A recent Archrival study revealed that today's consumption is all about inspiration, exploration, community, and loyalty. What better way to encapsulate all of these than through social media marketing?
Platforms like Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and Facebook have become go-to sources not only for fact-checking and reviews but also for discovering new trends, exploring products, and staying updated with the latest in the market. These platforms provide brands with unparalleled opportunities for building brand awareness, engaging with audiences, and generating user-generated content.
In this article, we’ll dive into the top 10 benefits of Social Media Marketing, from boosting customer engagement to enhancing brand loyalty, and explore how these strategies impact a brand’s success.
Social Media Marketing (SMM) is a form of digital marketing that involves using social media platforms like Instagram, TikTok, Pinterest, and LinkedIn to promote products, services, and brands. It includes various strategies such as content creation, paid advertising, and influencer partnerships to engage with audiences, boost brand visibility, and drive conversions.
According to Statista, the global number of social media users reached over 5 billion in 2024, highlighting the vast potential for marketers. With platforms like TikTok and Instagram showing engagement rates four times higher than Facebook, SMM continues to be a crucial tool for businesses aiming to connect with diverse and global audiences.
The main objective of a whitelisted post is to appear as organic as possible, meaning it shouldn't look like an ad. It needs to align with the influencer’s usual content and Whether you're looking to increase website traffic, build brand loyalty, or drive sales, the advantages of social media marketing are many and can provide a competitive advantage in today’s context.
Here are the top 10 benefits that make social media marketing an essential strategy for any business:
As a marketer, one of the first things you learn is that word of mouth is the ultimate goal. Today, social media boosts word of mouth exponentially: with over 5 billion people using social media each minute, imagine the endless possibilities and the number of people who can discover your brand!
By leveraging the platforms your target audience is using, brands can spread the word about their product and services to a large audience. And with inspiration becoming a huge part of the consumption process, your brand can not only get its unique selling point out there, but also become a source of inspiration that then drives sales and other benefits.
90% of marketers say social media marketing has increased their brand’s exposure, and 75% report an increase in traffic due to their social media efforts. Metrics like reach, impressions, and website traffic are commonly used to track the success of these efforts.
In terms of achieving brand awareness through your brand socials, it’s important to note that due to the amount of content and competition on social media, promoting your brand by yourself can be a bit tough.
However, there is a great way of increasing brand awareness: influencer campaigns, where your brand can be exposed to new audiences faster and more effectively when done right. You can read more about why you should invest in influencer marketing here.
A highly successful influencer marketing campaign for brand awareness is Bloom Nutrition: when partnering with creators, they emphasized on creative freedom and natural product integration, allowing for more cost-effective videos. Then, on the day of their product launch on Amazon, they partnered with more influencers who redirected people to the Amazon store in their videos.
The campaign resulted in a successful 5.5 million views, a $1.47 CPM, and in Bloom becoming an Amazon bestseller.
Beyond brand awareness, social media can also have a huge potential for attracting new leads, and according to eMarketer, social commerce sales are projected to reach about $144.5 billion by 2027.
To further understand the impact social media can have on lead generation, let’s take a look at some 2024 statistics by Exploding Stats:
So, combining the two stats, we get the perfect recipe for conversions: build trust with your audience through social media. Here’s how to do that:
With the right mix of informational content and a strategic call-to-action (CTA), conversions can increase dramatically with social media. For example, Instagram offers a sticker link for stories (first image), so people can directly access your shop in one tap; whereas TikTok has a built-in shop (second and third images) that is growing in popularity and proposes an interesting opportunity:
Social media is cost-effective overall, but mostly when it comes to advertising. Traditional advertising channels like TV or billboards can be very expensive, and it’s even hard to analyze their direct impact on your marketing efforts.
Social media on the other hand allows for multiple advertising options with dedicated stats to get meaningful insights. From free posts with affiliate programs and/or gifting campaigns to paid ads, they all allow for detailed targeting and can adapt to every marketing budget.
Furthermore, with engagement rates dropping on every app and brands struggling with organic growth, paid ads are growing in popularity and can be executed in different ways:
Commonly seen on platforms like YouTube or Pinterest, these ads appear in search results, targeting users who are actively looking for related content.
Although not traditional ads, brands can pay influencers to create and share content about their products or services, leveraging the influencer’s reach and credibility.
Brand posts that appear in the feed of users who don’t follow the brand but match the targeted demographic criteria. It's integrated naturally into the user experience.
Brands can also collaborate with influencers and content creators to run ads directly from the influencer's account rather than the brand's account. It leverages the influencer's established credibility and audience trust, making the ads appear more organic and authentic.
