The importance of an established social media presence has grown stronger in recent years, especially during and after the pandemic. With additional processes being digitalized and companies and consumers alike turning to the internet for personal and professional needs, it has become evident that the future of business marketing is heavily rooted in social media.
As a company owner, understanding the importance of social media and learning how to incorporate it into your marketing strategies could be what makes or breaks your business. Are you ready to learn more about what makes social media so powerful and how to use it to your advantage? Here are 20 reasons why you need social media as a part of your business marketing strategy.
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Social Media Could Boost Your Business Success
Social media plays a central role in today’s marketing, regardless of the type of business you run. This list contains 20 examples of why social media marketing and having an established presence on social media are crucial for any company aiming to succeed.
1) Speak Your Truth and Tell Your Story
With social media, communication between a business and its customers has become a lot more personal than it used to be. Here, you have the opportunity to become more than a brand and to share your journey. How did you get to where you are now, what were the struggles, and how did you overcome them? All this and more can aid in creating trust and for your customers to see the hard-working people behind the brand.
This approach can also be beneficial when establishing authority by presenting tips, suggestions, guidance, and more on social media. Show your clientele that you know what you’re talking about, and help people see why they should choose your company.
2) A Budget-Friendly Way to Grow Your Audience
While investing in marketing is likely unavoidable, social media presents an opportunity to build your audience organically and for free! Yes, there are plenty of paid marketing options on social media which can be great when used correctly, but you can come a long way by simply engaging with your audience, publishing interesting content, using hashtags on platforms like Instagram and TikTok, creating reels, and being active.
Consistent posting and relevant content boost your chances of social media success, and this could generate leads, sales, and traffic to your main website. Paid advertising on social media can also be adapted to your budget and tends to be one of the cheaper ways to advertise, but interestingly—many companies achieve digital growth through social media without any financial investments. Learning SEO basics is recommended to make the most of this opportunity. Otherwise, you can work with our team to help integrate search engine optimization into your business.
3) Create a Direct Connection with Your Customers
Before social media, a customer’s best chances of getting in touch with a company executive or other decision maker was by sending an email, filling out a contact form, or calling, but not anymore! Now, a connection can be made by posting a comment, sending a direct social media message, or responding to a story, and this has created a much more intimate link between a company and its consumers.
Use this to your advantage by actively responding to those reaching out, and help potential customers see that there is a human behind the screen who is there to acknowledge their thoughts, opinions, questions, and concerns.
4) Get Your Brand Name Out There
Success doesn’t happen in a day, but social media can give you a head start. Get people to talk about your brand, and get the brand name out there for customers to familiarize themselves with it. You can take a serious approach where you market your brand and your products in a more traditional way or consider creating funny or relatable reels for people to share. Once your content gets out there—so does your brand name.
At this stage, it is good to have an established brand identity to ensure your social media content remains consistent and true to your vision. However, some may decide to try social media marketing already at an earlier stage.
5) Show the Humans Behind the Brand
If you are comfortable with showing your face on social media, why not use photos and videos to talk about the brand, the products or services you offer, and how everything works? Putting a human face on a brand is a known marketing strategy—especially in the day and age of social media—and it helps consumers relate to what you are selling.
Show your audience who works at the company, some of your current customers, and how they have managed to make the most of your brand. Inspire new purchases by showing real people behind the brand name.
6) Establish Trust and Reliability
Trust and authenticity go hand in hand, and with the close customer connections formed through social media, your brand becomes more than just a name. Demonstrating who is behind the brand and how you work to stay true to your brand’s values is highly likely to increase marketing receptiveness—how well your customer base responds to your targeted marketing.
By demonstrating your brand values and professional expertise, your customers are likely to you and turn to you for needs that can be met by purchasing your services or products.
7) Keep Your Brand Relevant
The expression “you snooze, you lose” seems eerily fitting in the world of sales and business, and while you can be at the top one day, you might as well be gone the next. The key here is to remain relevant and ensure your clients and customers don’t forget about you. This, of course, does not mean you should constantly bombard everyone with sales pitches, newsletters, and marketing materials, but instead, it is all about being subtle.
Social media is the perfect outlet for subtle brand marketing. All you need to do is stay consistent with your publishing across different social media platforms and aim to engage your audience. Make it your goal to pop up on the newsfeeds of your target audience on a daily basis, and don’t forget the importance of relevant and interesting content. No one wants to be spammed by a brand, and it is recommended that you invest time in producing quality content.
8) Increase Brand Website Traffic
Does your brand have a website? Don’t forget to direct your social media traffic accordingly! When you use platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok properly, you can post content that will motivate your followers to head over to your website. Post blog post links, new products, and anything that will make someone want to click, and just like that—social media will help you increase your website traffic.
It also works the other way around. Your website should contain updated links to all your social media profiles (try to keep the usernames consistent across platforms for visibility) to give visitors a chance to find you.
9) Generate Leads and Boost Sales
Let’s face it, everyone wants to sell. This is and should remain your main objective when using social media and other media outlets, but it doesn’t mean you need to actively sell at all times. Generating leads and eventually boosting sales is something that should happen naturally as you up your social media game.
For customers, reaching out on social media can feel like less of a commitment, and they may be more likely to acquire about your products and services than they would otherwise, providing you with the necessary opening to complete a sale. Using social sales as part of your sales funnel will likely become increasingly important in the future.
