TeejayTrueWhat if I told you that you could increase your brand recognition, traffic, and sales by spending a few hours a week on social network platforms? Imagine that! Let me give you a couple of reliable statistics to highlight the massive reach of social networks and why your business needs a social media strategy.
A 2019 report written by We Are Social reveals that the United
States has 230 million active social network users, and globally, social media users are 3.5 billion strong. It is pretty evident that having your business present on a social network is no longer optional.
A 2019 Social Media Examiners report further reveals that while 97% of Small and Medium Businesses (SMB) use social networks to get new leads and sales, 85% of business owners are not sure about what social media tools to use. Most importantly, the Social Media Examiners report indicates that 63% of customers who seek out brands online, will more likely conduct business with the brands that have an established social network presence.
Therefore, it is vital for a business to comprehend the benefits of implementing an effective social media strategy.
1. Get Inbound Traffic
The fastest way to achieve an increase in inbound web traffic is through social media. Without social media, your digital and traditional marketing efforts will pretty much be limited to savvy individuals who know how to search ranked keywords and those familiar with your brand.
In the absence of a social media marketing strategy, attracting new people to, say, your startup will be an uphill climb. The different social media platforms and profiles that you utilize in your marketing approach will act as a gateway to your site. Every account platform and content type should appeal to a different demographic.
For instance, research carried out by Pew Research Center in 2019 shows that United States adults prefer interacting with content found on YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram.
By having a social media presence and by posting relevant content frequently on the various platforms, you add a new path of customer traffic to your website. In the long run, your efforts will lead to higher traffic and more conversions.
2. Increase Conversion Rates
Social media is a useful tool for obtaining new leads and moving potential clients through your sales funnel. Whether your establishment is business to business (B2B) or business to consumer (B2C), the increased visibility provided by social networks will give you more opportunities for conversion. Without exception, all activity on a social network, be it an advert, a news feed post, a comment, a shared blog post, an image, video, or even a new follower, will send viewers to your company website. Social media marketing allows you to convert people into customers.
Most people want to do business with a friendly company intent on building a relationship with them, versus a company that simply wants to sell their items. The more convincing you are, in this regard, the more customers you will gain and retain. The constant human communication between your social media manager and customers will present your business in a positive light. Brands become warm and personable when they interact with the people.
Due to the emotional connection that is formed through social media, potential clients will have your company in mind when they need your products or services. Because people stay connected on social networks, they’ll also recommend your brand and products to their friends, families, and communities.
Social Media Examiner reported that 66% of marketers experienced lead generation benefits from using social networks at least 6 hours per week. As such, compared to outbound marketing, social networks have a 100 percent higher lead-to-close rate. Positive social media interaction, where people are talking, sharing, and liking in a safe environment, will improve your existing web traffics conversion rates.
3. Enhance Brand Awareness
Being present on the most popular social media platforms, that is, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest, will give your brand the ability to connect to various demographics. Social media marketing is one of the most affordable digital marketing methods that serves to increase your business’ visibility. Due to social media’s ability to attract people from all walks of life, the implementation of a social media strategy will serve to boost brand recognition. Social media allows you to display your business’ personality, making it one of the best ways to connect with your clientele. Social channels also allow you to create content that gives your brand a unique voice, only associated with your brand.
With a business social media account on, e.g., Instagram or Facebook, you can encourage your customers, sponsors, employees, and business partners to “share” and “like” your posts. Each liked and shared post will be encountered by potential customers. Therefore, building new networks of individuals on social media could eventually lead your company to fame and fortune, at record-breaking speeds!
In today’s super-competitive market environment, it is advisable to spend at least an hour a day on your business’ social media account to post about your products/services, respond to queries, offer coupons, give compliments, etc., as it will benefit your brand in numerous ways. A visible, recognizable, and consistent social media presence will ultimately lead to repeat customers.
4. Improve Search Engine Rankings
Social media is vital for search engine optimization (SEO) because it makes your daily SEO efforts powerful and worthwhile. Search engine optimization is critical to obtaining higher page rankings and gaining traffic to your website. A vast majority of internet users search for information on Googles search engine, and most will not navigate beyond the first page. More often than not, the sought-out information will be present on Google’s first page of results. With that said, if your website is not ranked on the first page, as part of the top five sites, you may need to invest in an affordable SEO strategy.
