Reels, challenges, DMs, stories, shares – you don’t have to be a Gen Z influencer to care about social media. The most successful organisations know that a social media presence is all but required these days.
A strong social media marketing strategy builds connections with consumers and helps set you apart from the competition. With millions of users worldwide, social media has become more than just a place to share funny videos and find old friends from school. It’s become a place for business.
If you’re not convinced, here’s why social media marketing is important for your business.
Connect with your customers
Facebook and the like may have started as a way for people to connect with each other, but now, many businesses are using it as a way to connect with customers.
Unlike 30 years ago, business and marketing is not a one-way street. Consumers don’t want to be talked at. They want to engage and build connections and there’s no better place to do that than social media.
Platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Tiktok give you the opportunity to not just promote products, but to show your brand personality and add additional value. Join in on some of those viral challenges, respond to comments on your posts, share your story and values.
Social media gives you the opportunity to have some fun, be creative, and be more accessible as an organisation. It personifies your brand into something that consumers enjoy, trust, and are loyal to.
Once you build those connections, they translate into traffic and sales. 57% of consumers will follow a brand on social media to learn about new products and services. After they follow, 91% of people go on to visit the brand website, 89% buy from the brand, and 85% recommend it to others.
Grow your audience
One of the best things about social media is how it connects the world. With the right strategy, your products and services can be found by hundreds of thousands of people who you otherwise couldn’t have reached.
The number of social media users is expected to grow to over 4 billion by 2025. It makes sense that if you want to be found, that’s where you need to be.
While businesses in the past were often limited to their geographic area, organisations now can connect with people all over the world and grow their audience exponentially. Ads, especially, make it relatively easy to do so.
With ad targeting, social platforms show your products and services to those interested in related topics. Even if they’ve never heard of your business, they can discover your products and become customers from anywhere.
You don’t have to rely on ads, though. Organic posts can also grow your audience. The more your followers interact with and share your content, the more it can be seen by others who may not follow you. Social media platforms simplify and digitise word of mouth marketing, making it easier for your business to grow.
Listen to consumers
You know how they say the best communicators know how to listen? The same goes for businesses.
Some companies send out surveys or ask for reviews from clients and that’s a great start. But if you want to scale that, you need social media. Those platforms give you the ability to see genuine thoughts and feelings from thousands of customers. You can use these to make improvements, get new product ideas, and build relationships.
For example, let’s say someone posts about a bad experience they had at one of your stores. You can respond directly to them and make it right, letting customers know that you hear them and care about their happiness.
Maybe you see a lot of customers requesting a store in the next town over. You might consider that for your next location. Maybe you launch a new product with one particular feature that gets negative feedback. You can fix that in an updated version.
Listening to your customers is so important in building trust and cultivating brand loyalty. If they feel like you listen to them, consumers are more likely to love your brand. Social media provides an easy way to “keep your ear to the ground” and get real time, valuable feedback.
Learn about competitors
The same way you can listen to and learn about your customers, you can learn about your competitors.
They likely are also active on social media platforms and their activity can provide you with valuable insights. Look through their platforms to see how customers respond to their products, what messaging they use, and what value they are offering.
This information can tell you where you might differ and what you offer that they don’t. For example, are customers wishing that their product had an additional feature? Add that feature to your product!
You can also learn from competitors. Are they getting some bad press for a recent campaign? Did they respond poorly to an incident? No one’s perfect, but we can all learn from mistakes, and it’s even better when they’re not your own.
Increase Marketing ROI
As great as all these other benefits are, sometimes you want something a bit more quantitative. Social media marketing has you covered there, too.
Social media marketing is estimated to have an ROI of 28%, second only to email marketing. Thanks to the free platforms and large number of worldwide users, even small businesses with limited marketing budgets can drive real results without breaking the bank.
Every post, tweet, story, or affiliate link you share can lead to sales and direct revenue. In the last two years alone, social media referral traffic to online stores has increased 100%. Customers referred from Facebook, specifically, typically purchase about $55 worth of goods on average.
When you consider that ads running for as little as $5/day can reach thousands of people, it’s hard not to see the appeal.
As with any channel, direct social media marketing ROI can be a challenge to measure, but tools like the Facebook Pixel and platform insights are a big help. Businesses can draw a line from social media interactions to sales.
When social media marketing is combined with other strategic initiatives like email marketing, content marketing, or paid ads, your ROI soars.
If you want to be successful, social media marketing is important for your business. You don’t have to do it all on your own, though. To really get it right, we recommend working with a team that specialises in social media marketing, like Unified! We understand the nuances of each platform and how to fit social in with your overall marketing strategy.
Give us a call today to get started.