Time and time again, we are asked whether or not a business, especially SMEs, needs Social Media Marketing. There are countless ways in which this method of marketing has real value for 99% of businesses, but we have named our top 3 here.
1. Increased Brand Awareness
The first step of Marketing is attention.
Without people seeing your brand, how can they buy from you? As your target audience will most likely be spending more time on social media than they will on TV. Therefore Social Media is a great way to get your brand known without having to spend a ridiculous amount of money.
It is true that a little bit of investment to boost your posts on Facebook will grease the wheels somewhat but you can also utilise your existing relationships to boost your brand awareness. It is also good practice to use existing relationships to help you with your social media presence. Such as those working for you, your clients, suppliers, friends and family.
Once you have the foundations of an audience and you can encourage them to engage with your content and your audience should grow organically.
Your brand can easily be shared and therefore seen as trusted sources. Social Media is the Word of Mouth marketing on steroids.
2. Build Relationships
Social media, unlike any other, is a two-way Marketing channel that allows you to directly interact with your customer.
This allows you the opportunity to enrich your relationship with them, so why not take advantage of this? It also allows you to learn about your customer and get instant feedback. Thus, building a relationship that traditional advertising wouldn’t allow you to do.
Your customer will also be used to using Social Media platforms as a form of customer service. is also expected Many customers and prospects will also use social media to ask questions and it’s always best for you to be answering rather than competitors or strangers.
With constant interaction with your audience, this should increase customer loyalty and help you remain relevant. The first part of building a relationship is to stay in touch and with social media being the top choice for a customer care channel, why wouldn’t you utilise it?
3. Increased Website Traffic
You will be limiting your inbound website traffic if you do not use social media as a source of traffic.
As long as you create the right piece of content, Call To Action and target the right audience, you will be able to lead people through to your site, even if they weren’t proactively looking for it at the time.
With the vast majority of the population on one platform or another and Facebook having amazing insights, you must profile your ideal audience. You can do this by selecting using a variety of interests, demographics, and behaviours.
It’s true that each platform have slightly different users. For example, the most popular age group for TikTok is 18-24 (25%), whereas Pinterest have over 70% women aged between 35-45.
However, the vast majority of people are on Facebook (whether they like to admit it or not), even your Finance Directors. So don’t think you should keep your tax tips just for LinkedIn.
Being on social media can also benefit your SEO by promoting your website content and encouraging therefore inbound links.
It’s no longer good enough to use the various Online Marketing tools separately. The Website, SEO, Content, Social Media and Email Marketing should all be working in sync.
It is also beneficial to stay ahead of your competitors, so you need to know where they are in comparison to yourself. You can do this in various ways on social media but there are a few listed here.
To learn more about social media marketing why not request a free video recorded review.
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