There’s no getting around it. Your business needs to have an online presence. But, not just that! You need a social media presence! That’s just a fact. Social media is an essential piece to any marketing strategy, whether you have a small business or a giant company.
Social media is essential because it allows the opportunity to connect with your customers, promote your brand, and increase your sales. We live in a social-media consumed world. Over half of the entire world uses it! That’s 3.8 billion people who are interacting on various platforms daily. Facebook is the most popular platform, with 2.7 billion active users. Instagram and YouTube trail close behind with millions and millions of users combined.
Social media has not only changed the way people communicate with their friends and neighbors, but it has changed the way that brands sell their products. It has become a place where brands and companies are able to share original content and grow their brand.
As easy as it may seem, social media can be difficult to utilize effectively. Most brands struggle with creating a formal strategy to push out information, while other brands struggle with building a loyal following. These things aren’t as difficult as they may seem! You can build a loyal following and create an effective strategy by trusting the process. Social media is incredibly important for these reasons.
1. Engage with Customers
Social Media is an effective way to interact and engage with customers that you wouldn’t otherwise have the opportunity to engage with. Communication with your audience helps your brand in so many ways. The most important part is that it creates a relationship between yourself and the customer. The relationship that you have with your customers is setting the stage for potential conversions. Not only that, but opening the line of communication to your customers allows you to receive public feedback on your products, gain trust and loyalty from your customers, and grab the attention of new faces.
It also gives the customers quick access to your inbox when they have questions or comments about your brand! Social media has given brands the ability to expand their business past their small hometown shop.
2. Increased Website Traffic
For a business or a brand, the purpose of social media is to expose their products or services to a larger audience and funnel those people back to their website. Social media was not meant to be used in place of your website. For businesses, it has been used to bring people to their actual product. Social Media is free to the public due to the ads displayed to users. Take advantage of that opportunity! Your online presence is meant to promote and advertise your brand further than you could advertise it traditionally. It is an effective way to show the world your products and then funnel them to your actual website to purchase the item. You can increase your chances of people visiting your website if you regularly promote your blog content, make your content sharable, and continuously engage with your audience.
3. Impacts SEO
To much surprise, your social media impacts your SEO. You may already be aware that your business listings are incredibly important. Your listings are the reason that anyone on the internet can call, locate your business, or view your business hours. It can be a pain to input your business information into several different locations, but you need to have them to optimize your website! Your business listings extend to your social media pages. Your social media is a great place to list all of your business information so that you can optimize your brand for SEO. This means that you should include in your online profile a keyword-rich description, an indication of your services, your hours, phone number and address that matches your google profile. When your social media listings align exactly with your google profile, your website will be trusted and you will be better optimized!
4. Brand Recognition
Having multiple profiles and accounts for your brand will help your visitors build brand recognition. This means that the more content you post on social media, the more your audience will recognize your brand’s colors, logo, design, and products. If your customers really like your products and services, they may even share it with their friends! ( meaning that your content is reaching more people). The more often your audience sees your brand on social media, the more willing they are to eventually make a purchase. For this reason, some brands hire representatives or influencers to promote their products with the intention of spreading awareness of their brand.
5. Cost-Effective
Another great thing about social media is that it is a very cost effective way to advertise your products and services. Creating an account is free for most all social networking platforms. For the most part, the only thing that you will have to dish out are funds for paid advertising. Even with paid advertising, you wouldn’t have to spend a lot. A social media account is one of the best ways that you can promote your brand on a budget. A cost-effective marketing plan is so important because it allows you to hold a bigger budget for other marketing possibilities. The goal is to make your brand known to the public. You can do this by investing in social media and saving that budget for other opportunities to grow your brand!
Social media is a crucial part of business marketing. For all of these reasons and more, social media will help you gain more website visitors, help you be recognized, and initiate more conversions. If you still have yet to create a social media profile for your brand, start now! It’s never too late! Take that first step, create a profile and start creating a relationship with your customers.