20 reasons why social media marketing is important for any business
It doesn’t matter if you run a small local shop or a big international company, social media is more than just a trend. It is an essential piece of your business marketing strategy.
Social platforms can help you connect with your customers, increase awareness about your brand, and boost your leads and sales.
The following are the 20 reasons why social media marketing is important for any business.
1. Get attention and build awareness
Statistics say that 90% of consumers trust brands more when they see them active on social media. Whether you’re a new business or someone who’s been around for some time, social media can help you improve brand awareness and get the right attention from your audience.
With over half of the world’s population using social media, platforms like Facebook, Instagram or Twitter are natural places to reach new and highly targeted potential customers. 83 percent of Instagram users say they discover new products on the platform.
Moreover, it’s free to create a business profile on all the major social networks, so you have nothing to lose.
2. Establish yourself as a thought leader
People are looking to brands for insights and information and what better place is there to share that than social media?
Regardless of what industry your business is in, social media offers the opportunity to establish your brand as a thought leader—the go-to source for information on topics related to your niche.
Creating attractive profiles that you update frequently with relevant content will build your brand’s authority and make sure you make a positive first impression through social media, assuring that your business is trustworthy, knowledgeable, and approachable.
Social media provides you with ways to demonstrate your expertise as a thought leader in your industry—like writing information related to your expertise or expanding on your company’s mission. By educating your audience about what your business offers and values, you will establish confidence in potential customers.
3. Show authenticity
The ability to create real human connections is one of the key benefits of social media for business. Just let your followers know the real people who make up your company and showcase how existing customers are using and benefiting from your products.
Authenticity builds trust. Trust, in turn, builds marketing receptiveness and drives new business. And social is the best place to get real.
Customers hate to see dry; corporate-style social media posts. Instead, let your brand’s personality shine through in everything you share on social media. It is more important to find a voice and take a stand.
Social media allows you to make your customers understand how you’re protecting your brand values and how your products work in real life.
4. Engage with your customers
Social media opens the conversation for instant interaction, relationship building, and customer loyalty. Social networks allow you to interact directly with customers and fans, and likewise give them the chance to interact directly with your brand.
While traditional media allows only one-way communication, social media allows two-way communication. By responding to comments and questions from your followers on your social media you can win their hearts.
Keep a finger on the pulse of your customers and listen to what they say about your brand and respond appropriately to those who mention you.
5. Boost your sales
Your social accounts form an integral part of your sales funnel through which a new prospect becomes a customer. The number of people using social media is on a steady rise, and as social sales tools evolve, the importance of social networks for product search and e-commerce will be inevitable. It is high time that you align your social marketing efforts with sales goals.
6. Generate leads
A lead is the life force of a business. Many social networks have built-in features to capture leads using special advertising formats. Thus social media offers an easy way for potential customers to connect with your business.
7. Cost-effective
Social media marketing is cost-effective. It’s also one of the most versatile strategies that small businesses can use to reach their targeted audience as well as boost sales over a particular period. That’s why 97% of marketers are using social media to reach their audiences.
From creating your account to publishing your first post, it’s all free for all the top social media platforms in the world until you decide to run paid advertisements to promote your business or product.
8. Provide customer service and customer support
Social platforms have narrowed down the gap between companies and their customers. Now, instead of calling a customer service line, people turn to Facebook or Twitter to solve problems or find information. About half of social media users expect a response from brands on social media within three hours. Develop your reputation as a responsive, caring brand by offering support through social channels. Following are some tips:
- Develop a system for spotting customer comments, questions, and complaints on social media.
- Respond as quickly as possible to questions and complaints.
- Be helpful by reaching out to your customers out of your way.
- Make customers feel important by listening to their criticisms.
9. Grow affordably and steadily
Social media is not a place for aggressive sales activities, but it doesn’t mean that you should not make use of the opportunity to make sales, should the opportunity shows up.
Marketing costs are high and not every business can afford big campaigns. But you can get significant value for your dollar with social media advertising. Social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram have the great potential to grow your audience and help you reach your objectives through ads.
Social media advertising is difficult to track. In general, buyers go through many touch points in their purchase journey before a purchase. The major part of this journey happens on social media sites and review sites but the customers may not cite the social media sites when they finally arrive at the business to make a purchase.
