Social media marketing is a great leveller, especially for organisations with a limited marketing budget.
Today with social media marketing, you don’t have to spend a ton of marketing budget to get the word out about your organisation.
You don’t have to hire eye-watering expensive celebrities as brand ambassadors to promote your organisation.
To begin with, you don’t even need to splurge on ridiculously costly marketing tools. All you need is to leverage the incredible power of social media marketing to connect, engage, and nurture a loyal audience. An audience ready to spread the word about your organisation, what you do, your offerings, and anything else you want them to do.
When done right, social media is word-of-mouth marketing on steroids.
Social media provides you with an incredibly cheap platform to build your brand, go viral, and, if a business, generate revenue.
Moreover, if your competitors are not looking to take advantage of social media, you better think again.
According to a survey from The Manifest, 3 out of 4 small business owners plan to invest in social media marketing in 2019, and this investment continues to the present day.
The best part of social media marketing is regardless of how big or small you are, whether offline or online, you can benefit from the opportunity social media offers to build brand awareness, engage with your target audience, provide responsive 24/7 customer services, and even generate revenue.
Are you still not convinced social media marketing is right for your organisation?
Check out these compelling business reasons that are sure to win you over. Moreover, once you’re ready to dip your toes into the social media marketing ocean, you may want to contact an experienced agency to help you.
1. Tap into an engaged audience
Users on social networks want to be entertained, informed, and learn about their favourite brands, shows, etc. On average, users spend over 2 hours each day on social media platforms.
Also, they research new products and services during this time on social media. According to this report from Global Web Index, more than 1 in 3 social media users said they use social media to discover new products or learn more about a brand.
Users expect to interact with brands to solve their problems. A survey from Smart Insights found that 63% of customers expect organisations to offer customer services through their social media channels.
Hence, the platforms allow your organisation to be discovered by these users as they search. Plus, there is a chance to reach out and offer real-time, responsive customer support.
The best part is, even if you’re a local organisation, you can triangulate and focus on reaching a potential customer only within your location.
2. The potential to go viral
With over 3.48 billion global social media users – that’s almost half the world’s population. With Facebook, the market leader, with 2.4 billion monthly active users alone – social media offers organisations an opportunity to go viral, reaching millions.
Viral marketing is the holy grail of online marketing – here, with minimal efforts, you can get your content and brand in front of millions of your target audience – people you would never have been able to reach otherwise.
3. Drive traffic to your website
For online businesses, the more eyeballs you get on your content and products or services, the higher the potential to make a sale.
It’s a no-brainer, then, as you’ll likely do everything you can to increase the number of visits to content on your website.
According to a report by Vendasta, 41 per cent of local businesses used social media to generate revenue. Almost 90% of marketers say their social marketing efforts have increased exposure for businesses, and 75% say they’ve increased traffic.
4. Occupy prime real estate in your customers’ mind
As a business owner, you want to be where your customers always turn to you whenever they need something instead of going to your competitors.
Having a presence on the social platforms where your target audience hangs out is part of the strategy. The other part is sharing valuable content consistently and regularly on these platforms. The idea is that every time your customers scroll through their social media feeds, they should stumble and hopefully engage with your content.
Though you might not know it, you’re imprinting your brand and what you do in your customers’ minds if you consistently do this.
Eventually, when a need for your services or products arises, your brand will be the first that comes to their mind.
5. Social media helps you understand your audience
Social media is powerful because of its ability to help you drill down into granular data to understand your audience.
Platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter have sophisticated analytics features you can leverage to learn more about your customers. You can, within minutes, uncover a trough-full of data that gives you incredible insight into what your customers like. Their interests, where they work, fears, what they want to read, what movie they watch, their income and demographics, and just about any data needed to personalise your offerings.
6. It provides an opportunity to humanise your brand
People like to connect with other people, not brands. With social media, you can pull back the curtain and let your customers peek behind the scenes of your company.
You can share your culture, what it means working in your organisation, and even show them how you do what you do.
By sharing this kind of content, you build a connection and make your brand relatable.
7. (bonus reason) It helps you generate more leads for your business
You may want to step up your social media marketing efforts to create more business leads.
Thankfully, platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn have useful lead generation features you can use to drive qualified leads to your business.
According to a LinkedIn report, 50 per cent of business buyers use LinkedIn when making purchasing decisions.
So, depending on your business, if perhaps you’re a business-to-business company, you may want to get your presence on LinkedIn optimised to funnel these hot leads back to your business.
Summary
Social media has come to stay, and with its increasing popularity, you can’t afford to ignore these platforms as viable marketing channels for your business.
Social media offers an incredibly inexpensive way to reach your target audience, build authority in your industry, and solve customer-related problems.
