The Importance of Adding Social Media into Your Marketing Budget

Social media is continuing to grow as a source of information, news, reviews and online engagement. More than ever, people are looking to social media to help them with their buying decisions. Leaving social media out of your marketing budget means you'll be missing out on potential customers looking for products and services, just like yours, right in their social media feeds.

Although a strong social media presence can be a powerful tool for supplementing marketing campaigns and emails, organic social media is losing its luster. Instead, it's becoming increasingly important to become more targeted with social media campaigns using sponsored posts, advertising and In-mail methods.

To gain a greater understanding of just where you may be missing out when it comes to social media promotion, below are some of the tools and benefits that are right at your fingertips within the top platforms:

Sponsored Social Posts

Depending on your audience, sponsored social media posts can be a way to garner a higher click-through rate and more engagement with your content. Choosing the right platform or combination of platforms can help put your content in front of a more relevant, targeted audience.

Sponsored social media posts can be a valuable way to get your content in front of a wider, qualified audience, while establishing your brand as a thought leader and industry influencer. In addition to blog content, important events can be a good topic for sponsored advertising on various platforms. On Facebook, you can choose whether you'd like to simply drive more traffic to content on your website or whether you'd like your target audience to take an action (think event registration or webinar sign-ups).

If you have a particularly business savvy audience, LinkedIn offers ample opportunity to target prospects and clients in a variety of methods: In-mail, sponsored posts and ads.

Page Sponsorship

Looking to increase your base of followers so you can extend your organic reach to new prospects and clients who aren't already engaging with your brand? Sponsoring your page can help you put your brand in front of more eyeballs in your region and among demographics of your choice. Growing your audience is vital to keeping your organic content engaging, while picking and choosing which content you'd like to sponsor to supplement your other marketing campaigns and efforts.

Creating Great Content

Creating great content in-house is quite achievable. However, you do need to budget time and resources to developing and evolving quality content for your social media audience. The content needs to deliver value to your community and provide them with useful and interesting information. Along with written content, visual content is just as important. Taking the time to select an image that is eye-catching, thumb-stopping and relevant to the article or post is huge. According to Social Media Examiner, 37% of marketers said visual marketing was the most important form of content for their business, second only to blogging (38%).

Utilizing a Social Media Management Tool for Franchise

As a franchise system, effectively posting and monitoring all of your social media pages can prove to be quite a challenge. Budgeting for a social media management tool will save you time and money in the long run that can be reallocated to other marketing activities, spending more time engaging with your clients or creating more great content.

With an increasing number of ways to hone in on your audience and target them in a smarter, more logical way, your brand can work to combat the struggles associated with downward trends related to organic social media. Social media advertising lets you choose the type of audience, test ideas and messaging across your community and advertise more strategically. You work hard on content and campaign creation, don't fall short on delivering that content to your community, budget for social media success!