It’s 2019, and most of us already have a pretty great understanding of how social media works, right? But what if we were to tell you that about 96% of all the people who discuss brands don’t even follow the brand’s profiles? Or even that people that are aged somewhere between 55 and 64 are more than twice as likely to be seen engaging with branded content as opposed to those that are 28 or younger?
Social media platforms are extremely powerful tools that are right at our finger tips that allow us to share content anywhere around the world in a matter of seconds. This means that social media marketing has the power to increase your brand awareness. There are many small businesses out there that struggle with the implementation of effective social media strategies which have the ability to drive sales.
Why Is Social Media Marketing Important?
Researchers have found that as many as 97% of all the small businesses out there use social media to gain new prospects. 85% of these businesses, however, aren’t quite sure about which social media tools need to be used to achieve their distinct goals and objectives.
What’s even more unsettling is that 63% of all the people who search for businesses online tend to be more likely to convert to the brand that has a great social media presence. This, on its own, demonstrates just how much social media marketing can increase sales. Even though this is the case, a lack of understanding of how to attain these results is common.
Consumers today are itching to become your brand’s ambassadors, but the question is – where is your business?
The manner in which social media can help validate your brand nowadays has made it less of an option for companies. It has now managed to become an essential method for companies to engage their customers – especially when it is done correctly.
The longer you wait on adopting a social media strategy, the more you lose. This is because social media marketing leads to attracting new customers via more traffic and more levels of engagement. This means that having a less effective presence on social media can prove to be as catastrophic as not having a business plan at all.
The Benefits of Effective Social Media Marketing
Branding
One of the best ways of connecting with your target audience is to display your business personality on the social media platforms. All the social media channels out there present great opportunities to expand your organization’s interactions, content, and voice.
New customers may stumble onto your Instagram feed if they are avid users. They may even become repeat customers if your business’s online presence is more recognizable and consistent.
Customer Loyalty
Brands have now begun placing a larger emphasis on the experience of customers due to the fact that it can have a great impact on their reputation. In a similar manner, brands that are active on social media channels tend to receive higher levels of customer loyalty. It has been found that as many as 50% of all American that follow social media pages of brands are loyal customers.
Conversion
Every email, blog post, ad, and post is an opportunity for businesses to convert their visitors to customers. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a B2B or B2C company – social will be persistent in playing an effective role for your brand to gain leads and moving people smoothly through your sales funnel.
Humanization
Organizations used to be faceless in the past. Nowadays, however, consumers aren’t only picky about what they buy, but also look into who they are buying from. Social media, therefore, has a larger lead to close rate as opposed to outbound marketing. Your business can leverage this and form effective connections with customers instead of putting them through the traditional automatic recordings on telephones.
Customer Insights
Have you practiced what is known as social listening? This is another advantage of social media as it allows you to gain very valuable insights about the behaviors and interests of your consumers. Social listening can be as simple as checking out customer’s comments or reviews in order to see what they think about your business.
You can also go ahead and look at engagement rates on all your social media posts in order to measure which types of content seem to be generating the highest levels of interest. Conversions can also be tracked through lead or purchase ads in order to determine which part of the audience seem to be benefiting most from your services or products.
Customer Service
Did you know that the absolute best place to implement customer care is on social media? Even before brands were involved, social media was created for simple communications and, to this date, this remains its core function.
Interactions with customers allow businesses to record, read and react to customer complaints. Furthermore, social media is also a place where businesses can enhance their relationship with customers. This can be done by recommending additional products, following them back or simply creating any open lines of communication.
Inbound Traffic
Lastly, increased inbound traffic is another reason why you need to have an effective social media strategy. Increased inbound traffic, quite simply, means an increased ROI. Without a social media strategy in place, your leads will be limited to those people who are already familiar with your brand or found you via organic searches due to ranked keywords.
On the flipside, if you increase the frequency of your social media content, you will be increasing your presence on different social media channels. By doing so, you will have increased pathways that lead potential customers back to your site. As a result, you will have achieved higher rates of traffic on your website – which will also lead to more and more conversions!
Do you think you have been pinning, tweeting, or posting without any rhyme or reason? Well, you should find out more about the purpose of social media and effective strategies to get you out of the social media chaos.