Learn how to partner with creators to do Whitelisting and start implementing it now!
Designed to collect user information, these ads often include forms within the platform, making it easy for users to sign up for newsletters, requests, or offers without leaving the app.
With the amount of fake news and the increasing creativity for scamming, now more than ever people want to fact-check before committing to a product, service, or brand.
Think of it as being on a dating app: you see someone you like, and their description sounds amazing, maybe a little too good to be true. So, you want to check this person out and find out more. The first thing that might come to mind is checking their social media, and if they don’t have any, or their profiles are pretty empty, you might second guess moving forward with them as you can’t establish credibility.
The same goes for brands. Plus, Vogue Business talks about how many Gen Z consumers aren’t actually impulsively buying products online. Instead, they are using social media as a search engine, to research products they’ve already seen and to hear reviews from others.
So, it’s very important to build trust on social media by collaborating with the right people, staying away from fake followers, sharing meaningful content, implementing effective social media content moderation and so on.
You can start by analyzing your brand profile’s analytics with Influencer Hero’s Analytics Tools, where you will be able to check your followers quality, engagement rate, and more. You can also use this tool to analyze someone else’s profile, especially if it’s an influencer or creator who you are thinking of collaborating with!
Social media marketing can have the power to discover and enter new markets, beyond finding customers for your existing products or services.
Thanks to the analytics and engagement metrics available, SMM helps brands identify trends, preferences, and customer feedback in different regions or demographics. Brands can therefore use this data to adapt their offering to fit new markets.
Then, to enter new markets, social media offers multiple benefits:
Before committing significant resources, brands can use social media to test how their products or services perform in a new market.
By running small, targeted campaigns, businesses can gather real-time feedback and assess the market’s interest, in order to refine their product offerings or marketing strategies before a full launch.
Once again, influencers propose a massive opportunity to quickly gain visibility and credibility since they act as cultural ambassadors, introducing the brand to their followers and boosting awareness in the region.
In fact, 71% of consumers are more likely to make a purchase based on social media referrals, making influencer partnerships crucial for driving sales and tracking key performance metrics like conversion rates and sales growth.
Take Hey,Hei for example: when the gin and juice seltzer brand partnered with local influencers to generate buzz around their launch in Miami, they achieved 8.41M+ impressions, 136K+ post reach, and a 2.03% average engagement rate that not only beat a competitor's average, but several influencers beat their own engagement rate personal best.
Social media allows brands to customize their content for different regions and cultures by creating localized campaigns that reflect the language, preferences, and cultural nuances of a new market.
Platforms like Facebook and Instagram allow businesses to create multiple versions of ads or posts targeted to specific geographies, ensuring the message resonates with local audiences. For example, the ads below test different personalization options for different audiences, as they might value one or the other more:
A lot of social media platforms offer e-commerce integrations, making it easier for brands to sell directly to customers in new markets. With these integrations and affordable shipping options, even the smallest brands in the smaller cities can ship their products to anywhere in the world!
According to SEMRush, social media doesn’t impact directly on your SEO strategy (Search Engine Optimization) but it does aid indirectly.
For example, people who have interacted with your social media accounts are more likely to also search for your brand on Google. If they also leave positive reviews, that can further improve your SEO ranking.
Social media is also great for learning about trends and what people are talking about, so you can cover that on your website with blog posts or landing pages and then rank higher. Fashion and lifestyle magazines use this resource a lot, where they capitalize on social media trends by writing articles about them and getting good SEO rankings:
Keeping a consistent aesthetic, message and tone is crucial for building brand personality, which helps brands connect with their target on a deeper level and make them stand out in a crowded market.
To do so, brands can apply different social media strategies to effectively expand their personality:
A great example of expanding brand personality through social media is Ryanair, the European low-cost airline. They apply their own mantra to everything, even their marketing strategy: memorable experiences can be equally achieved on a budget.
By posting memes on TikTok and wittily interacting with customers on Twitter, Ryanair understands that authenticity is key on social media and that brand loyalty is built through emotion-driven posts. They know that their low-cost fares can only be achieved at the expense of some benefits, but that’s what they are all about:
Archrival found that 84% Gen Z consumers are more likely to purchase from brands that make them feel part of a community. This means they can relate to the brand and share experiences with others.
This leads us to believe that repeated sales are no longer the only indicator of loyalty, but building a community is also now a major metric.
A good way of building a community (and therefore, customer loyalty) is to adapt social media trends to your promotion and communication efforts. A great example of this is Sephora (a major beauty retailer) incorporating the “dopamine menu” trend to their Instagram feed:
The “dopamine menu” trend is about creating a list of things that bring you joy. In their example, they not only added products that are already fan favorites, but they also added things people can relate to like the dog or the matcha drink.