By defining your target audience precisely and being clear about the goals you want to reach while building an ad campaign you can prevent wasting money on creating poor campaigns. In your ads, use content that educates or entertains.
10. Understand your customers
Social media accumulates a vast amount of data about your customers in real time which you can use to make smarter business decisions. All of the major social networks come with analytics that provides demographic information about the people interacting with your account. This can help you devise laser-targeted social media campaigns to speak to your potential customers.
11. Keep an eye on the competition
While you spend a significant amount of time promoting yourself, it is also important to be aware of what your competitors are doing and what people talk about your competitors. For example, tracking the mentions of your competitors might reveal some pain points about the products their customers are facing.
You can then address those issues to win new customers. Monitoring the competition on social media also helps you keep track of your competitor’s new product launches, their promotions, and the release of reports and data.
12. Stay on the top of the mind
According to a study by Pew Research Centre, seventy percent of social media users log into their accounts at least once per day and 49 percent of people admit to checking social multiple times per day.
Every time they log in, it is an opportunity for you to connect with your followers. Therefore, keep your posts engaging and informative enough so that when they see your posts in their feeds, they will feel happy, keeping you on top of their mind. When the buying moment comes, you will be their first stop.
13. Increase traffic to your website
You can bring organic traffic to your website through social media posts and paid ads. Creating great content on your blog and sharing them on social media channels is a surefire way to keep your followers engaged and also to get new followers. Participating and adding value in social conversations is another great way to get attention from new people, showcase your credentials and drive traffic to your website.
14. You can partner with influencers
Recommendations from friends and family affect consumer decisions to a great extent, as do reviews. One key way to drive social word of mouth is to partner with influencers. Influencers are those who have a large following on social media and can pull their attention toward your brand.
15. Promote content
Social media platforms allow you to share your high-quality content on them, with your existing followers and new people, prove your expertise and grow your audience.
16. Go viral
Social media can help your content go viral. As your followers share your content with their networks, and their networks repeat the same, the content spreads across the internet, potentially getting thousands or even millions of shares.
The web has far more content than any one person could ever consume, and hence social sharing is far more important because it gets you a step closer to the right content.
Thus, going viral, which is not an easy task, is made easy with the help of social media.
17. Reputation management
Your audience is talking about both the good and the bad experiences they had with your business. You can spot the posts that talk positively about your business and highlight them, at the same time pick up the posts that are negative about your business and address the issues properly before it becomes worse.
Is someone loving your service and expressing it? Make sure you thank them and bring the attention of others to that post. In contrast, is someone talking about a bad experience with your business? Make sure to pinpoint your side of the story politely and professionally.
18. Targeted advertising
Social ads are cost-effective ways to promote your business and your content. They also offer various targeting options to reach the right audience.
According to statistics, by 2022 advertisers are expected to spend over $56 billion for promoting products over social.
Providing ad targeting options such as demographic information, geography, language, and even online behaviours you can create tailor-made messages to cater to different kinds of potential customers.
19. Retargeting
As per statistics, nearly 70 percent of online shopping carts are abandoned. Those who abandoned your shopping carts have already decided what they wanted to buy, done the research, visited your website, and gone up to almost purchasing. These people, who have travelled so far in their buyer journey and expressed an interest in your company and products are not to be ignored.
Social media platforms, like Facebook, offer special tools like Facebook pixel, to retarget your ads to those who have already visited your website or abandoned your shopping cart. With Facebook pixels, you can show ads again for products they have previously visited or added to the shopping cart and abandoned without buying.
20. Reporting and analytics
Proving return on investment is always challenging. But with social media tracking and analytics tools, you can get an in-depth insight into the effects of your social media activities, from follows to engagements right through to purchases.
Facebook Analytics is a comprehensive tool that allows you to visualise your entire sales funnel, understand the lifetime value of users, and see how your organic and paid strategies intersect.
Tools like Google Analytics and Facebook Pixels track website traffic generated from social media, conversions, email sign-ups, and ROI for both organic and paid social media campaigns.
Setting UTM parameters is another great way to track which social networks are providing the most benefits for your business.
Conclusion
Faye Digital is a Melbourne-based digital marketing agency that specialises in social media marketing and various digital marketing services.
We are an innovative team of digital and IT experts, each one excelling at their respective domain and eager to succeed. Customer satisfaction is in our every breath.
Just call us at 03 70 464688, or contact us to promote your business on social media and enjoy huge success.