Why is social media useful for marketing?
Why is social media useful for marketing?
As you know, social media holds a lot of potential and will help in
increasing your customer base. You will see how easy it is for you to reach
out to different customers that are based all over the world. Let us now look
at some of its real uses to companies.
Reach
The first and most important use is the reach that this platform provides to
its users. You will see that it is possible for you to reach out to more people
just by making your presence felt on these sites. When you add one person,
you will automatically end up adding another 10. This is not possible when
you advertise in the traditional way. You will hardly be able to reach a few
hundred there whereas here, you can easily reach millions just by clicking a
few buttons and uploading pictures of your products and services.
Recognition
Your brand recognition will grow in leaps and bounds. Imagine having a
small shop in a remote island and trying to reach out to the world. It will
seem like a herculean task. But now, you can easily reach out and have our
brand successfully recognized by million just by setting up an account on a
social media platform. It is like getting to set up free billboards on every
street in the world. Your brand is sure to be recognized by millions around
the world and you will see that it is possible for you to become a global
image by establishing your presence on social media.
Costs
The costs of marketing can be considerably reduced when you take up
online marketing. When you market in the traditional way, you end up
spending a lot of money. Right from paying the advertising company to
paying for the different promotional campaigns, there are many costs that
will keep accumulating. You have to set up a big fund for it and only then
will you be able to afford the traditional method of marketing. However,
with social media, all of that can be reduced to a bare minimum. You will
see that it is possible for you to promote your products and services with a
very small to no budget at all! Imagine the kind of money you can save on
just by adopting social media for your marketing needs.
Interaction
Through social media platforms, you can interact with many people
including your customers and potential business partners. You can bring
everyone under the same roof and allow them to interact with each other.
You will see that it is easy for you to answer any queries that these people
have towards your company, products or services and make it an interactive
session. This type of a setting will go a long way in helping you establish a
good connection with your customer base.
Conversion
Through social media, you can easily convert people into your customers.
Now say for example 500 visit your page on a daily basis. Out of those,
maybe 200 are your existing customers and the rest are new people. If even
half of them, meaning 150 people convert into customers then you will now
have 200+150 customers for your products. That is a great number for you
to work with, especially when you are just starting out. That number will
only grow over time and before you know it, you will have a big audience
base following you.
Loyalty
You can establish customer loyalty by being online. You can be in touch
with the best customers and get them to be your repeat customers. Social
media helps in establishing a strong customer base and also strengthen your
hold over them. Remember that your current customers are extremely
valuable as they are who will bring new customers and also give you
consistent business. So it is extremely important for you to hold on to your
loyal customers and get them to help increase your business.
SEO
You can make use of SEO when you set up an online account. SEO stands
for search engine optimization, which will help you get noticed. You can
use it to your advantage and turn up as the first search result online. That
will ensure that your page gets visited more often, which will mean more
customers for your business.
These form just some of the benefits of using social media for marketing
but are not limited to just these. As and when you start using social media
you will be acquainted with the other benefits. Following are the likely
benefits and the reasons why you should start making use of social media
marketing right now.
Helps in improving your brand authority:
You shouldn't forget the basic of marketing just because you are making use
of social media. You will have to keep interacting with your customers on a
regular basis and when you do this it shows good faith towards not just your
existing customers but your potential customers as well. With the advent of
technology people these days like to brag or even criticize about a particular
service or product on various social media platforms. And when they do
happen to post about a particular brand online, they are in fact introducing
this brand to several others in an indirect manner and this expands your
audience base. As the number of people who are talking about your brand
starts to increase then the publicity of your brand will increase too and it
will be perceived as being more valuable. You can always tie up with
individuals who are quite popular on social networking sites for the
promotion of your product. This will help in increasing the publicity of
your product manifold.
The inbound traffic increases:
Your inbound traffic is generally restricted only to your existing customers
and all those users who would have searched for the keywords that
currently work for your product or brand. But social media can really help
you turn things around. Every profile that you manage to add on social
media will help you create a pub that will directly lead to your website and
you every piece of content that you have managed to acquire I'd an
opportunity for attracting new customers. When the quality of the content
that you make use of or publish on social media strata improving then it
will also help in increasing the chance of generating conversions will also
improve.
