To swim in the ocean, you either need to be a fish or learn how to act like one!
You might find the above statement funny, but it rather holds very implicit importance. If your business ideologies are directed towards brand awareness, an ever-growing customer pool, registering record-breaking sales, and proving your worth in the market, social media is just the right tool for you.
The power and influence of social media are growing at a supersonic speed. Currently, there are 3.96 billion people around the world scrolling through their social media feeds, sharing content, connecting with brands, and improving the paradigm of social media selling.
Social media is the boom of this century. The craze and obsession intertwined around it is not going to end soon. And, if your business wants to swim, and not float, it needs to address this new-age platform and leverage it in the best way possible. Not because this is ‘in trend’, but because your target audience hangs on these popular social media platforms. And, because brands should engage with their target audience on different levels.
Put simply, social media makes branding easier, engage your customers in a positive experience, and let you explore the various social advertising opportunities
What makes social media so important?
Quite frankly, the answer to this question is their numbers.
With billions of people on social media, businesses no longer have to limit their operations to certain geographical locations. They can address global audiences, promote products worldwide, and still keep local brand reputation intact.
And, you know the most interesting part of doing all this?
Businesses can do all this without spending more than a few bucks on advertising and marketing.
Doesn’t this sound interesting!
Now, for ruling the hashtags for social media marketing, you don’t need to memorize every intimidating buzzword or possess the magical million number of followers, but discover ways to facilitate your connection with the billions of social media users. If you can capture their attention and create a lasting first impression, your business will establish its reputation in being a trustworthy, knowledgeable, and approachable resource.
Moreover, the benefits of social media extend far beyond increasing sales.
Several brands developed their brand image and customer base using social media. And, your business can achieve that too!
Consumers are right there, itching to connect with a brand that understands their pain points.
But where is your business?
Why is social media necessary for businesses?
Did you know, 97% of small businesses use social media to attract new customers?
Also, around 63% of users who search for a business online are likely to become their consumers if they possess an acclaimed social media presence.
Social media is a tool that can help you oversee operations beyond your camp. It doesn’t matter whether you run some local shop or are a big multinational corporation, it needs to have a social media presence.
As per a report, more than 97% of marketers are using social media for marketing, and 78% of salespeople outsell their peers by using social media for business.
As of today, social media is an essential part of every business marketing strategy. Unlike all the other trends that die eventually, the hype around social media is immense. Considering the bountiful advantages brands receive by employing social media for promotion, the honour and stature are well deserved.
Still not sure how and in what manner social media impacts your business?
The following points will simplify it for you.
Social media for brand awareness
Building a brand from scratch is one of the most difficult tasks, only if you exclude social media from your strategy. Social media eases the effectiveness of the brand-building process, only if you learn employing it successfully.
Unlike traditional marketing tactics, social media allows you to get your brand out there in front of the people more quickly and easily. It lets your audience look at your brand even when they aren’t trying to. A significant improvement over traditional media, this allows businesses to drive genuine conversations about their products and services.
Moreover, it allows businesses to connect with their audiences, identify their interests, and create content addressing those pain points. Along with social listening, businesses can gather data from the audience, identify the tone and language used by their target customers, and represent themselves similarly.
Moreover, social media is a great platform to share a brand’s mission and stories. Effective stories structure a positive brand image. Brand storytelling is an art, and brands should master it. No matter how you tell your stories, proper narration can work wonders for brand promotion.
Social media for inbound traffic
Websites are a must for every business. If you do not have it till now, you’re missing out on the attention of millions of people, looking for services and products similar to the ones you’re offering.
If you do have a website, you already know its integral role in registering a digital presence of your business. Many websites struggle to garner the right audience attraction. Moreover, it is highly unlikely that all your traffic will come through search engines. However, social media marketing can help push customers directly to your site.
Social media marketing is a perfect way to allow a diverse inbound traffic stream to your website, but you need to consider certain aspects like what, when, and how often to post. Don’t overbear your customers with too much information. Add content pieces that are SEO-friendly.
Social media for topical authoritativeness
Social media helps businesses establish topical authority.
How?
When you post relevant content on social media, search engines recognize this behaviour. In the long run, this frequency and nature fasten you as a topical authority. The more is the authoritativeness of your page, the better is the traffic. Social media marketing can help improve page authority and website authority of a business website.
Social media for product promotion
Product promotion online isn’t the same as offline. Businesses need to find creative ways for product promotion. Quirky and original content needs a mention here. Every social media message script should define the uniqueness and imperativeness of your products and services.
Telling a product story is a fabulous indirect way to promote it, allowing your audience to build their perceptions. Audiences relate better with product stories. So, businesses should adopt that approach. In the long run, it will improve lead conversion rates and helps achieve skyrocketing sales numbers.
Social media for customer satisfaction
Getting a new customer is hard, but retaining a customer is harder.
This is why customer satisfaction should be your topmost priority. Social media allows you to connect with your customers in real-time while you can monitor their needs and issues. To truly satisfy your customers, brands need to offer more than customer service like a personalized touch.
Social media helps you accomplish it.
- Offer prompt customer service to your audience in regards to genuine problems regarding products and services
- Observe conversations to see if your customers talk about your brand
- Post messages, alerts, announcements, and offers on your feed
- Connect and build a fruitful relationship with your customers
- Conduct Q&A sessions with your customers to understand their distress better
The top tips that will help you grow your business using social media marketing
Over one-third of the world’s population is currently on social media. So it’s quite obvious, social media is the only platform housing the majority of the world’s citizenry. That means a business should focus on building a strong brand presence on social media or prepare to lose to its competitors.
