10 Reasons YOU Need Social Media Grow Your Business?
Do I Need It? The short answer is YES! Definitely!
Social media over traditional media is very beneficial to your business. It gets your brand in front of people faster and much more easily. Your audience is exposed to your brand even when they aren’t thinking about you, your product or service you provide.
1. Brand Recognition.
Gaining brand recognition is THE most important marketing goal for any business. Consumers want to buy from brands they recognise and identify with. Brand building on social media is easy, effective and is far less expensive than traditional media.
Take a look at Nick Cheadle Fitness, the most recognised brand in Australia for 2020. The profile is neat and clean with a highly recognisable brand, profile image and cover photo without being overbearing. Boasting a huge 1.7 million followers. Flight Centre Australia re-focussed on travelling Australia after Covid, and is the second most recognisable brand on Facebook with almost 1.5 million followers.
Both have really effective, identifiable cover photos and brand. Make sure the visual elements of your brand are well represented.
Tip: Pay attention to your profile and cover photos, create brand recognition by ensuring your logo appears often and placed strategically. Ensure it’s not overwhelming or distracting.
2. Create A Conversation.
Start talking on social networking rather than social media! Many businesses post on their channels without communicating with those following them, making comments or even leaving private messages unanswered. Not cool guys.
One of my clients receives more than 50 messages a day from potential customers, he answers every single one, diligently, and has generated a customer base far exceeding his expectations in just 3 months. Any business can do this, with very little effort, on the move and any time.
Tip: Engage with your audience when they comment or acknowledge and thank them when they share.
Give shout-outs to other businesses you network with
Ask for feedback from your customers
Post open-ended questions and encourage your audience to be involved
3. Listen & Respond:
Social listening is what we as marketing organisations do by monitoring social conversations around topics relating to our clients. It helps us understand what’s important to your audience and identify trends your target audience is following.
By listening we identify and use the same words and phrases our target audience uses to represent themselves in a fashion they want to be portrayed. If you’re unsure how to match the tone and style of your audience, social listening really helps.
4. Your Brand Story
I have spoken before about using your "Brand Voice" - Your Brand Story is part of this. Using social media is a great way to share your brand’s mission and share stories. Effective stories can have a huge impact on your brand’s image and social interactions. They can be as simple or extensive as you feel necessary. What do you think will be most effective? Create your story to ensure it is impactful and clear.
5. Research To Improve
Audience research is critical to growing your online presence. Your insights and analytics search keywords your audience use, with a focus on your specific product. Use social media to gather this information and use the information to improve how you communicate with your audience.
6. Customer Service Online and Offline
Customers now expect businesses to handle their requests through social media. Keep your followers happy. An investment in customer service can build real relationships between your company and your customers. Social media should not be forgotten, the challenge of customer service remains as important as it’s ever been, it’s only the method of communication that’s changed.
Social media allows for instant interaction and customer feedback, and you are also able to post an immediate response to your customers. With more than 50% of Australian customers using social media to ask questions about products or services, having an active social media strategy that includes customer service is extremely important.
7. Build Loyalty
What could possibly be better than building brand loyalty for free? Customers follow and interact with the brands they enjoy. An interesting fact is that 53% of your page followers are likely to be loyal to your business specifically. It’s an obvious direct correlation: If customers follow you, they are more likely to choose you over your competition. Furthermore, if they are loyal customers, they are more likely to refer your business and increase your traffic.
Tip: Be sure to keep your loyal audience engaged and happy:
Offer promotions or discounts through social media to your followers Facebook’s promotional content guidelines
Ask open-ended questions that allow your audience to respond and start a conversation
8. Use Socials to Refer Traffic To Your Site
Social media really does assist in sending customers directly to your website or blog. The traffic coming through search engines is dropping, while social media channels are more attractive and more diverse inbound traffic stream.
As social networks increase traffic to your site, you need to be more diligent, not only what to post, but how often to post. You don’t want to become overbearing and preachy in your approach, you’ll turn your customers off. Set up a schedule for posting your content with a link to one of your blog posts or a specific page on your website. This will help you ensure that your content is not only posted at a time that is most effective, it will also give you time to edit your content to help you with your SEO and SMO (social media optimisation).
9.Social Media Optimisation
SMO now has a DIRECT impact on SEO. Let’s say that you get 1,000 actions on a blog post because it contains strong content. Some of your followers who see your post may share, comment and write similar content, backlinking to your original post as a source. Search engines pick up on the activity and rank your post higher than your competition, if you do it well. Google and Bing also display tweets and Facebook posts in search results, as well as Instagram images in image searches, this feature is now more relevant than ever for trending topics.
10. It’s FREE
That's right, well mostly, free. To create social media profiles and post organic content, it is most certainly Free. Many small businesses it’s more than enough, and the quality of the content promotes the content on its own. However, if you really want to blossom, go the extra mile and promote it further, paying small amounts to promote your business will help increase exposure.
You can promote your business on Facebook for as little as $1 a day. I generally recommend around $5-$7 per day for a block of 7 days with specific purposes once a month. A small budget is often very workable. Facebook automatically directs your ad toward users that are interested in what you do or sell. Twitter works in much the same manner.
You just set up your campaign, choose a few demographic measures, and they’ll work with your budget. That means you’ll often have a fabulous ROI and you'll use your marketing budget very effectively.
You can't afford NOT to have social media working for you, get on board!
We can help setting up social advertising campaigns, goals, strategies and budgets.
Give us a call on 0481 543 772 or drop us a line using the contact form on our website.
Stayed tuned for reasons 11 to 20!
