It’s no secret the world is evolving from traditional media towards the new age of social media. The times are changing and it’s essential for businesses to change with them, and cater to their customer base. Social media has become the best way to get a message across on a mass scale as cost-effectively as possible.
As many marketers know, a business is nothing without its brand. Social media offers so many opportunities to communicate your brand’s message on a daily basis. Social media lets brands be seen by a broader range of people quicker than traditional media, which will create better brand recognition. That recognition is everything in marketing since consumers are more likely to buy a brand they recognize first. It allows your company to share your brand’s mission, stories, and promotions to your followers as often as you choose. This allows your followers to see your brand and be reminded of it constantly, which seems simple but essential in the psychology behind their purchases.
Companies also often choose to share customer’s or employee’s stories on social media to create a sense of community among their followers and customers. Humanizing a brand is a great way to build customer loyalty. And of course, a loyal customer will choose your product/service over your competitors, and more likely to recommend you to their inner circle.
Posting frequently is essential to spreading your brand message and communicating with your customers. Commenting and direct messaging on social media platforms are also great ways to convert followers into paying customers. Direct messaging, especially, puts a voice behind the brand and humanizes the company, making the followers feel heard.
Social media also allows your business to provide amazing customer service at ease. Customers can use your social media accounts to ask questions, leave reviews, complement the products, and so much more. It’s important that this customer feedback, whether positive or negative is handled appropriately and quickly. Great customer service, especially on social media, is a great differentiator from your competitors and should not be overlooked.
From a cost analysis perspective, social media offers a great return on investment, since it’s free to sign up on almost any social media platform. Even running paid promotions on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook are relatively inexpensive, and offer a lot in return in terms of customer conversion, so long as they’re executed well.
Once you establish your brand’s target market, you can strategize a way to reach that market on any social media platform. As stated before, most social media promotions are relatively affordable and offer a lot in terms of return. These promotions are also great because it allows the marketer to cater to their specific target market by age, gender, location, preferences, and so much more. With such a large portion of the population on social media sites, this offers a lot of promise in growing your businesses to the market you’re targeting.
Social media in its simplicity, can just drive traffic to the company website or blog. By sharing specific blog posts on social media, you are more likely to get “clicks” on the link. It’s more likely that social media will drive traffic than a traditional search engine. But social media will also grow your SEO score. For example, a post with a lot of shares will be deemed strong content by search engines and will be more likely to rank you higher than your competition.
By keeping tabs on other competitors in your industry using social listening tools, you can learn how to differentiate yourself and strategize accordingly. You can also generate content that seems to perform well in the industry and increase virality. Being aware of the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats of competitors and your industry as a whole is essential. Social listening is a great way to constantly attain those performance indicators and steer directions accordingly.
Beyond the focus on customers, social media has a lot of value in employee recruitment, Linkedin does especially. Linkedin is currently the largest business networking platform and it’s crucial that companies utilize this platform for both brand awareness and as a recruitment tool. Candidates will look to social media sites to gain a feel for the company culture and the organization as a whole. A well-marketed company will stand out among the others, and will generate candidate interest. Of course, the larger the amount of interested candidates the better. This allows companies to be more selective in their hiring.
Social media offers so much range in its offerings to your business while simultaneously being cost-effective. Surely anything with such a great ROI would help market any business, so make sure you’ve got a good social media program in place.
