Social Media
Social media has become an integral part of many online business’ marketing strategy. There are over 2 billion social media users. Facebook alone has over 1.4 billion active monthly users. For the business owner, this means opportunity. But how can social media actually benefit your business?
Build brand awareness
Social media platforms is where people go to connect. If your brand has a presence on the popular social media platforms, the chances of current and new customers connecting with it increase. Social media also provides one of the best ways to interact with your brand’s followers in an informal environment. You can also turn your brand followers into brand ambassadors by encouraging them to share, like and comment on your posts. If leveraged properly, social media can increase brand awareness, customer loyalty and retention.
Drive traffic to your website
Social media is a great way to drive free or cheap traffic to your website. There are several ways to do this. The most popular way is to consistently publish social media posts on your business’ social media account. These appear on your follower’s timelines prompting shares, likes and click-throughs. Social media ads are another popular way to drive traffic to websites. One advantage of social media ads over search engine ads is that they can be highly targeted based on location, demographics, preferences, age and so on. This means that you can easily drive highly targeted traffic to your site within hours of placing social media ads. In addition, bidding on social media ads usually costs less.
Know your customers better
One great thing about social media is that it provides data about your customer in real time. Be it a tweet, like or share, you can get to know who your target customer is, what they like and what they’re saying about your brand. This eliminates the need to run surveys and complex market studies. All the customer data you need to make sound business decisions can be found on social media.
An easy way to share content
Content is what drives conversations and sales online. Social media offers a great platform to share new content fast. Unlike websites and blogs where you’ll most likely need to optimize content and then promote it after publishing, with social media all you’ll need is to publish your content and it will be automatically displayed to your followers.
For today’s business owner social media is an important part of any online marketing campaign. It offers great opportunities to gain customer insights, build brand awareness, share content and drive targeted traffic to websites. Overall, it helps the business gain highly targeted leads and increase revenues.