Social Media Is Essential For Most Businesses
Social Media Marketing (SMM) is a type of internet marketing using social media networking websites – like Facebook and Twitter – to market your business. The goal of SMM is to create content that users will share with their social network to help your company increase brand exposure and expand your reach. Find your customers where they are online already – on social media. It’s a great way to market your business, stay in touch with your customers, and more.
Benefits of Social Media Marketing
Increased Brand Recognition
Take the opportunity to increase your visibility online. SMM is extremely valuable in achieving this goal. Social networks are simply new channels to share your brand’s mission, voice, and content. It makes it easier for customers to access your content and contact you. It also makes your business more easily recognizable. Some users may stumble across your company in their news feed and become a new customer! An otherwise apathetic customer may read some of your content and suddenly feel enthusiastic about your brand.
Improved Brand Loyalty
Staying in touch with your customers is paramount to improving brand loyalty. According to a recent Texas Tech University study, brands engaging with customers on social media earn higher brand loyalty from their customers than brands that don’t. Take advantage of the marketing tools social media gives you and improve brand loyalty.
Higher Conversion Rates
SMM causes higher conversion rates due to its approachable nature and the human element of it. Brands become more humanized when interacting with customers on social media. Nowadays, people want to interact with people – not companies. Social media allows your business to act like a person rather than a company, which warms up potential customers and builds trust, leading to higher conversion rates. In addition, some studies have shown that social media has a 100% higher lead-to-close rate than outbound marketing, and that more social media followers improves your credibility. So simply building your audience on social media can improve conversion rates on your existing traffic.
Higher Brand Authority
The more places a customer can find you online and the easier it is to interact with your business, the better. Interacting with your customers on a regular basis shows good faith to other customers. Furthermore, when customers are happy or displeased with a product or service, they tend to go to social media to talk about it. When they post your brand name with a review, new people may want to follow you for updates. The more people talking about you on social media, the more valuable and authoritative your brand will seem to new audiences. Don’t forget to interact with opinion leaders and major influencers online to further boost your authority.
Increased Inbound Traffic
Your inbound traffic is usually limited to people who are already familiar with your brand or users searching for related keywords you’re ranking for. Every social media profile you create is another link back to your website, a way for new customers to find you. The more high-quality content you put out on social media, the more inbound traffic you’ll generate, which means higher conversions and more leads.
Lower Marketing Costs
According to Hubspot, 84% of marketers found that as few as 6 hours of effort weekly was enough to increase traffic. Know that 6 hours is simply not a big investment in something as huge as social media. Simply spending an hour a day on your social media channels can help your business. And advertising on Facebook is fairly cheap, too, as compared to other advertising avenues.
Better SEO Rankings
Your content can make your website soar to the top of search results. Paired with highly optimized content on social media channels, this can drive people to your website and help boost your rankings in search engines.
Better Customer Experience
The more user-friendly your business is, the better. This means your website and all of your social media channels as well. If it’s easy and convenient for customers to get in contact with you, it is a win-win. Every customer interaction you have on social media is an opportunity for you to help both sides and enrich your business/customer relationships. If a customer complains online, social media gives you the ability to see it, respond quickly, and help remedy the issue, showing good faith. If a customer leaves a 5-star review, again, you’re able to quickly respond, thank them, and show good faith. It lets customers know you care, building trust.
Improved Customer Insights
Social media networks like Facebook give you the ability to separate target audiences into hyper-segmented groups. These filters can be based on age, location, religion, buying habits, and so much more. Furthermore, participate in social listening by monitoring what people are saying about your brand online. You can even check out what kind of content your target audience likes most and start producing similar content. Finally, you can measure conversions based on the promotions you offer and create the most powerful combination to increase revenue and grow.
Your Competition Is Already Online
If you want to beat the competition, you simply need to be on social media. I assure you, most likely your competition is already there, taking advantage of all the tools SMM offers. Don’t let them beat you! Create social profiles and get started ASAP! The sooner you start, the sooner you’ll start reaping all the benefits.
Improved ROI
As we discussed earlier, lower marketing costs means more money to spend on other things, higher profits, and improved ROI.