Reduction in the marketing costs:
According to an online report published by Hub post, approximately 84% of
all the marketers had to put in just around six hours every week and they
had managed to generate a noticeable increase in their web traffic. Six
hours is comparatively a very small price to pay for the more than
proportional increase in your brand recognition. A little bit of effort can
help you reap the benefits of social media marketing. Even if you are able
to spend maybe an hour every day for developing your content as well as
designing the strategy for marketing, you will be able to see results in no
time. The option of paid advertising can always be opted for, but whether
or not you want to make use of it solely depends upon your goals. You
needn't worry about started out small, it needn't be on a large scale and you
needn't exceed your predefined budget. Once you have acquired an
understanding of how social media marketing works, you can slowly start
increasing your budget according to your needs and you will definitely be
able to improve your conversion rate.
Better search engine rankings as well:
SEO can be thought if as one of the best and simplest manner in which you
will be able to capture traffic that is relevant to your content and then direct
such traffic towards your website. The requirements of this mode keep on
changing constantly. It is not just about regularly updated the content on
your blog, the optimization of the titles used and the distribution of such
links that all lead back to your website. Most of the search engines tend to
make use of social media presence for calculating their rankings and most
of the established brands also tend to make use of social media in one form
of the other. Just being active on social media is sufficient to send a signal
of credibility to the search engines regarding your brand. To put it in a
nutshell, if you really want your brand rankings to go up then you will need
to have a really strong presence on various social networking platforms.
Better customer experience:
Social marketing is a channel of communication that really isn’t much
different from the traditional channels of communication such as phone
calls or even emails. Every interaction that you might have with a customer
on social media should be considered as an opportunity for you to promote
your brand and you can do this by projecting a good customer service
experience and it also facilitates in helping you to enrich the existing
customer relationship. If at all a situation arises wherein a customer has
taken to Twitter to express their grievance about any particular product then
you should be able to take an immediate action and rectify the problem as
well as apologize to them in the same public forum. But not all of your
experiences are going to be negative. If any customer expresses their
satisfaction and happiness with your product then you can express your
gratitude to them and you can also provide them with a list of additional
products that you would recommend. You should make use of social media
for improving personal communication with your customers thereby
providing them a personalized experience.
Improvement in customer insights:
Social media can prove to be really helpful because it also provides you
with an opportunity to understand how the customers behave and this can
be done through something that is referred to as social listening. You can do
this by opting to monitor the comments that your customers might post; this
would give you an insight into their personality and what they think of your
business. Another thing you can do is opting to segment the syndicated
content and this will let you understand the content that has been able to
generate the most interest and according to this you will be able to post
further related content. Not just this but you can also measure your rate of
conversion depending upon the different promotions that you managed to
post on different social networking platforms. Being able to determine the
most used social media by your customers will let you understand the
media channel that you should actually make use of. You can really make a
move to improve your revenue if you know what exactly your customer
wants.
The above-mentioned are the benefits that you can derive by making use of
social media marketing. Bet if you really aren’t fully convinced even now
about making use of it; then here are some other things that you should
really consider before writing it off.
Your competitors are already involved:
You need to understand that your competitors might already be engaged on
various social networking platforms and they are making the most of social
media. So, you really wouldn’t want to miss out on any social media traffic.
You should also realize that since your competitors are already involved in
social media, your potential conversions are being poached by them. You
should also get going and not remain like an idle bystander anymore while
your competitors are enjoying all the benefits of social media marketing.
Levelling your playing field must be reason enough for you to give social
media marketing a whirl.
The sooner the better:
The foundation on which social media marketing is based is relationship
building and you can always do this by trying to expand your followers.
This will help you attract more and more customers. The sooner you start
the greater will be the number of audience whom you can attract.
Needn’t worry about potential losses:
If you really think about it, then you will realize that there really won’t be
any losses that you will be incurring. The amount of time and money that
you will be spending will be an insignificant fragment when compared to
the potential profits that you can make. You don’t necessarily have much to
lose by making use of this but you do have a lot to gain. All you need to do
is put in a few hours of work and spend a couple of hundred of dollars for
getting started. This is all the investment that you need to make and you
will definitely be able to reap way more than you will have to invest.
You really shouldn’t be waiting any longer and should get started as soon as
you can. The more you wait the higher are your chances of losing out on
potential business. Social media marketing can really come in handy and
help you attract a lot of customers and it can also help in improving your
conversion rate. So, all you need to do is get started. Take the first step and
jump onto the bandwagon, because whatever the cynics might say, social
media marketing is here to stay
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