Over the last two decades, the Internet has penetrated our lives so deeply that people are spending more and more time on the net than interacting with the real world. Their day starts not with a coffee, but with a gadget as the online presence is the must-have that goes-without-saying for each and every entity — be it a business behemoth, a middle-size software company or a tiny local coffee shop. Otherwise the question appears: do you even exist?!
But if you think that once you’ve built a website to sustain your web presence — you are going to have a rich pool of leads, you’re probably wrong . Static content on its own doesn’t seem to attract clients. And here is when social media comes in handy. Scarcely any tools from the marketing strategy kit can compete with social media platforms in terms of cost-effectiveness. 73% of marketers have reported social media marketing as being effective for their business.
In case you still doubt whether your business needs social media presence, let’s have a look at what you get when investing your marketing efforts into social platforms:
1. Brand Awareness
Nowadays 72% of the adult American public uses at least one social media site on a daily basis. What is a better chance to get your potential leads’ attention than exposing interesting brand-related content in their feed during relaxed after-work evening hours? Please, mind that the content should be eye-catching, useful, and relevant to your audience.
2. Customer engagement
Social media is becoming a customer service platform. This is the fastest and most convenient place to start, build, and deepen relations with your clientele. Facebook messenger, direct messages in Instagram and Twitter allow all parties to be on a first-name basis with each other, while fun and useful content, quizzes, challenges, contests you post on your business page provoke people to react with their likes, comments, and, as a cherry on your cake, encourage them to create user-generated content.
3. Building Trust
71% of consumers with a positive interaction with a brand on social media are likely to recommend the brand to family and friends. And this will be the best ad your brand can ever dream of, as nothing works better than the word of mouth.
Besides, people trust people. And social media is the perfect place to humanize your brand: post the pictures of your team, the company’s social life and leisure, testimonials from your clients, think of a mascot that can personify your brand. Appealing to human feelings will serve as a nice icebreaker for new followers, eliminate communication obstacles, make your brand memorable, and outstand the competitors.
4. Tracking Customer Satisfaction and Getting Marketplace Insights
Consumers vote with their wallets. And here — in social platforms — they vote with their doable actions (see Customer engagement) which is easily trackable: should you provide the content that really clicks — your followers will grant your page with their social media endorsements. Moreover, social media accounts are the mirror that reflects how your brand performs offline: whether your customers had a positive or a negative experience of interacting with your product or service— you will get to know this from posts, tags, and shoutouts people leave on social media pages.
5. Brand Loyalty
Studies show that millennials are 62% more loyal to brands that directly engage with them on social media. Effective direct communication with the customers, their positive experience, satisfaction forms a bond between your brand and them, which inevitably leads to the main goal of nearly all the businesses — building a loyal customer base. In the spring 2020 — during the coronavirus crisis — retaining this valuable business asset is getting actual as never before. When most businesses have to close their operations, interacting with your clients at least online is a nice option to keep in touch and retain loyal ones.
6. Product Discovery
Strange as it may seem, but introducing new products to the potential customers moves from brick-and-mortar and e-commerce stores to social media.
60% of people discover new products on Instagram. And 66% of companies use social media to release new products to consumers. Why don’t you help these two parties meet on your business page?
7. Purchase Driving
A report by Curalate confirms that 76% of consumers have purchased a product they’ve seen in a social media post. This doesn’t mean that social media are to become new marketplaces for products or services. However, if the customer journey often takes 6 to 8 touches from the product discovery to the purchase, touches through social media often appear to be the most significant ones.
8. Paid Advertising and Targeting
Targeting is a truly revolutionary feature provided by Facebook Ad Manager that with its emergence turned the ad industry upside down. Along with paid advertising, it enables you to save tons of marketing budget by showing your product or service only to the relevant audience. It is a great opportunity for your business to get more leads for less money and, thus, raise the conversion and optimize ROI.
9. Viral content
The best thing about social media marketing is that here on your business page you are free to post whatever you want and the necessary instruments are at your fingertips. By applying some creativity and creating fun and value for your target audience, you can get an unbelievable exposure for free.
Let’s assume, your average follower has 450 friends on Facebook and 500 connections on LinkedIn. Potentially, you get about 1K additional audience only with one repost. Now let’s think of a new hyping platform TikTok. There you can tag your video with #foryourpage, #foryou, and the like and get into the main page exposing your video masterpiece to an unlimited number of people.
10. Search Engine Optimization
That’s a combo: by ensuring the presence of your business on social platforms, you get some traffic to your website from the social media posts, and at the same time you optimize the ranking of your website in Google search results. The contribution of social media presence to the ranking results is not that significant in comparison with some other marketing efforts, still, it works. While ranking in the top positions will increase your website traffic dramatically and keep the positive conversion growth.
11. Following industry trends
Social networking platforms are a goldmine of data for business intelligence. Provided the crystal clear transparency of the platforms, you can listen to what your customers think about your brand and about your competitors, what they love about the products or services in your niche, and what they are annoyed with. Here you can also watch the industry trends, check out the current popularity of the keywords and hashtags relevant to your sphere, and adjust your content plan correspondingly. Get inspired with some ideas and apply them in your own way!
12. Cost-effectiveness
In terms of efficiency, this part of the marketing strategy often proves to be the optimal one. You use the most popular social platforms for free, here you are to invest only your time, designer and copywriting skills, and creativity. As for the paid ad campaigns, you can flexibly tune them for your needs. Starting with a small budget you can analyze the results nearly at no time and adjust the next investments correspondingly.
Wrapping Up
Numerous benefits mentioned and implied leave no doubts as to the necessity of social media marketing for your brand. When thoroughly and creatively considered, consistently updated, and carefully targeted, the social media strategy will bring you more leads, higher conversion, strong brand with an army of loyal customers, and much more at comparably low costs. Go social and get the ball rolling!
