In the past few years, social media marketing has become one of the most important parts of any marketing strategy. More than 3.48 billion people are on social media. For reference, that’s almost half of the world’s entire population.
With an increase in internet accessibility and technology advancements like (3G, 4G, free data access to masses), more and more people are joining social platforms.
One thing is for sure, social media is not going to die soon, so you better get on there.
Marketers are smart people. They are where their customers are!
They understand the value of social media regarding building brand influence and generating sales.
The fact that 96% of small businesses leverage social media as a marketing weapon shows just how much of an essential strategy it is to thrive today.
Gone are the days of pure outbound marketing, where we just scream on top of billboards and every television channel, hoping some will buy our product. There’s been a shift towards on-demand media consumption through YouTube, Netflix and Social Media. Word of mouth marketing has always been the most powerful and now word of mouth marketing has become digital through social media.
Let us now understand what makes Social Marketing Strategy so crucial for brands.
Importance of social media marketing for a small business
Social listening
Social Listening means tracking digital conversations to understand what your targeted audience says about you.
Listening before speaking is a piece of advice that will always help you in life. It works wonders here as well.
Social listening helps you understand what your audience needs, and their pain points. You can proactively act on the same, and improve their experience with your brand.
To add social listening in your marketing strategy, you need to:
- Know where your targeted audience spend most of their time (social media platform).
- Be active on that platform.
- Build an audience.
- Engage with them by creating content related to their needs.
- Decide what works and what doesn’t according to their responses.
Word of mouth marketing
Word of Mouth Marketing is one of the oldest and most popular marketing tactics.
Social media is the digital version of word of mouth marketing.
People are 90% more likely to trust and purchase from a brand recommended by a friend. As a matter of fact, 71% of the customers are more likely to promote a brand if they’ve had a positive experience with it on social media.
Improve search engine rankings
It is a widespread misconception that social media has nothing to do with search engine rankings.
Social media marketing might have no direct connection with search engine rankings, but that doesn’t mean that it can’t help your website rank higher.
Search Engines like Google love what people love. If you are getting lots of customer love in the form of likes, shares, retweets, Google will definitely improve your rank in the SERP.
When the search engine bots crawl, they also keep an eye on the social media shares. The more engagements you get, the more likely you are to rank higher on the SERPs.
Brand awareness and brand loyalty
In the past, it was difficult to measure the impact of Social Media efforts on brand awareness and loyalty. Now, almost all the platforms have analytics metrics. More than 80% of CMO’s now believe that social efforts impact brand awareness and commitment.
Be it a toothbrush or a luxury car; you need to win the trust of your audience. How do you do that? Not by building a company but instead a brand.
You need to push good inbound marketing strategies. You need to make people believe in your brand and for this, social media marketing is the easiest way.
Identify who your audience is, and what their pain points are. Use good visuals and create helpful content. Create a buzz around your brand and see the results for yourself.
Traffic source
A recent study suggests the Social Media traffic is the most significant source of referral traffic for a website. A whopping 31% of referral traffic (visits that come to your site from outside of the search engine) are from Social Media.
It doesn’t just end with getting high traffic through to your website. Once they’re there, you need to convert them into customers.
Higher conversion
The primary goal of any business is to generate leads and make sales, and if you are failing in this, then it is a serious concern.
Your social media page is important. Positive reviews on your page, millions of fan followers and likes acts as social proof. It instils confidence in the new buyer to trust you.
Be a part of your audience as a real person and not a bot as humans prefer to buy from a human.
The daily users of social media increase each year.
Every day, marketers are trying to explore new roots of marketing through social media as they understand that social media is the present and future of marketing.
Be it Facebook or Instagram, companies are spending money for their brand promotion. Why? Because they all understand that social media is the easiest way to get connected with their audience. Wherever you are in the world, it is there to stay.
