Businesses, both large corporations and one-man bands have one thing in common when it comes to their marketing strategy. All businesses need to have a social media presence.

If you’re running a business in 2019 and don’t use social media as part of your marketing strategy, you’re missing out, not only on additional traffic, brand awareness, SEO and social media engagement but most importantly, you could be missing out on valuable sales.

Authority and Trust

Having a social media presence supports many activities but when searching for a product or service, most people’s first point of call is to do a quick Google search. If your website is lucky enough to be one of the top search results, you’ll most likely be surrounded by your competitor’s search results too, meaning you’re less likely to be able to generate a sale.

One of the best ways to tackle this is to have a social media presence and make use of the platforms effectively. If a user can’t find any social links associated with your website, they are less likely to click and buy. You need to build trust with your target audience and utilising social media is one of the best ways to do this.

The other side to building trust is to also build the authority of your brand in the SERP (search engine results page) rankings. To do this you can create a profile on sites such as Trustpilot and Reviews.io and encourage customers to leave their feedback about your product or service. This can then add a rich snippet to your Google results as seen below.

A rich snippet is a visual element added to an existing search result, an example of this is the star ratings displayed. When embedded into your site certain widgets can allow Google to pick this up through the code you have implemented resulting in your reviews being shown and will not only provide social proof for the user, but it will draw eyes to your listing, with the yellow stars giving your ranking something extra to draw the viewer in and increase your CTR (click-through rate).

Breaking Barriers

Social media isn’t just about building trust and authority for your business website, another main aim is to create additional channels for customers. In 2019, you really need to be breaking barriers when it comes to communicating with your customers.

Traditional ways of communicating with customers like email and phone are still used but tend not to be a customers first choice. Utilising social media and encouraging customers to not only engage on these platforms but also provide feedback and get in touch with support teams to address issues or queries can be another form of marketing in itself with good social media management, but can also help your customers reach out to you easier.

Making communication between your support and your customers easier will only enable you to build that trust and authority with how you deal with their queries in a public place. Not only does this build trust with your current customers, ensuring that their issues are a priority for you but also shows potential customers that if they choose to buy a product or service from you, that process isn’t a one-time transaction. You’ll be showing them that you want to treat them right and retain their business.

New Traffic Sources

Social media also allows you to create new channels to drive engagement and traffic to your primary site. This activity has many benefits for your business including SEO that will help indirectly influence your Google rankings.

By having social media channels for your business, you’re opening up new pathways for people to find your website. The more variety of referring sources you have pointed to your website, the better in the eyes of Google. Which is why you should engage in activity across multiple social media platforms.

Once that traffic arrives at your website your marketing doesn’t stop there. Having a bunch of new traffic from social media sources is great, but what do you want these viewers to do once they’re on your site? To increase your conversion rate you’re going to want to make sure that not only is your website optimised, but the landing pages you’re sending these visitors to are built for conversion.

To ensure the best chance at conversion you’re going to want to focus on 3 things: your USP, your story and the action.

Your USP needs to be effectively communicated to your visitors on why they should buy from you and not a competitor. Having this clearly displayed will allow you to then move onto the storytelling part of the page. You’ll need to show the customer the story of the product or service that you’re selling and ensure that you highlight the benefit or issue that your product solves for the visitor. And finally, you’ll need to have a clear action of what you want the visitor to do. For instance, if you’re selling jewellery you’ll want a clear and large button indicating ‘add to cart’ or ‘buy now’.

From here you are going to want to continue optimising this page to reduce bounce rates, and increase conversions. EKM help businesses all over the UK do just this, setting up online sites and offering continuous evolution for websites, so they never become outdated.

If you would like to learn more about how social media could help you rank on Google, download EKM’s free guide here.