Why Your Business Should Focus On Social Media Marketing | Simplemachine
It’s now expected that any reputable business will maintain multiple social media pages, but this should be looked at as a golden opportunity rather than a tiresome obligation. This modern marketing channel opens up countless possibilities for any businesses of any size or sector, and the potential rewards are hard to beat. Here are just a few of the reasons why your business needs to focus on social media marketing.
Connect to Your Traffic
There are billions of individuals on social media. However, your job isn’t to go after every single one of these people. You can’t catch every fish in the ocean, but you might be able to catch more than enough to meet your needs by focusing on one specific kind: your business’ target audience. With other forms of Internet marketing, you rely almost completely on luck and keywords to help individuals find your site. Social media is different. With it, you can identify your target audience using the user-specific information published on social media. This not only includes basics like gender, age and location, but also more valuable specifics such as previous social media interactions the individual has conducted. Finding correlations among these variables can help you figure out what kind of person is most interested in your business, and you can use this information to determine what kind of content you should be producing for optimal payoff. Very few other marketing channels can match that level of specificity.
It’s Free Marketing
Yes, you can create paid advertisements on social media. There are certain advantages to doing that, and it’s something you can consider once your low-hanging marketing fruit is gone. However, even without paying for advertisements, having a social media page alone works as a free advertising channel. It expands your brand’s outreach by making it easier for people to come across it, and it gives your company a chance to stand out from the competition by telling your audience what’s great about your particular products or services. By integrating links back to your main website, you provide visitors to the social media page with a direct link to access all your detailed company information. When someone new follows your page, their own friends and followers can see this, which makes it that much more likely for new individuals to visit your social media page.
Services like Twitter and Instagram also include hashtag functionality, which bookmarks your designated pages and connects them to other posts using the same hashtags. This is yet another way to make it easier for others to find your post and interact with your business. Understanding these sorts of quirks in the way that different platforms work will go a long way in boosting the number of new followers and potential customers who come to your business.
Brand Awareness
Marketing is more than just pushing products onto customers; it’s about expanding and maintaining brand awareness. This is crucial for the long-term success of your business. You need people to recognize and identify your business so that they think of you when they have a problem you can help them with. Using social platforms allows you to do exactly this. While you do need to take care to maintain a uniform look across all marketing channels, this boost of brand awareness helps those who come in contact with you on Facebook easily recognize you on Twitter or in other kinds of digital advertisements, and vice-versa. You need to take every opportunity possible to strengthen your brand, and social media makes this positively easy.
Boost Search Engine Optimization
Every business wants to rank well on search engine results lists, and social platforms offer several key benefits here. For starters, social platforms have become search engines. People turn to Facebook or Instagram in order to look for a business, and if they can’t find yours there, you might lose out on a customer. Additionally, social content is connected to larger search engines like Google. Each blog post is eligible for search engine ranking, and you can connect your social profiles to your company’s own blog posts. This is important as Google’s ranking algorithms allow each appearance of a post to count toward final ranking results. Plus, when followers retweet, share and comment on the post, their actions boost traffic and exposure, two other noteworthy measuring factors for search engine optimization.
Some social platforms are more effective than others in this regard. Google likes when users play in its sandbox, which is why having a Google+ account is helpful. While the platform lacks the popularity of some others like Facebook or Twitter, the Google+ feature lets you share posts and other important content with Google right away. This makes the post much more attractive to the ranking system on that search engine. Most platforms have some sort of edge like this, and posting on any one of them gives you a boost based on sheer numbers alone. In order to capture the maximum benefits of this strategy, you need to not only have a presence on social media, but also diversify this presence across multiple platforms. Ultimately, your business should see dramatic gains in online visibility.
Increase Customer Interaction
Interactivity and socialization is key to social media marketing – after all, it’s right there in the name. Before social profiles, the only way an individual could reach out and connect with a business was by stopping by the brick and mortar facility, giving the business a call or sending an email. All these methods could sometimes prove time consuming and were restricted by business hours, and this meant that communication between customers and businesses was remarkably limited.
Social media doesn’t have any of those old-fashioned restrictions. It allows your business to connect and communicate with customers 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. By opening this dialogue with them, you boost the customer’s appreciation of the business and increase the chance of them coming back in the future. If you create a profile and fail to use it or maintain it, however, you’re missing a sizable opportunity. Customers who take the time to leave messages or comments expect businesses to respond to them, and if this content goes without a response, they in turn become more likely to leave and look for a company that does value their time and attention.
A social profile is all building your company’s reputation and relationships with others. It does take additional work, time and resources, but the improved rapport you’ll have with your customers more than makes up for the investment.
Social media marketing is a vital yet challenging responsibility for any business to take on, and not all organizations have the time or resources to do it themselves. That’s where Simplemachine comes in. Our company can help you plan a regular social media posting schedule and create all the necessary content ahead of time – this way, content keeps going up on your pages, and your business stays on the minds of your followers. If you’re interested in these services or have questions about what they might entail, you’re ready to start your journey into social media marketing. Give us a call today and let our team at Simplemachine help you through every step of the way.
