Originally posted on https://thefrisky.com/how-to-grow-your-business-with-social-media-marketing/

 

If you’ve taken even a cursory look into how to market your business, then you’ve most definitely come face to face with the term “social media.” These platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, have quickly risen to become a core part of establishing your business online.

If you’re new to the field, however, you might wonder just how social media should be so crucial to your business’s growth, and what benefits it can offer. Let’s take a closer look and help you get one step closer to dominating the online world.

Source: Content Writing Tips

 

The reach of social media

First, to understand just how valuable social media can be, it’s important to understand that it’s massively popular. 69% of all adults in the US are active users of at least one networking site. That raises up to 88% for those between the ages of 18 and 29. Furthermore, the average user has multiple accounts. Out of Facebook’s two billion users, 1.2 billion of them are actively using the platform every single day.

To put it simply, social media offers a platform that you can use to get directly in touch with your audience. Rather than having to fight to bring them to your website or online store, they’re already using those platforms. You still have to put the strategies in place that help you get noticed and build connections with those social audiences, but the potential reach of the platform is undeniable.

Increase revenue directly

If you’re looking for new clients and customers, then social media platforms can offer you a direct way to ensure your marketing reaches them. Most platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube, have advertising networks directly connected to them. By crafting advertisements built specifically for the platform, you can increase the reach and visibility of your products and services, leading to new customers.

You can make sure that your advertisements are aimed specifically at those most likely to convert, too. Targeted advertisements can be used to appeal to the demographics most likely to be interested in your services, using factors like age, location, occupation, and interests. Remarketing can take it a step further, targeting those who have visited your website before.

Source: rd.com

Drive traffic to your website

By most accounts, the website is the core of your online marketing strategy. It’s where your customers can find the information they need, where you can convert visitors into customers, and offers them a direct line to get in touch, to buy, or to find support. Increasing traffic to a well-designed, helpful website will increase customer conversions. However, a lot of businesses struggle with getting visitors to their website.

Social media isn’t the only tool used to increase traffic (we’ll cover SEO, later), but if you’re not on platforms, you could be missing an organic pathway that customers can follow to end up on your site. Creating a profile linked to your page and using networking platforms to share interesting content hosted on your site acts as the welcome mat. From there, they can share that link to others or further explore the site if you’ve managed to engage them effectively.

Grow new leads

The majority of businesses use social media to find new leads to nurture and convert into customers. There are a variety of ways to do this. For instance, hypermedia is widely used to share content, such as blog posts, that readers may be interested in. You can gate certain pieces of content, meaning that users have to sign up to read more about the topics they’re interested in. This gives you a line on their email address, which can be used to guide them down the sales funnel further.

Other ways to grow leads include running contests for free products, discounts or prizes, for which customers have to give some personal details to enter. Or you can host hangouts, webinars, or live videos, addressing questions, or delivering informative and educational content. Once you get those customer details, you can further use tactics like email marketing to close the deal.

Source: BrandAid

Empower your SEO efforts

Search engine optimization is an online marketing practice that has become just as ubiquitous and as important as social media marketing. It’s the practice of improving your search engine rankings so that more web users can find your site more naturally. A lot of SEO is about making sure that your website is Google-friendly, with well-written, valuable content. However, they can improve your rankings as well.

Search engines like Google value the relevance and popularity of web pages. By sharing your content, you can improve the page’s ranking with every click. Furthermore, you can build the ranking of your profile itself, helping improve brand recognition and visibility.

Build a connection with your customers

Social media can be used solely as a channel for marketing, but the truth is that it has the potential to become much more. It can become the home of an online community growing around your brand. As your brand’s presence on social media grows, you should hopefully find your followers growing, too. Amongst those followers, some are going to be more likely to engage your brand directly.

By answering questions, getting involved with conversations, and providing support, you can build a connection to customers that fosters trust and loyalty. People are a lot more likely to further engage with a company that communicates directly with them, rather than just through passively reading marketing material and blog posts. This can greatly improve your reputation amongst your customers, creating loyal brand fans if you’re smart.

Spread the positive word of mouth

Those brand fans can help you grow your company even further by carrying your message far and wide. Positive experiences between a customer and a brand create loyalty but, on social media, you have an audience for those experiences, as well. This is part of the viral potential of networking. A company whose approach to customer satisfaction catches attention can quickly find themselves engaging with new customers drawn to that good reputation.

Establishing a healthy following on social media is a boost for your business, too. It acts as positive social proof, showing the market the evidence that your business has supported so. Thus, it’s worth supporting.

Gain insight on your own business

Social media offers analytics you can use to track the successes and failures of your online marketing campaign. By seeing how many people click on your links, share your posts, or otherwise engage, you can reinforce strategies that work and find the weaknesses that could use a little extra work.

However, you can go beyond the analytics to get a much broader understanding of the perception of your brand. Social listening is all about paying attention to what customers, influencers, reporters, competitors, and others are saying about your brand, about market trends, and about the industry in general.

By following mentions of your brand name, username, and other relevant terms, you can get a real insight into what people like or dislike about your products and services, customer pain points you can address, and so on. Some platforms, like Twitter, use hashtags that make it easy to follow discussions around certain topics, as well.

Learn from your competitors

Knowing your rivals can help you grow your business and there is no better way to learn about them than to follow them and their customers on social media. By monitoring their own marketing efforts, you can see which of their own posts are more successful, and which largely go ignored. As such, you can build on their successes while learning from their failures.

Though some might consider it cutthroat, you may even be able to capitalize off those failures further. For instance, by following mentions of their brand, you can find dissatisfied customers and reply with a tweet, post, or comment that addresses their pain point directly, highlighting your own brand as the alternative that you need.

Become a thought-leader

Brand reputation and integrity are hugely valuable. If people respect your brand and see it as an authority in the industry, then it means they’re more likely to become your customers than to join the competition instead.

By sharing great content through social media, contributing to conversations, and networking with other industry heads to share their content and get involved in their discussions, you can build a very valuable reputation. Besides making your company look like the go-to choice, it can open doors for PR opportunities, such as guest articles on trusted and widely read web publications.

Source: HubSpot

Where do you start?

Hopefully, the above points have proven the worth of interactive media and given you a few ideas of how you can start using it to grow your business. If you don’t know where to start, however, WSI can help. Our social media marketing services can help you establish your presence, catch up with your competitors, and start paving the path to having the marketing strategy that will directly contribute to your business’s success.

Visit https://www.wsiprovenresults.com/ to learn more about how social media marketing can benefit your business.