These days, it’s hard to achieve much without social. And its relevance, significance, and influence is only going to get larger as time goes by. Need a reason why social media marketing is here for the long haul? Here’s five.
The potential of social media marketing is still being discovered
The longer social media is around, and the more we use it, the more we’re discovering its cache of benefits. And that’s part of the medium’s relentless popularity; that one-two punch that provides access to a wider base of users and a broader base of marketing tools to help you achieve outstanding results.
In the past, social was viewed as something you might use to accessorise your approach to market positioning and search engine rankings. Today it’s the main event attraction. And its full potential is still being unlocked.
Social gives you an already developed audience It gives you the ability to target specific customer categories. Learn to use it the right way, and it becomes one of the most effective weapons in your marketing arsenal.
Social media marketing gives you better positioning in the market
Without a presence on social media, it’s almost like your business doesn’t exist. It’s more than an advertising tool. It’s the apparatus by which you’re able to improve and influence your overall positioning with the target market.
Social provides a massive audience to draw potential customers from. But allows you to focus your marketing efforts on the users most likely to be interested in buying what you’re selling.
Go global. Advertise locally. It’s a platform with near endless possibilities.
Social networks let you use a variety of post-types too. From video clips to blog posts or short, sharp advertising lines – there’s something available to attract the attention of different users.
And on top of using to social to create and build a reputation for you or your brand, it’s a useful tool for education and driving traffic directly to your website. Which will help improve your positioning on search engines and increase conversions.
Community influence is an important branding factor
Word-of-mouth has always had a persuasive impact. And now that social provides everyone with a pulpit to preach from, word-of-mouth is more powerful now than ever before. According to Linkedin, 92% of consumers trust peer recommendations over advertising.
Good and bad experiences alike are shared via social networks. And because the world is now connected through social, news spreads like wildfire.
When reports are positive, it often results in new leads. And an attractive offer on your part can convert those new leads into new customers.
There’s also the effect sharing can have on your business. When your content is engaging, whether that be words or images, it increases the likelihood that it will be shared by social media users who encounter it.
When your content gets shared on social networks, it improves your digital reputation, multiplies the effects of your marketing efforts and earns you new customers. That all leads to bigger profits and better returns on your investment.
Expanding your customer base through social media marketing
It’s not just the cool kids anymore. Everyone uses social media today. And most people are active with profiles on several different social networks simultaneously. So the ability to reach even the smallest group of total social media users is still astonishing compared to what was possible in the days before social.
This is not a fact wasted on different social media platforms either. They’re well aware of their own promise. That’s why many have developed their own marketing tools that can help grow your customer base.
You have to reach people before you can influence them. And tools that allow you to target relevant users with pinpoint accuracy, combined with new features like “live video,” allow you to publish quality content that accomplishes both quickly and at a fraction of traditional marketing costs.
Social media marketing achieves better ranking on search engines
If the proliferation of viral content has taught us anything, it’s that offering users quality content can result in a much broader customer base. Create a piece of content that goes viral, and you’ll see traffic to your website go up. And your search engine ranking results increase.
Publishing quality, credible content is the best way to attract attention to your brand or business. Followers are apt to share content they find entertaining, informative or appealing with their friends and social network connections. Which will only increase your popularity and bolster your online presence. Quality content helps define your authority and appeals to the ranking factors that drive search engine results.
When users like your content and share it across the different social networks, it will gain you new followers, drive more organic traffic to your website, and increase the popularity of your channels.
As traffic grows and you continue to gain followers, visitors and customers, your ranking goes up. And as your ranking goes up, traffic increases and you gain more followers, visitors and customers. It’s a cycle.
And that cycle is in large part driven by content.
Social media marketing is more important than ever.
It’s an inexpensive means of achieving incredible reach. Which leads to engagement and causes conversions. It’s an effective way to generate brand awareness and drive more traffic to your site; ultimately converting consumers into passionate brand advocates.
These days, the customer journey more often than not begins online. And social media networks are among the most popular destinations for internet users today who now spend, on average, 135 minutes a day interacting on social platforms.
That’s up from 90 minutes a day just five years ago. And as this trend continues to move in this upward direction, making social media marketing part of your overall marketing mix will become more than just increasingly valuable. It will become downright essential.