Choosing the right platform
So, which platform should you choose?
Finding the right promotion platform is of tremendous significance here. Consider aspects like business domain, future plans and goals, end customers, and audience nature.
- Having a Facebook page for your business is a necessity, especially for small companies. But, that won’t be enough to maximize your reach and establish a prominent presence.
- LinkedIn is beneficial for B2B marketing since the platform is responsible for 80% of such leads.
- YouTube is renowned for video marketing. If your business does or will post video content, YouTube is the right place for such promotional acts.
- Instagram is the most trending platform today. It allows users to share photos, videos, stories, live videos, etc. Instagram and its rich analytical and post scheduling capabilities take an edge over other social media channels. Therefore, brands shouldn’t miss this social media channel.
- Twitter functions as a real-time information portal about things currently happening around the world. This channel deals with news related to entertainment, sports, politics, and more. Its limited characters tweet enhances its reputation.
- As a brand, if pictorial representation is your stronghold, then build your brand page on Pinterest. Customers love to scroll their feed page, adding pins to their board, and discovering new content formats. Moreover, 78% of users believe that content from Pinterest comes in handy and shapes their purchasing decision.
Video conversation is on a rise
Video content is quickly replacing the stardom once help by text and images. As the user interest evolves, so does the social media marketing strategy. Algorithms have changed too, suggesting users more of video content than text or image-based. For the same reason, a whopping 86% of brands are already leveraging video to accomplish their engagement goals. Moreover, since the human tendency to remember videos is higher than text, a good storyline creates a lasting impression in their minds.
For brands, they need to live an authentic, quality, and impactful life and share it via vlogging with their consumers. Brands certainly lose customers due to the lack of video content. Don’t let your business be one of them.
Try influencer marketing. It works
The word ‘influencer’ was once dismissed by brands, considered baseless and counterproductive, in vain. However, influencer marketing has grown tremendously in the past few years, becoming a common household name in the arenas of social media. Instagram, followed by YouTube and Facebook are the top rulers of influencer marketing.
With the booming eminence of influencer marketing, the budget allocated for such marketing models is obliged to increase. Over 7% of companies invested more than a million dollars on influencer marketing in 2020. Furthermore, 2/3rd marketers also increased their spending on influencer marketing this year.
The sudden shift of interest in influencer marketing depicts the dynamic nature of the market. Influencer marketing holds a promising potential not just for fashion and lifestyle brands, but for all sorts and sizes of organizations. If brands get their product or service publicly vouched by a trusted authority in the niche, their sales number will increase with a wrapping speed. Therefore, influencer marketing is the most cost-effective way of getting new customers on board.
Content is king. Remember that always
Content has the power to script stories of social media success for your brand. It can make or break a brand.
The type of content you post on social media defines a lot about your ideals, values, and beliefs. So, make sure that your content sets a straight record with your consumers without hurting the sentiments of any person, religion, community, country, etc. Simply put, the right content can help you connect with your audience, but a wrong one can destroy years of hard work.
Different Platform. Different content
Brands are mostly under the perception that content is an unchanging variable in their social media marketing equation. Maintaining accounts on all major social media platforms doesn’t mean you post similar content on all.
Each piece of content should be formatted to suit the channel outlines and its audience.
- Post photos or videos on Instagram
- Design long posts for LinkedIn,
- Add videos, memes, and images to your Facebook page
- Script short announcements on Twitter
- Add creative images to your Pinterest board
Even if the message is the same, each post should be designed otherwise for different platforms.
Focus on networks that do well
Even if you have an account on all social media channels, it doesn’t mean they’ll perform the same. It takes some time for brands to understand which platform does better than the others, but once you do know, give time to that network and take advantage of the opportunity.
Run paid campaigns for better reach
A successful social media marketing campaign has to be mercurial and robust.
Every marketing strategy depends upon various parameters, like your region of operation, the interest level of people, price, popularity, etc.
However, running paid campaigns can do the deed for your business.
Paid campaigns on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn enhances engagement figures and produces a better reach.
Opting for paid doesn’t mean that organic doesn’t work, however, the former will boost your sales numbers, generate a worthier brand presence for a wider audience group, and contributes to customer data insights.
Social media is also a customer service channel
Social media is a cross-functional platform. It functions as a product promotion channel and a customer service portal.
Brands do employ their social media channels for solving customer queries, resolve multiple issues at the same time, and audit customer requests. Simply put, social media very much behaves like a customer service channel.
For brands, it is imperative to maintain a balance between both its aspects.
Analytics are a must
The best thing about social media is that it is free and loaded in analytical information. Unlike the traditional form of marketing where you need to conduct surveys for analyzing customer behavior, social media consists of in-built tools for that. So, you can review your brand’s performance without wasting much time, money, and resource on it.
Conclusion
For businesses, changing times call for adaptable methods.
Social media is the new age tool for branding, sales, and marketing. With the right social media presence, brands can achieve the success they have been struggling to attain. However, only well-researched and thought-over social media marketing strategies are rewarded by consumers. Unleash the power of social, connect with billions of users, and take the next leap into modernity and success for your business.
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This article was written for Business 2 Community by Sumeet Anand.
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