As a business, getting more people to know about your brand is important, right? Right. Social media is one of the easiest ways to reach your audience effectively and get other people to see your brand simply while browsing in their own personal time. When somebody on Facebook shares your post, image, or video, this creates additional exposure to your brand. Let's say you use social media to promote a coupon for your store. When somebody is excited about the sale, they will often share your post with their friends. Not only do you get more people seeing your sale, but you can also gain additional followers. Social media creates a trickle-down effect that is very beneficial to businesses.

Social media creates opportunity businesses didn't have in the past. With your profiles, you can easily interact and engage with your customers. When you interact with your customers, you are creating a positive relationship with them. When this relationship gets built online, the customer is more likely to end up purchasing your businesses products or services. Your loyal customers will like, share, retweet, or comment on the content you create.

A great way to grow your leads is through utilizing social media. Whether your business wants to grow an email list to showcase your new products or you're a B2B business looking for new clients, social media is a great tool to do so. There are many techniques for generating leads through social media including running contests or using paid advertising, In fact, 44% of B2B marketers have gained leads through using LinkedIn.

One of the most beautiful aspects of utilizing social media marketing in your marketing plan is you get to learn more about your customers.

The main social networks include analytics about your followers. With these insights, you can learn more about your customers buying habits, interests, and geographical location which are very helpful in identifying what content to send out to your audience. In particular, you can even define your groups into different segments so you know where to put forth more effort in your marketing plans. Social media allows you to gain more detailed information about your followers than ever before.

Through social media, you can easily promote your new products and services to your audiences. With your profiles, your customers can easily shop right through whatever social media platform they are on. Currently, Facebook and Instagram allow businesses to tag their products in products and a follower can easily purchase that item without ever leaving the platform. Another option is to create content around your sales. If you are running a sale, your business can promote the sale through paid advertisements and at the same time share the sale with your normal followers.

If you really want to grow your business we suggest utilizing influencers on social media. Influencer marketing is one of the fastest growing and successful ways to sell on social platforms.

Influencer marketing has been taking the social media world by storm. Brands both big and small are paying social media influencers like Dude Perfect to promote their products in a fun and social way. These influencers post on their normal platforms but mention a brand or service that helped them get their own content out there. People who follow these influencers are likely to be persuaded into purchasing that product because they saw their favorite Youtuber or Twitch streamer using that product.

If you properly use your social media platforms to their max, you will see significant increases in your sales.

Did you know your social media profiles can actually help you show on higher on search engines such as Google and Bing? This is done by a process known as Seach Engine Optimization or SEO. When you are active on your social media profiles, there is evidence that shows you will show up higher on these search engines. This means when someone uses a keyword to search for something, the tops results most likely have consistent, and active social media profiles. This is great at increasing your organic traffic to your website!

One of the great benefits of using social media in your business is you can see exactly what your competition is doing.

If you notice your competitors are doing a much better job at engaging their customers, you can see how they are doing it. Since there is so much data out there in the world of marketing now, you can do a social media audit of your competition all for free. Your business can do a deep dive on the competitors and found out what exactly is working for them. Whether it is a consistent posting schedule or sharing tips about the industry, you can then try some of their techniques out on your own page.

More and more businesses are utilizing their social media accounts to do their customer service. Companies like Nike use their Twitter account to handle any customer's complaints, compliments, or issues. Connecting with your customer using social media creates a relationship with them. This then builds off of point number 1 we made about building brand loyalty. This is an indirect benefit of using social media for your digital marketing.

Most of the major social media platforms have the option for businesses to run advertisements through them. In fact, Facebook is the most popular option for marketers to use paid advertisements. To put this perspective into common terms in advertising, the CPM (cost per thousand) on Facebook is $7.90 and traditional TV marketing can cost up to $34.57. Social media marketing has allowed companies to save thousands and still be as effective, if not more effective, than traditional marketing. Not to mention, you do not have to pay to get your message printed!

Perhaps the most obvious benefit of using social media as a marketing tool is sending people to your website. Whether your a B2C or a B2B, your website is one of the most important tools you have in the digital marketing world. When you share a link or update from your company to your page, you are ultimately hoping for your customer to click on the link and go to your website for a particular action. In 2015, social media drove 31.2% of all traffic to websites around the globe.