Social platforms help you connect with your customers, increase awareness about your brand, boost your leads and sales. With more than three billion people around the world using social media every month, the users and engagement on major platforms will just keep increasing
- TELL YOUR STORY
Having an online presence as a business on any of the social media platforms is a great way to interact with your audience and to really connect with them on a personal level. These platforms give you the chance to tell your story to all your followers. It also keeps it “real” Social media is a place where interacting with your audience gives you more exposure and helps you better understand your audience.
Your customers will be able to get to know you and relate to your stories on a more personal level, therefore building relationships. People who don’t know you or your business may find it interesting to know how you build up your business which will help create brand awareness.
- GROW YOUR AUDIENCE WITH A SMALL BUDGET
Social media advertising has to be one of the least expensive ways of marketing your business. There are so many different advertising tools available on social media platforms that you can make use of, that are very cost-effective. Saying that I have found that you don’t always need to use these tools to market your brand. You can grow your platform by simply being consistent and posting interesting and relatable content for your audience.
There are a huge number of businesses, including myself who have spent very little on advertising, by just having great content and great interaction with your audience that has connected with you. It doesn’t have to be expensive although over the years to get to that stage it has cost me a lot of time!
- STAY ON TOP
Business owners need to be careful on social media networks and need to create an image of their brand that is the first thing that comes to your customers’ minds when they think about a certain product or service. You need to create a strong impression on their minds so that your business is their first choice whenever they search or think about buying a similar product.
This bond between a business and a potential buyer plays a significant role in converting them from just a potential customer to a loyal and regular one.
- LEARN ABOUT YOUR COMPETITORS – MYSTERY SHOPPING
With all business profiles on all social media networks accessible to the public, this could be your chance as an entrepreneur to know your competitor better and understand the strategies that they are implementing to attract their audiences. You would be able to see the content that they are posting on their social media profiles and judge which posts are doing better.
After carrying out this analysis of your competitor’s profile and looking into all the queries asked by their audience, you will be able to incorporate those questions into your marketing. Go through their posts, their comments, and how they are engaging with their audience. I often make an enquiry.
Research more about how well informed their audience is and how aware your audience is.
Based on these comparisons, you will be able to answer these enquiries better and make yourself and your audience more aware of certain things that you didn’t know about earlier. Study their customer service and compare it with yours and analyse how you can do better than them. Knowledge is power!
- CUSTOMISE YOUR AUDIENCES
Businesses can access the different tools present on social media forums to see how many visitors were interested in the content that you shared, how many “liked” or clicked on any call to action and how many purchased if any.
Getting your hands on such statistics enables you as a business to target these potential customers who were almost about to become a buyer, but due to certain reasons were unable to complete the shopping process.
Through social media marketing, you will be able to show your brand content to such customers, reminding them how they needed/wanted your product, and now after seeing such ads, they would be reminded of their need/want for your product.
Building a custom audience gives you an opportunity to create customer satisfaction for these specific people who initially did not feel satisfied with your service and decided not to purchase.
This could be your chance to rectify all the errors and change your potential buyer’s perspective about you by providing them a much better and giving them the satisfaction that they seek by purchasing a well-produced good or service.
- LEARN THE BUYING PATTERNS OF YOUR IDEAL CUSTOMERS
Social media networks are open to all, giving businesses a chance to follow their consumers’ activities or potential buyers. This helps marketers be more informed about their target audience, likes, dislikes, and interests so that they can create a better marketing strategy to attract such customers.
Learning these patterns helps you focus on the things that you are not following while designing content for your page, and therefore aiding you in becoming better at your digital marketing strategies to attract the right customers and meeting their demands.
Social media gives you a chance to see what interests your customers the most. You can create content that can be relatable for your audience, increasing engagement on your social media presence. This gives you access to see different demographics of people who visited your page and what kind of content was liked the most on your social media profile.
- INCREASE YOUR RETURN ON INVESTMENT
Social media marketing and advertising can help you increase your ROI, as the cost of advertising on these social media forums is often less than the return, giving you more revenue.
Because you use digital marketing, you can reach hundreds and thousands of people by simply targeting ads, reducing your advertisement costs. Facebook and Instagram help you in attracting your potential buyers, and at the same time, they aim to keep the potential customers engaged on their specific social media networks so that you and they both can benefit from this.
This increased user time on their social media networks increases the possibility of users seeing your ad or your profile, and therefore visiting your profile and then eventually becoming buyers.
- BUILDING RELATIONSHIPS
This is the key! A business that connects the most with its customers is a business that grows immensely on all possible levels. This is because the customers not only trust you with the product or service you offer but get to know you as a business on a much deeper level.
This is why you must create a friendly relationship with all the followers through these social media forums, where they interact with one another, answer queries, respond and try to help each other in all possible ways. Communication is extremely important.
This has to be one of the most effective ways of getting to know your audience better. Communicate with them, interact on all possible posts, learn what they want and what they like, and then use it to implement a much stronger marketing strategy so that you can transform them from potential buyers to loyal customers.
- BRAND AWARENESS – HUGE!
To attract a larger consumer base, it is important that you create a brand awareness first where your potential buyers are well aware of your brand. This can only be done through creating extremely creative and appealing content that will catch the attention of all potential customers, making them aware of your brand’s existence. You will continually have to remind your audience that you exist.
This can be done through proper social media marketing strategies and content marketing campaigns that will imprint your brand name on anyone using any of the social media networks you choose to use.
Once you have made people aware of and created a great image of your brand, you will notice your targeted audience relating to your brand, or the content you create more often.
This will not only increase engagement on your social media profiles but also create more chances of potential customers becoming buyers. Customers that connect with your brand, are aware of your services and your mission, and recognize your products.
It is because of this trust that you have created with your audience that you will grow as a business, and you must maintain this trust throughout your business journey on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, or Twitter.
- PROMOTE PRODUCTS AND SERVICES
Being an active member of all social media networks helps you create brand awareness.
Promotion of products and services on social media platforms like Facebook is much easier in the digital world, where you can put up professional images of your product and their details, and let the audience engage under these albums.
Facebook for example gives you a number of options for you to promote your products through different advertisements like the carousel, where you can showcase a handful of pictures of your products when running an advertisement. This helps your customers to see the variety you offer as a brand in the single advertisement that you are running.
Your Business Needs a Social Media Presence!
Mike Jack is the Director of The One Consultancy