Posted by Digital marketing has grown to become one of the essential components for business success, and social media marketing sits right at the center of it.
With more than 4.2 billion active social media users globally, social media has become one facet of digital marketing that is a must-have for any business interested in interacting with its target audience on a global scale.
Thanks to advancements in technology, businesses are no longer limited to the target audience in their locality. As a result, today, businesses can advertise their products and services to billions of buyers worldwide using different online channels.
From Facebook to Instagram and Twitter to TikTok, social media allows businesses to send their brand messaging to the right audience at the right time. When done right, social media marketing can drive up traffic to your website, increase conversions and create a loyal client base in the long term.
If your business is not yet taking advantage of social media marketing, you are missing out on one of the modern-day’s fastest and more reliable marketing strategies. Here is why leveraging social media for your business should be a no-brainer.
What is Social Media Marketing?
Social media marketing is simply the use of social media platforms like Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and Twitter to build brand awareness, promote a product or sell a service.
Social media gives businesses an effective avenue to reach their prospective clients, regardless of the company’s size. When done right, social media marketing can level the playing field for all businesses, large and small.
When a business uses social media marketing, it gets to interact with is target market in the spaces they are found online. More than 3.5 billion people globally log on to social media platforms and spend an average of 3 hours a day on these platforms.
A business with a social media presence can take advantage of these numbers to connect with its target audience, build an audience and drive up revenue. Here are other benefits you can enjoy when you use social media marketing for your business.
Why you should be using social media for your business
1. Increase Brand Awareness
Brand recognition is the ultimate goal of any marketing strategy. Social media is one of the cheapest strategies for digital marketing that leverage content to increase brand visibility. Having a social media strategy for your business can boost brand recognition. This is because your brand is visible to a larger audience online.
To increase brand awareness for your brand, you first need to have a social media presence. Create social media profiles for your business to start interacting with your target audience. You also need to get your clients, employees, business associates, and partners to share and like the profiles. This will have people interacting directly with your brand, therefore boosting awareness.
2. It is Cost-Effective
Social media marketing is one of the most cost-effective aspects of any marketing strategy. A business can sign up and create a business profile on multiple social media platforms for free. This is with the option of using promo ads at a very low rate. When I say, low rate, it is in comparison to other marketing and Ads.
The cost-effectiveness of social media marketing allows any business to take advantage of these platforms to maximize brand exposure and ROI while preserving most of its budget for other business expenses.
Investing a little time and resources in social media marketing can greatly increase a business’s conversion rate and bottom line.
3. Increase Website Traffic
Any business without a social media presence misses out on the possibility of reaching a larger audience, therefore limiting it to its usual clients. The best way to reach clients outside your local market base is through social media.
Every social media profile you create for your business acts as an access point to your business website. With good content, you can channel your social media platform traffic directly to your website to boost traffic. Increasing web traffic makes it easier for the website to rank higher in search engine results. This increases your brand visibility online, giving you better opportunities to attract more customers.
4. Customer and Audience segmenting
According to Forbes, social media is one of the most effective marketing avenues for small businesses. However, how effective social media marketing is for a company depends on the business’s goals and its market audience. For instance, LinkedIn is a better platform for professional networking and reaching business clients compared to Instagram.
Businesses can benefit from increased audience and customer engagement by knowing the most active social platform for different business needs and focusing on the platform where most of their target audience is found. This will ensure you keep up with the ever-changing market preference for your audience.
5. Collecting Data from Audience Research
The only way to know how well your business is performing is through data collection. Social media marketing gives you access to user data and how they interact with your brand online.
A tool such as Google Analytics can be used to measure your social media marketing efforts to know what works and what needs improvement. You can even measure the performance of all your social media profiles to see which one performs best and which one needs improvement. Getting access to valuable business data would be almost impossible without these tools or user numbers.
6. It helps you get Marketplace insights
One of the most valuable benefits of using social media marketing for your business is gaining market insight. Social media platforms allow businesses to interact directly with their target audience, giving the business access to the thoughts and ideas of its customers.
You can get marketplace insight by monitoring social media profile activities. This gives you access to consumer ideas, interests, and opinions, which would otherwise be difficult to come by. With this information, you can better understand our industry and tweak your business to meet your customers’ needs.
Social media marketing allows you to segment your content by lists based on topics to identify the type of content generating the most impressions. You can use tools to measure conversion from different posts, which can give you the perfect idea of what content to use to maximize returns.
7. Building your brand as a thought leader
Through social media marketing, a brand can position itself as a thought leader in its niche. Taking time to post well-structured and insightful content is important. This makes it easier for your followers to trust your brand. And also acts as an authority for reliable information in your niche.
For this to happen, a business needs to take time to interact with its target audience online by sharing content and participating in conversations. This helps to highlight your skills, allowing your followers to look up to you. Building your brand as a thought leader is an effective local SEO for small business strategy that helps search engines rank your website higher.
8. Increased conversion rate
You will also experience an increased conversion rate and enjoy better conversion opportunities as you build your business visibility online through social media. With social media marketing, every blog post, image, video, or comment you make increases the potential of driving traffic to your website.
Social media marketing personifies a brand whenever the business interacts with its online audience through comments, content sharing or status updates. According to the statistics, more than 65% of marketers claim to experience increased lead generation from spending at least 6 hours a week engaging with their audience on social media. Increased lead generation directly improves the conversion rate of the business.
9. Customer satisfaction
Social media is a communication and networking avenue. A brand needs to create a firm voice on these platforms to humanize its interactions with the target audience. Taking time to give personalized answers is an easy way of improving customer satisfaction.
One-on-one interactions with the client base improve their likelihood of trusting your brand and making them loyal followers. Loyal customers spend more on a business and offer you free marketing by telling those around them about your brand.
10. Ability to retarget and remarket an audience
Generally, only 2% of new business visitors purchase the first time they visit a business online. Social media marketing can increase this number by up to 90% when done using remarketing advertisements.
In remarketing, a business collects visitor data and places anonymous cookies in their browser. This ensures your business is advertised to these clients when they visit other social media sites. With these remarketing ads, you get to place your brand in front of the right audience, even outside your business website or social media page.
Summing up
Social media marketing is an excellent way of building brand awareness and a brand’s reputation as an authority online. It is an excellent tool that delivers numerous benefits to businesses worldwide. You need to make it an important part of your overall marketing strategy. This way you will enjoy the benefits highlighted in this article and more.