The Importance of Social Media Marketing for Your Business

Let’s be honest; social media marketing is just as real as the world around us, and probably the most influential technique for digital marketing in recent years. It’s true, you need presence when it comes to ranking on search engines such as Google but there’s simply no medium that can produce instantaneous results in the same way as social media.
But what makes social media so important for your business?
In this article, we’ll take a look at some important aspects of social media and why using these platforms is critical for the success of any business:
The Importance of Social Media Marketing for Your Business

1. Social Media – The Affordable Option

Social Media is completely underpriced and this is largely because too many major businesses fail to recognize the power of advertising on social media.

For example, Wish is an e-commerce website and considered by many as the biggest threat to Amazon. Incredibly, Wish has amassed between $3-$6 Billion in each of the past three years and widely expected to double this figure over the coming years.

But why is Wish so relevant?

Well, it’s estimated that Facebook advertising accounts for more than 95% of their advertising budget. What’s more, the co-founders of Wish are ex-Google programmers who worked directly with the Google Adwords project.

Needless to say, if these experienced programmers seem to know something that most businesses do not!

2. Creating Community Around the Brand

Did you know that over 60% of companies collaborate with their customer base for the purpose of market research? According to CMO Essentials, these companies use their existing community to perform research that would otherwise cost a lot of money. Also, if we believe a recent survey by Hubspot, 80% of professional marketers build communities to increase traffic and awareness of the brand.

Now:

That’s not to say there should be an ulterior motive for creating a sense of community around a brand. In fact, the objective should be as transparent as possible with the no expectations from fans, or followers. Needless to say, if you provide value to these people, they will inevitably spread the message in an organic manner.

3. Generating Traffic and Leads

Speaking of which, traffic is arguably the greatest benefit of social media and this is especially true given that generating traffic is often the biggest challenge for any brand. You see, producing content is obviously needed on every platform or medium, including the domain, but social media is the outlet where people most often find this content. It also goes without saying that social media is the best chance that a brand will have for their content or news to be shared by online users.

4. Building Brand Awareness

In recent studies, Circle Research found that more than 75% of marketing experts consider branding “critical” for the growth of a business. As if that’s not enough, LucidPress discovered that consistent brands are at least three times more likely to be visible to the end consumer.

Branding is all about consistency and conveying the right message to both your existing audience and target market. As you know, it’s incredibly important to keep this brand name and image relevant, which is why social media is so important in this sense. After all, social is entirely visual and the perfect way to showcase what the business, service or product is all about.

5. Customer Service and Convenience

With Messenger improving every day, Facebook is increasingly useful and interactive for improving customer service. That being said, Twitter has long been a convenient tool for reaching out to customers and helping to avoid any potential problems or frustrations that might be building.

Just as importantly, social media is much faster and this is certainly true when compared with answering calls etc. At the same time, this is usually the most convenient way for customers to interact and many surveys suggest that social is certainly the way forward for customer service in a business.

6. Improved Search Rankings on Google

Unless you are new to search engine optimization (SEO), you will know that Google most certainly pays attention to what happens on social media. Of course, nobody knows exactly what the algorithms entail but it’s widely known that social signals play a pivotal role when it comes to ranking any particular website.

With this in mind, sharing content on social media will improve the SEO performance of a brand but then also the standing of this brand on social media itself. That is to say, Facebook, Instagram, and every other social media platform now offer a feature, which can be used to search for important data.

7. Providing Transparency to Customers

Business owners often get it wrong on social media by pretending to be something they are not or communicating a rather false image. On the contrary, social media should be your opportunity to provide complete transparency to customers and connect with them on an emotional level.

In fact, studies show that stories, in particular, can activate the part of the brain that processes taste, sight and sound and these are critical for influencing consumers toward a desired outcome (sales).

Conclusion – Social Media Marketing for Your Business

As you can see, there are many reasons as to why social media marketing is critically important for every business. Aside from the fact that this is the most affordable way to advertise or promote, this is also where businesses will find their target market.

At the same time, for any serious business, this is also a way to build brand awareness and communicate effectively with an existing customer base. But as already mentioned, generating leads is also important for the business and social media is the best or easiest place to generate traffic for these leads.

Either way, social media is crucially important and there is no other medium that can produce the same feedback, results, and sense of community as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and friends.