective too. The other reason would be that promoting and marketing only through one medium is not recommended. You need to hit everywhere till you get your shot. So, marketing without the internet and social media is not dead. However, let us explore how social media is changing marketing.

What Is Social Media Marketing In Simple Terms

Social media marketing is using the internet and social media to market your product or any service you provide. You try to build an online presence of your brand and drive people towards your business. In the age of the internet, we call this driving traffic to your business.

Some of the famous social media applications that are allowing marketing are Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Snapchat, Linkedin, Quora, and many more. These social media tools allow you to create your brand’s account and market your services. You can reach the user base of these applications and also analyze your marketing efforts. Most of these tools provide analytics to help you with your marketing strategies.

Most businesses and services you use are on social media applications commonly. It is what they want to take advantage of. The large customer base with creativity.

How Social Media Has Changed Marketing?

The simple and foremost answer is Yes!

Social media has revolutionized the way we looked at marketing. Marketing with social media and the internet is quite different from traditional marketing. Let us first understand the evolution of social media in the context of marketing. Social media started as an internet space where people could connect. The people could be your friends, colleagues, or new connections you want to approach. The early stages of any social media application never had any advertising or marketing features. However, the main turning point was when brands started creating their accounts on the same social media applications as us. You could now follow these brands and follow their happenings. This was when these social media apps opened a new gate for marketing. I am sharing a few pointers on how social media helps in marketing.

1. Allow Users To Market Your Services Too

Can traditional marketing media like radio, television, and newspaper be forwarded to your friends or family? It is not that easy. However, social media marketing allows users to deliver your marketing materials quickly. Moreover, the users connected to you can quickly know what you are up to. This spreads the message faster and saves money on the company’s end. You become the online marketing agent for the company if you like its product or service.

Many people may argue that you can tell people about certain products and brands by word-of-mouth as well. Obviously, this is true. But which method is faster and easy to implement? Social media makes it a click away and your entire friend circle knows what product you like and if they would want to use it as well.

2. Social Media Marketing Allows Feedback

This is quite an advantage with marketing through social media channels. Traditional marketing never had any way of receiving feedback from the target audience. You can think of this as one-way communication. You are just posting your material and leaving it there.

However, on the contrary, social media marketing allows you to receive feedback. With the feedback, you can change your strategy or add certain missing elements. Feedback would allow you to understand your target audience better and in a faster way. It helps you understand if people are actually interacting with your product or service.

The feedback can range from shares, likes, comments, or even direct messages to your teams. It fills the gap and makes your marketing a two-way communication with your target audience.

3. Social Media Allows Better Audience Targeting

When you talk about social media, you get access to huge data of users. These users are on different platforms. The data allows you to understand the audience or the user base more clearly. This is simply – big data. Traditional marketing may allow you to reach your audience too. But the audience you are reaching may not be a potential lead for you. For example, what would you benefit from showing an MBA program advertisement to a five-year-old kid?

This is where data allows you to target and show your advertisements to the correct audience. This is simply targeting and marketing your product to a much better section of the audience. It helps you put your money into the right places and get better ROI.

4. Reach Global Audience Through Social Media

This is something that cannot be overlooked. Gone are the times when people used to connect with only local providers of services and products. In this age of the internet, people are connected globally. This also means that marketing can be done globally too. The traditional way of marketing to reach a global audience is too messy. Social media fills this gap.

You can market your product and services to people living in different parts of the world. It would depend on what kind of audience you want to attract and win as customers. The use of Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter is commonly seen to market your product and services globally. This also helps you to reach an audience that may help you achieve your business targets quickly.

5. Market Your Products Using Memes

The new age of social media brings us the new format of audio, video, and text. However, one more interesting space is the space of memes. Traditional marketing did have some way of funny content for advertisements. However, it is quite limited. Social media like Reddit allows you to share and interact with memes and related funny content in a much more efficient manner.

There are many companies using memes to market their product and services. This way of marketing also allows you to retain the attention of customers. Marketing done using memes may outperform normal marketing strategies. Memes are a new way to interact and express ourselves. This is what social media allows you to take advantage of.

Bottom Line

Social Media has indeed changed the way companies do marketing. You will experience a whole new wave of marketing strategies in the coming decades too. The only drawback of social media marketing is that it is quite competitive. You need real experts who understand the industry. Your brand engagement can be overlooked considering the competition is high and tough. On the other hand, it gives you the opportunity as well to leverage the power of the internet. Social media platforms can be a game-changer for your brand and marketing strategies. Just like any other form of marketing, it also comes with its own sets of merits and demerits.