10) Establish Connections with Influencers
It is common knowledge that recommendations go a long way. People are often more likely to purchase a product after a recommendation from a friend, family member, or trusted individual. This is where influencers come in. An influencer is a social media user with a large following who has already built trust with their audience. By partnering with an influencer and getting this person to recommend your products, you get that same effect multiplied by hundreds or even thousands.
The reach a real influencer has should never be underestimated, but you must ensure you choose to work with those whose audience matches your target audience.
11) Promote Products and Services
You can, of course, also use social media for some good, old-fashioned marketing, where you promote and highlight specific products and services. It is a smart way to advertise without spending money, and you have the option to upload tutorials, customer testimonials, and anything else you deem relevant to demonstrate what you and your products can do.
Aim for quality when uploading product photos and similar. Don’t think social media makes it okay to post low-quality images and content that wouldn’t meet your standards if you were producing paid marketing campaigns. Every post you make should serve a purpose.
12) Manage Brand Reputation
Sentiment analysis is another thing you, as a business owner, can gain from social media. Yes, it is crucial to be talked about and to get your name out there, but you also want to know what people are saying about you and whether it is good or bad. Instead of obtaining only the raw data, you can dig deeper to see the overall response to your publications and how customers appear to view your brand.
While online reviews have been around for many years, it gives a somewhat limited view of how someone feels about your products and brand. Social media has opened a new door to free and often constructive feedback.
13) Engage Customers and Your Target Audience
Come up with clever ways to keep your customer base engaged, as this helps you stay relevant! Use Instagram posts and stories with polls, calls to action, or engaging questions, and discover the benefits of motivating your clientele to comment and opinionate.
You can also take engagement a step further by organizing giveaways where you ask participants to share your posts, tag friends, and follow your social media account, as this promotes people to essentially market your business for you—for free! Make sure you follow through with any promises made to ensure customer engagement and satisfaction.
14) Direct Customer Support
You create trust by providing the customer with a simple way to get in touch with you and the company. You can always refer those who reach out to other, more appropriate channels if you already have solid customer support set up, but by simply acknowledging a customer’s question or concern through social media—you make sure the customer feels heard.
Caring for your customer base is fundamental, and social media is a tool that should not be underestimated. The most frustrating aspect of being a consumer is when you struggle to get in touch with a company or brand, and it is a good investment to keep in touch with customers through direct messages and comments.
15) Get to Know Your Customers
A unique aspect of social media is that you, the brand, can click on your audience member’s profiles and familiarize yourself with their likes and preferences. It is significantly easier to obtain data that could help you identify your reach and compare it to the intended target audience. Before, online purchases were often close to anonymous, but today, the information needed to boost your business is always within reach.
Keep in mind that this asset should be used with complete respect for your customer base, as you would never want people to feel like you are invading their private sphere with your services and products. User-generated content (UGC) and employee-generated content (EGC) are approaches that could bring you closer to your next sale.
16) Monitor Your Brand’s Competition
What is your competition up to these days? What are they doing that’s working, and what could they improve? Social media is a gateway to discovering other brands with similar products and services, and you get to keep a close eye on these companies without wasting much energy.
You can use hashtags, keywords, or search functions to find similar brands.
17) Monitor Investment Returns and Analytics
Marketing can be tricky unless you find a way to target the right people, and you wouldn’t want to spend a fortune only to realize a completely different group of people—people who are unlikely ever to make a purchase, saw your ad.
The demographic information provided by social media platforms allows you to access data concerning who has seen your advertisement for you to make the necessary adjustments.
18) Target Your Advertising
If you plan to use the marketing features on Facebook, Instagram, and other platforms, you can conveniently target your audience by choosing an age range, demographic, and any other perimeter relevant to the people group you are hoping to target. This means that relevant information (your ads) will show up directly in the feeds of your target group, making it less of a hit-and-miss type of marketing.
19) Gain a Deeper Understanding of the Industry
The best way to succeed is to ensure you know the industry like the back of your hand. Do research, explore what customers look for and what they appear to respond well to, see what part of the market is already saturated and where you could have something unique to offer—understand your industry. A world of information is at our fingertips now with social media, and a few minutes of scrolling daily can lead to unexpected discoveries.
Even better is that social media can be conveniently used on mobile devices, which means you can research at any chance, and you don’t necessarily need to sit in front of a computer.
20) Dealing with a Sudden Crisis
As much as we want the company to run smoothly at all times—things happen, and you could face an unexpected crisis at some point. It could be the recall of a product, a failed marketing attempt, or something that rubs your customer base the wrong way, and when and if that happens—social media could save the day.
Through social media, you have the opportunity to manage the situation and apply necessary damage control measures that will reach your customers directly.
Smart Social Media Usage Paves the Way for Business Success
No one can purchase your products or sign up for your services unless they know you exist. Social media isn’t just a fun way to chat with friends and family; it has become a powerful marketing tool and a must for companies that wish to succeed in today’s society. Your presence on top social media platforms could be what gets you noticed, and it is crucial to create social media marketing strategies and plan your content and publications.
Is your brand represented across all relevant social media platforms? Is the content posted true to your company values and brand identity? Unless the answer is yes, or if you’re not seeing results, you are likely misusing social media.
Don’t underestimate what proper social media use can do for you and your business.
For more information and to discuss your specific social media objectives, contact us.