Now to be clear, social networks do not directly improve your search engine ranking. The simple reason being that Google does not view social signals as ranking signals. While Google does index social media pages and profiles, it does not take the number of shares and followers into consideration when ranking. Due to the numerous updates, added followers, and constant shares that take place on platforms 24/7, search engines cannot keep track of social media content. That, in turn, affects a search engine’s ability to rank them. The advent of bots (digital robots) also made it easy to cheat the ranking system. These combined factors have led to search engines not directly ranking social media web property.
So, how does social media affect your SEO? Social media activity has a positive effect on page ranking, albeit indirectly, due to the interaction between a site’s Search Engine Results Pages (SERP) and its social signals count. The result is – higher indexing of the website by search engines. A quick investigation of popular and top-ranking sites reveals that just about all of them have strong social signals. Social Media Examiner, in its 2019 report, states that over 58% of social media marketers who have used social media platforms for over one year have observed improved search engine rankings.
The simplest way to increase your website’s search engine ranking is by implementing a social media marketing strategy. By creating and posting high-quality content such as infographics, blogs, case studies, business information, and compelling stories about your products, employees, and community projects, your business will achieve credibility and endear itself to the masses.
An active community of followers will also allow you to proposition industry influencers, who will endorse your business to their followers and share your social networks and website links. The influx of their curious followers to your website will give you customers and improve your search engine rankings. Please note, nano influencers have upwards of 1,000 active followers, while certain major influencers have active followers running into the millions!
In 2019, Dan Zarella of Hubspot researched 25,000 URLs that had been shared on at least one major social network, within a time frame of one month and with one incoming website link. Dan discovered that there is a measurable and positive correlation between a (website) content’s social media shares count and the number of backlinks provided.
For example, the URL’s that received more Facebook love also received more link love.
5. Better Customer Satisfaction
A study conducted by Social Sprout in 2017 shows that the majority of consumers want to purchase items from a brand that they perceive to be helpful (78%), friendly (83%), and honest (86%) and which also provides excellent social customer care. A business that is interactive on a social network will build trust and credibility. Being present on social media gives your company a humanizing voice, and customers appreciate receiving personalized responses from human beings instead of automatic messages from bots.
Pay attention to your customer’s comments on your social networks and always go above and beyond the call of duty to resolve their issues promptly. This type of concern will go a long way to providing excellent customer care experience. One-on-one interaction with individual customers on social media gives you the chance to demonstrate thoughtful behavior, even compassion, for your clients. A conscientious brand should take the time to address a question or a complaint with a personal message that will be viewed by all in a positive light.
6. Marketplace Insight
If you are a numbers person, who favors market analysis, one of the benefits of social media is the marketplace insight that
most social network platforms provide. How can you best know and serve your customers if not by talking to them directly? Social media allows you to conduct affordable market research on your platforms and gauge your customer’s response to, e.g., a new product that you are about to launch. Monitoring the activity on your profiles, will allow you to hear your customers’ opinions, and find out their interests, information that you might not have had access to if your business did not have a presence on social networks. Social listening is key to improving your social media strategy.
Social media can be used as a complementary research tool that can assist you in gaining information that will enable you to understand your industry better. Facebook Ads metrics maybe even more crucial to your business than A/B testing!
With a sizeable following, you should obtain additional tools to compile and analyze your clients’ demographics. Another aspect of social media marketing is its ability to categorize and section your content syndication lists based on a topic.
Having your lists in segments will allow you to identify which content types generate the most response and impressions. There are digital tools that give you the ability to calculate conversions based on various social media posts, across several platforms, to establish the perfect revenue-generating combination.
7. Increase Brand Loyalty
Gaining clients is one thing: keeping them is a whole different story. Brand loyalty and customer satisfaction are intertwined – they have separate definitions, but work in tandem. A company that masters the art of customer satisfaction on social media will obtain a solid and loyal following. Therefore, it is necessary for a business to engage with its customers regularly, and purpose to develop emotional bonds with them.
On social media, a brand must go beyond the minimum marketing requirement of introducing products and conducting promotional campaigns. Today’s customer views these platforms as an intimate service channel where they can communicate directly with a company and receive personalized care. Failure to meet this reasonable expectation will lead to a disappointed customer base who will quickly replace you with a brand that meets their needs!
Brands that engage with their customers on social media channels receive more loyalty from 50% of American consumers than those that do not. Millennials are a particularly sensitive group of customers because they are the most brand-loyal consumers of them all. The millennial generation, comprising of people born between 1981 and 1996, is the largest in the United States labor force.
