Top 8 Reasons Why Social Media Marketing has Become so Important to Small Businesses
According to Statista, there are more than 3.96 billion social media users around the globe. Why not make use of these users for your brand? If you use social media effectively, it will help you upscale your business. All you need is some time and consistent efforts to build your small business’s social media presence.
Here are the top 7 reasons you should consider social media marketing for your small business?
1. Building Brand Awareness
A business can grow if it has built a strong brand around itself. With the help of social media, you can create a brand as it will enable you to tell your brand’s story to everyone around the world. Social media marketing is a golden opportunity to make your brand reach a wider audience.
You don’t need anything fancy or expensive; start creating social media profiles on different platforms to get started. Post some quality content around your niche. It can either be an infographic post or a short video, images, etc. You need to understand different social media channels to be able to nail the game of social media marketing.
The content should be so engaging that people should stop scrolling and take their time to read or view it. Initially, ask your employees, friends, relatives, and people in your network to interact with the content that you are posting. All they have to do is share, like, and comment on your post. This will slowly get you started, and as more and more people begin to interact with your content, your brand awareness will likely go up.
2. Increased traffic to your website
If you have a website for your business, social media marketing will definitely help you increase the inbound traffic to your website. Sure, your target audience is using the exact keywords you are ranking for, but how do you plan to increase your customer base?
Building a solid social media presence will help you reach out to various types of customers, helping you break the glass ceiling of your target audience. To put it in more simple words, it will help you grow your business to a wider variety of customers.
Social media platforms will also enable you to share the content on your website, like blogs, articles, etc., with a broader set of people. The more people interact with your content, the more likely to increase the inbound traffic to your website.
3. Better Customer Satisfaction
One of the reasons why social media marketing is so effective it’s because businesses can personalize their brands. When a brand replies to comments and DMs and writes witty Instagram captions, these actions humanize the business.
Customers will appreciate your efforts in acknowledging their comments. It will show how much you care about each customer. People always want to do business with other people rather than any business. Social media marketing is a great way to personify your business.
Be it responding to a query, complaint, or a compliment, through social media; you can create a friendly and accessible path of communication for your customers, which results in better customer satisfaction.
4. Increased Brand Loyalty and Brand Authority
A brand will only become more authoritative when there is a high level of customer satisfaction and brand loyalty. When your brand has an interactive social media page or an account, people who follow you will likely start trusting your brand’s credibility. Satisfied customers will start talking about your brand to their family and friends, increasing their brand loyalty.
People mentioning your brand on their social media will also advertise your brand to a new set of customers. It will bring new visitors to your page. Seeing your engagement with your followers will make a good impression on these new visitors.
5. Building a niche community for your business
If you use social media platforms correctly, they can help you build a community for your business. Building an online community will bring together other people who have the same interests as you do. If you lead and build a community, it will make you stand out. You would be known for your thought leadership in your niche community.
For instance, if you have a business around SEO. You can create a Facebook group around it. Members of that group can mutually help each other. Facebook groups are just one example, and you can even use Reddit and Discord to build more niche communities. For building more B2B relationships, try using LinkedIn.
The key is that everyone in the community should benefit and also, in return, add value to the overall community. Building a community on digital media will help you make more business partners across the world. If not anything, it will start a conversation around your brand. You will learn and interact with other people and business owners of your niche. It might even lead to some fruitful business collaborations.
6. Cost-Effective
Social media marketing is possibly the most cost-effective marketing strategy. You can create free social media profiles on almost all social media platforms. But at the same time, you need to use your creativity, storytelling skills, and marketing skills to create an effective social media presence.
You need to spend some time and make consistent efforts to build your social media. For instance, if you have an Instagram page, you can do polls, show them ‘behind-the-scenes’ of your business, and interact with your followers via polls; these activities are not monetized. You just have to be consistent and be as creative as you can, as these activities will help you increase the engagement rate and create a strong brand presence.
Compared to any other form of marketing like print or television advertising, social media marketing seems to be cost-effective and beneficial for your brand in the long run. People will directly connect with your brand as social media allows the personalization of your brand.
7. Understanding and gaining marketplace insights
One of the main advantages of social media marketing is understanding and gaining insights about your customers. When customers comment, like, and share your posts, you can analyze their reactions. Customers can also sometimes write feedback in your comment sections and DMs. If you feel the feedback is valuable, you can incorporate it into your business strategy.
Social media platforms allow you to communicate directly with customers. Take this opportunity to understand what a customer likes, what they dislike, etc. Once you have a good following on social media, you can use various social media tools to research and analyze the trends and demographics of your customers.
You can even gain insights by going through your competitor’s social media accounts. Analyze what strategies they are following, how well people are reacting to their posts, and what kind of narrative they are trying to create around their brand.
8. Increased Sales
As discussed above, social media can help you boost brand awareness, credibility, and brand authority, resulting in increased sales. You can even set up an online store on social media platforms to sell your products. Instagram is the most favoured platform for small business owners to set up their online stores.
You can also collaborate with influencers and use their fan following to sell and advertise your products through social media. As the social media influencer has a loyal fan following and has attained certain credibility in a specific industry, you can use their followers for marketing your products. This is also called affiliate marketing.
Conclusion
Social media is an integral part of everyone’s lives. People worldwide are buying products and services by scrolling their social media feeds. Small businesses should give social media marketing. It is not only cost-effective, but it also lets you create a strong brand around your business. It will help you to communicate better with your customers.
You just have to be creative, give some time and make consistent efforts to build good social media for your brand.
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