Top Reasons to Use Social Media for Your Marketing Strategy
Is your brand using social media?
For many of us, digital marketing is the first touch in communication with potential customers. If you don’t use social media, you are missing an essential part of the digital landscape.
Read on for ten (10) reasons why social media is essential to your marketing strategy.
1. Humanize Your Brand
To connect with potential customers, your brand needs to show its human side. What are your brand values, and how are you embracing them? Are you looking out for the best interests of your customers? Your employees?
The ability to create that human connection is a huge benefit social media brings. Use it to introduce your team. Show the benefits your products are bringing to existing customers. Also, let your brand values shine and stand out.
2. Customers Are Active on Social Media
Social media gives people platforms they can use and explore on their terms. The likes of Facebook and Twitter make it easy to share information across the globe. To make the most of your marketing, you need to understand customer communication.
Deciding how you want to contact customers requires a strategy. Social media marketing should line up with your other campaigns and strategy. If you don’t fit it into a more comprehensive plan, you risk inaccuracy, inefficiency, and little to no return.
3. You Can Make (and Break) Your Reputation on Social Media
Social media has been instrumental in providing a voice to those who struggled to speak up. It also makes information and sharing more portable and transparent.
Good reviews and customer stories can spread far and wide. And it’s a platform to build your brand identity and express your company values. It also raises the voice of discontent. Not having a social media presence risks any negativity blowing up before you can counter it.
4. Promote Your Content
Promoting your content on social media is an excellent way of getting it out to a broader audience. Your informative, industry-related content demonstrates your expertise and pointing to it from social media helps grow your audience.
However, you can’t just post your content haphazardly across the Internet. You need to fit your social media into your more comprehensive content strategy. Find out what platforms your target audience is using, and what your competition is doing.
5. Customer Service and Support
Nowadays, people are expecting your business to be on social media. And when they need customer support, they’ll come looking for your account.
A study conducted by the HBR regarding Twitter showed that customers who got a response to their Tweets would likely become return customers. This was even more true if that response was under 5 minutes after their Tweeted. This was also the case if the first Tweet was a complaint.
6. Gauge Sentiment About Your Brand
You’d think that getting a lot of mentions is always a good thing, and in most cases, it is. It’s essential to know how many people are talking about your brand.
You should also find out precisely what they’re saying. If you’re getting a lot of negative comments, you need to work out what’s gone wrong and fix it.
Using social media lets you stay on top of the sentiment towards your business. You can protect your reputation and take real-time action to fix any issues as they arise.
7. Increasing Web Traffic Helps Search Rankings
Many marketers underestimate social media as it doesn’t directly improve your search engine rankings. However, this misses an integral part of the picture.
Create high-value content on your website, and then share snippets, links, and infographics via social media. Make sure it includes your target keywords. Your content will help you build a following, which organically increases your reach and website traffic. Even simple things like business updates and photos help to keep your brand top of mind.
In addition, quality content will encourage industry influencers to link to your content, creating high-quality backlinks to boost your rankings in the search results.
8. Improve Brand Loyalty
To ensure the longevity of your business, you already know you need to build a loyal customer base.
One proven way to gain loyalty is to bond with your customers, and social media provides the perfect platform for this. Customers increasingly see social media as a service channel where they can talk directly to a business. This isn’t just sentiment. Studies have found that social media engagement improves loyalty for 62% of millennials.
Millennials are the largest generation in US history, so this is something that you can’t afford to ignore.
9. Demonstrate Thought Leadership
Posting well-written, informative content on social media helps you become seen as a leader in your field. There’s no one way to become an industry expert, but online social tools will help you. Make sure you’re making the most of what your social media accounts can offer to build your presence.
Share content, promote your brand and experience and connect to your audience. As long as you align your social media campaigns with the rest of your marketing, you’ll highlight your value. In turn, followers are going to look up to you and your expertise.
They’ll come to you for high-quality content and see you as reliable. This relationship will encourage brand trust, and your customers will value your business. This helps you become a leading influencer in your field.
10. Target Your Advertising
Using ads on social media is an important way to promote your content and business. They also offer extensive targeting options. These allow you to reach the right people and make the most of your ads (and your budget).
Ad targeting uses demographic information, geography, language, and online behavior. This lets you tailor your ads to best reach groups of potential customers and focus on content they’re likely to want. It also means you won’t be paying for audiences you don’t want to reach. Be sure to use A/B testing to ensure the best bang for your buck.
Use Social Media to your Advantage
As you can see, unless you use social media as an integral part of your digital marketing strategy, you miss out. As the digital landscape changes, social media is becoming more and more integral to how businesses communicate with their customers.
If you want to level up your digital marketing strategy, contact us today at Solid Digital.