This helps stay at the consumer’s top of mind, as they are indirectly reminded of your brand and they can also relate to it.
Marketers know more than anyone that selling an idea or a lifestyle is more powerful than simply selling a product and its functionalities. Social media is then the perfect place to do this, since brands that regularly share high-quality, insightful content about key industry trends and challenges can position themselves as experts.
By offering solutions, insights, and forward-thinking ideas, brands can shape the narrative around emerging trends, helping them build authority and credibility.
This has been greatly exacerbated by brands like Rhode, a cosmetic company, which create a whole trend before launching a product.
Rhode coined the “Strawberry Girl Summer” trend which rapidly expanded to all industries. The trend started as a makeup look that received 3.6 billion views before Rhode launched its new Strawberry Glaze Peptide Lip Treatment. By the time the product was out, everyone wanted to take part in the trend and it quickly sold out.
The final top 10 benefit of social media is the insights it can provide. After all, what is a marketing strategy without analytics?
Besides the ones we have previously mentioned, here are some more valuable insights that brands can gather through social media:
Social media allows brands to monitor how their audience perceives them in real time. Through comments, reviews, and direct interactions, brands can gauge customer sentiment—whether positive, neutral, or negative.
By analyzing how users engage with posts related to specific products or features, brands can gain insights into customer preferences. For instance, tracking which posts or promotions generate the most engagement (likes, shares, comments) can help brands identify which product features are most valued by consumers.
Social media platforms provide detailed analytics about the demographics of a brand’s audience, including age, gender, location, and interests. This data helps brands better understand who their customers are, allowing them to tailor their messaging and product offerings to meet the needs of their target demographic.
Again, Influencer Hero’s Analytics Tools can quickly gather all of this information for you and help you understand where you stand.
There is one word we have repeated a lot throughout the article due to its importance, and that is trends.
Monitoring social media conversations and hashtags related to your industry can reveal emerging trends. Brands can then use this information to stay ahead of the curve, adjust their strategies, or even create new trends by responding quickly to changing consumer demands.
Through monitoring conversations and customer inquiries on platforms like Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram, brands can identify common pain points or issues with their products or services.
This information is invaluable for improving customer experience and product development.
Social media marketing and influencer marketing are closely interconnected, with the latter often acting as a powerful extension of social strategies.
By partnering with influencers, brands can amplify their content, expand their reach, and tap into the influencer's dedicated audience. This can lead to improved brand trust, more personalized content, and higher engagement rates.
This partnership directly boosts social media engagement metrics such as reach, impressions, engagement rates, conversion rates, and follower growth, all of which demonstrate how well a campaign is performing.
Together, these strategies form a comprehensive approach that not only drives traffic and conversions but also strengthens brand-consumer relationships, making it easier to measure the return on investment in both monetary and brand value terms.
Influencer Hero can provide you all the tools for a successful influencer + social media campaign, book a demo with our experts today to find out more about the influencer campaign manager!
When done correctly, social media marketing can bring numerous benefits for brands, including increased visibility, stronger audience engagement, and valuable insights into customer behavior.
These things help every aspect of a business since it drives sales and improvement opportunities, as well as enable brands to stay relevant by taking part in industry conversations and leveraging influencers for augmented reach. Ultimately, social media marketing can help brands stand out in competitive markets.
Social media marketing enhances customer service by providing brands with a direct and efficient communication channel.
Through platforms like Twitter and Instagram, brands can quickly address customer queries, complaints, or feedback in real time, creating a more personalized customer experience. This responsiveness also boosts customer satisfaction and trust, helping to build loyalty.
Yes, social media marketing can improve customer retention by fostering consistent engagement with the audience.
By regularly interacting with customers through comments, messages, and content updates, brands maintain visibility and stay top-of-mind, encouraging repeat purchases and brand loyalty. Exclusive offers and community-building efforts can further solidify this connection.
Social media marketing allows brands to share authentic stories that resonate with their audience through a variety of formats—videos, blogs, images, and live streams. Platforms like Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok make it easy for brands to craft visual narratives that highlight their mission, values, and customer experiences, adding a personal touch to brand messaging.
Social media is crucial for crisis management, as it allows brands to respond quickly to any negative situations or public relations crises. By addressing concerns directly, providing transparent updates, and managing public perception in real time, brands can mitigate the impact of crises and maintain trust with their audience.
Social media marketing aids in market research by providing real-time feedback and insights from audiences. Through social listening tools and engagement analysis, brands can identify customer preferences, industry trends, and potential pain points, which can be used to guide product development and marketing strategies.
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