As a business, understanding your target audience and what motivates them to follow you on social media is vital in determining how to connect with, and grow your audience. Knowing your own unique selling points and understanding your customers well, will help give your business a voice and means you’ll be able to create and curate content that echoes with your fans and followers.
We all know that social media is a must these days and that a huge and growing number of businesses are applying social media as part of their marketing strategy, but for those that aren’t yet on board; it can be challenging to understand what are the benefits of investing in social media.
If your business hasn’t started using social media yet, here are some reasons on why you need to start now!
Build Trust with Social Media
With so many alternatives to choose from, customers are often overwhelmed and want an easy way to validate a business that they are dealing with for the first time.
Seeing that you are active on social media helps to fill potential customers with trust, it signals that you care about your customers and should anything go wrong, that it will be easy to contact you.
Give Better Customer Service with Social Media
Usually, Twitter is the first approach for many customers who have pre-sales or support related issues. When customers’ questions go unanswered, it makes a business look unprofessional and as if they don’t care, so it’s vital that you are visible on the social networks that your customers are using, and that you are regularly monitoring all of your channels for mentions and customer questions.
Communicating with your customers in real-time makes your customers happy, which in turn creates brand ambassadors who drive a positive brand sentiment. Often, businesses will see customers converted thanks to answering pre-sales questions promptly. With that said, you can influence sales by being active on social media.
Build Your Brand with Social Media
Social media makes it easy to increase brand awareness and build your brands identity. You can effectively establish your brand's personality and give your business a human voice that people can relate to.
Connecting on an emotional level or showing some personality are both effective ways of helping your brand stand out from your competitors.
Become More Reputable
Managing your reputation online is a critical part of any marketing strategy and social media provides you with a fast and effective way to do this. When dealt with swiftly and sensitively, comments and complaints can be dealt with effectively, this instant feedback demonstrates high levels of customer service and can effectively diffuse negativity and resolve any issues that a customer may have.
Hard feelings can often be turned into positive ones in a very public way. Such a visible demonstration of strong customer service and problem resolution can have a very powerful effect. The customer is now happy and won’t go on to post bad reviews and warn their friends not to use the company or brand; instead, they are more likely to tell them that the company provides great customer service.
Get a Hold of Customer Insights
Customer insights can drive the development of social media campaigns and shape calculated decisions, helping you to make your content and product or service offerings more attractive and relevant to your customers. Social media makes it quick and easy for businesses to obtain feedback from customers, which will give you a clearer idea of brand sentiment and help you identify common negative points that you may need to address.
Promote Your Content with Social Media
We all know how important content marketing is, not only in terms of SEO, but in order to attract new customers. Help increase awareness of each new blog article or news post that you publish, by spreading the word about them on social media.
Social media when used in conjunction with high quality content creation is a highly effective way to attract new customers to you and also helps you to build authority in your area of expertise.
Keep Customers Engaged with Your Business
Social media is a great way of keeping your business or brand in the minds of your customers. This means you can actively influence purchasing decisions and helps to foster customer loyalty and encourage repeat purchases.
Drive Traffic to Your Website
Being active on social media will help you increase the amount of traffic that your website receives. Successful social media activities will always improve the amount of traffic referrals your website receives, playing an essential initial role in your sales funnel.
Social media as an SEO ranking signal is increasing in importance. Being talked about and mentioned on social media is a positive signal that shows you are popular and have content worth sharing and talking about. This in turn drives Google to regard your website as being more authoritative, which is one of the many signals that helps your website rank better in organic SEO.