Numerous studies show that millennials are most responsive to brands that engage with them on social networks. In other words, if your product is geared towards millennials, you had better be present on all the major social networks and have an alluring and captivating social media strategy to obtain and retain their business. Millennials are also a highly opinionated and passionate group on social platforms, so it would serve your brand well to be able to respond to negative feedback professionally. Any missteps with millennials will spread like wildfire and send your brand’s reputation crashing.
On the flip side, a good social media strategy will cause them to support your business in droves – millennial brand loyalty is a leading cause of the desired “sold-out” moniker. A brand must utilize innovative methods and a variety of digital tools to build strong emotional connections with millennials. They are technology experts who are not easy to convince, but when you do, you will have an incredibly loyal customer.
Regardless of whether your customer base is predominantly drawn from either the millennial generation, Gen X, Gen Z, or Baby Boomers, having a comprehensive social media strategy will prove to be a goldmine to your business.
8. Improve Brand Authority
A company becomes an authoritative figure in its niche industry when it regularly interacts with its customers on social networks. Brand loyalty and customer satisfaction play a role in making your business an authority. Brand authority on social networks and in general can be attributed to having an excellent product/service, posting original and creative content, and regularly engaging with your customers, among other things.
Credibility is built on social platforms when your business demonstrates that it cares for its clientele. In turn, clients will become confident in recommending your company simply because of the wonderful response that they received from your social media team! Satisfied and vocal customers will voluntarily advertise your business, leading to your recognition as an authority in your field.
9. Maximize Savings
Marketing and advertising are mostly about budgets. A more substantial marketing budget allows you to hire high budget marketing and advertising agencies, which leads to better results. Now, not every business can have a multi-million-dollar marketing strategy. However, thanks to the reach of social networks, small, medium, and large company’s have been able to market themselves and acquire customers with very affordable social media marketing services. The cost-effective nature of social platforms will make it worth your while.
Signing up is free for most social networking platforms. Compared to advertising costs on traditional platforms, i.e., billboards, radios, TV networks, and print media, advertisement costs on social networks are relatively low. Social media marketing provides your business with quantifiable benefits because it allows you to reallocate your overall budget. This enables your company to focus on other business expenses while allowing you to see a higher return on investment. For instance, a company that manufactures its own products might want to focus more on research and design versus marketing and advertising.
If you use social media for advertising, make sure that you research on how to reach your client base via the specific platform. Instagram has a different advertising format from Facebook, so it is highly advisable to study individual advertising formats. Start with one platform, for instance, Facebook Ads, and with minimal amounts of money. Errors in inputting information in the demographic, location, and payment sections can have you losing hundreds of dollars, even thousands of dollars in a useless advertising campaign. You may want to consider hiring a person well versed in the different facets of Facebook Ads, Google AdWords and social media advertising across several platforms.
There is one primary defining metric that makes social media advertising the more affordable option – cost per thousand impressions (CPM). CPM is an algorithm, an advertising metric, which measures how many advertising dollars your business must spend, to reach 1,000 people. The goal of any advertising campaign should be to reach out to as many potential customers possible, at the most cost-effective rate.
Social media advertising is currently the most affordable form of advertising per 1000 viewers. In other words, it is one of the few types of media that can expose you to more than 1,000 people for less than $3. Interestingly enough, on social platforms such as YouTube, you can monetize your business content and receive advertisement revenues from the volumes of traffic to your channel! But that’s another topic altogether.
10. Increase Leadership Profile
It is crucial that your business posts respectable, well-written, and insightful content to its page. Social media is a fantastic way to become a leader and expert in your field. A variety of methods can be utilized to ensure that your business takes its place as a leader in the marketplace. One way to achieve this is by fully taking advantage of social media platforms.
Build your presence by connecting with your audience. Share content, be communicative, and promote your expertise and leadership. Create value-added relationships with your customers that will allow you to become a recognized and notable influencer and leader in your niche.
Start Your Journey!
If your establishment is not already on social media, begin your journey by creating profiles on the major social networks. Major platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn are highly recommended. Make sure that you provide pertinent information about your company and post engaging content daily to begin gaining followers. Encourage people to “share” and “like” your business page to build your profile and to also grow your social media following. It takes a while to achieve positive results, so don’t get discouraged.
It would be well to point out that having your company present on a social platform without a competent social media manager can be catastrophic for your business. Consider hiring a digital marketing agency to ensure that you maximize the potential of social networks while applying the least amount of effort. With consistent updates and friendly interaction with followers, a properly implemented social media strategy will lead to brand prominence, increased web traffic, better SEO, higher conversion rates, and so much more.