Social Media Marketing for Businesses

 

 

Social media marketing is a powerful way for businesses of all sizes to reach leads and customers. People discover, learn, follow and buy brands on social media. So if you're not on platforms like Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn, you're missing out! Great social media marketing can bring remarkable success to your business, create engaged brand ambassadors and even increase leads and sales.

Benefits of social media marketing

With such widespread usage and versatility, social media is one of the most effective free channels for marketing your business today. Here are some of the specific benefits of social media marketing:

• Humanize your business: Social media enables you to turn your business into an active participant in your market. Your profile, posts, and interactions with users form an approachable persona that your audience can familiarize and connect with, and come to trust.
• Drive traffic: Between the link in your profile, blog post links in your posts, and your ads, social media is a top channel for increasing traffic to your website where you can convert visitors into customers.
• Generate leads and customers: You can also generate leads and conversions directly on these platforms, through features like Instagram/Facebook shops, direct messaging, call to action buttons on profiles, and appointment booking capabilities.
• Increase brand awareness: The visual nature of social media platforms allows you to build your visual identity across vast audiences and and improve brand awareness. And better brand awareness means better results with all your other campaigns.
• Build relationships: These platforms open up both direct and indirect lines of communication with your followers through which you can network, gather feedback, hold discussions, and connect directly with individuals.

The essentials of a successful social media marketing strategy

A successful social media marketing strategy will look different for every business, but here are the things they will all have in common:

• Knowledge of your audience: What platforms they use, when they go on them and why, what content they like, who else they’re following, and more.
• Brand identity: What is the message you want to convey to your audience? How do you want them to feel when viewing your content?
• Content strategy: While there is a level of spontaneity on social, you’ll need a structured content strategy to be able to have a consistent voice and produce quality content regularly.
• Analytics: Quantifiable insights will inform your strategy, including who you’re reaching, the right content to share, the best times to post, and more.
• Regular activity: Social media is a real-time platform. If you want to use it to grow your business, you need to post regularly, stay on top of engagements with your business, engage back, keep up with trends, and maintain accurate profiles.
• Inbound approach: Don’t use social media to pitch your business. Focus on adding value through useful and interesting content and building up those around you. This, in turn, will organically promote your business and others will promote it for you.