Objection: “We shouldn’t be wasting time on social media.”
Fact: Nearly 3 out of 4 buyers actively use social media at some point in the purchasing process.
Both your marketing team and your sales team should be paying attention to social media. With social media sites serving billions of users worldwide, this outlet allows your business to not only expand beyond your brick and mortar, but beyond county, state and even national lines. Social media can move the needle on brand visibility.
Learn more in our free guide: Why You Should Use Social Media to Grow Your Business
Check out these 2016 stats: 1.6 billion people are on Facebook. 430 million are on Instagram. 429 million are on LinkedIn, and 325 million are on Twitter. And the list goes on. (Source: Digital Media Sapiens)
How can you put social media and its extensive reach to work for your business?
Engage Your Buyers
Social media was built on the premise of sharing and commenting on information, which provides you with limitless opportunities to interact with current and potential customers. You have the ability to engage customers in real-time conversations about your products, services, promotions, and boundless other topics to learn about their preferences.
Pull In Leads
Your inbound marketing efforts benefit greatly from using social media. Posting content on your social media sites with links back to your website increases website visitors and allows you to organically generate leads. Many social media sites including Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn offer targeted paid advertising platforms to generate leads as well.
Target Your Audience
Traditional media encompasses a broad strategy with broad reach. Your social media content is accessed and shared by those who like and are interested in what you have to offer. You can write focused content targeted for this audience resulting in a gain of more lead-qualified customers per marketing dollar.
Monitor the Competition
Everything that happens on social media is real-time and in a public forum. You’ll have access to the thoughts of your competition and their customers. You can see exactly what is working for your competitors and what is not. Learning about your competition can help you identify your own strengths and weaknesses and develop or fine-tune your positioning strategy.
Measure Your Tactics
With social media, everything is measurable. You can see which activities are creating the desired outcomes and which are not, and adjust your strategy and tactics accordingly.
Cut Costs
Participating in social media to achieve brand visibility is relatively inexpensive when compared to the cost of a traditional media campaign to build brand awareness. Think of the production costs to create a television, radio or billboard advertisement. Now add in the media costs to actually run the ad, and you’ll quickly realize that social media outshines these communication strategies in the cost-effectiveness department.
Strengthen Relationships
Social media allows you to personalize your business. Instead of an impersonal company, your customers see you as a person who listens and responds with helpful feedback. The quality and frequency of your posts will determine your ability to build relationships. Posting product or promotion information only will make customers feel like it’s a sales pitch, whereas posting information to help solve their problems and responding to their concerns builds relationships.
Boost Your Search Ranking
If your company has active social media accounts on several platforms, it can increase your search engine rankings. Search engines now take into account and prioritize content that is connected to the searcher in some way -- through a Facebook friend or Twitter follower, for example.
Increase Website Traffic
The benefits of awareness and exposure, stronger customer relationships, lead generation and search engine optimization will result in more website traffic. If your website works as an inbound marketing machine, you will be able to capture these leads and turn them into revenue.
Are you fully using social media in your online marketing efforts? Contact Marketing Essentials to schedule a free inbound marketing consultation. 419-629-0080.
