In the past few years, not only has social media shown tremendous and dream-like growth but also successfully pervaded the online consciousness of all internet users worldwide. Today its influence is even more widespread, and its footprints are impossible to ignore in commercial and business circles.
Social media marketing has become so important and vital, that businesses are increasingly planning and strategizing on it to optimally exploit it to their business’s profitability. Here we list the top benefits of social media marketing for business for all those skeptics who are yet to see its viability.
Increases Brand Awareness
Owing to its huge user database, social media is a highly effective and extremely low-cost means to increase brand awareness and generate new customers. It can easily create familiarity with your company’s web presence and leaves an imprint on the minds of customers, prospects, and patrons. Most social accounts allow free registration and only demand your time. However, an account should be properly utilized and well maintained, and you should be active and vigilant enough to develop maximum connections. Brand awareness not only positively influences the buying patterns and behaviors of the customers but also further cements the loyalty of customers.
Legitimizes Your Brand
Customers tend to conduct an online search about a brand quite regularly. If the same information is made available on social media, it goes a long way toward customer recognition of a company’s product and services, leading to brand legitimization.
Increases Website Traffic and SEO Ranking
Over 80% of marketers claim that increased social media presence culminates in increased website traffic. This is hardly surprising, given the fact that over 73% of adults who remain online spend a great deal of time on social media like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. Facebook is the top social website that attracts the largest amount of traffic. Additionally, it has been established that the higher the number of media shares received by you, the higher your ranking in search engines.
Lead Generation Happens at Minimum Costs
The cost per lead generation from social media amounts to about just about a fraction of the cost per lead through traditional means like newspapers, radio, or commercials. It is believed that it can save up to about 80% of the total lead generation costs, which assists in increasing the company’s ROI, both by cost-cutting and increased sales. Moreover, social networks also have the availability of cost-effective paid advertising options like Facebook Ads and Twitter Ads, which allow any business establishment to scale, increase reach, and fuel demand generation. Considering that lead generation is the oxygen of any business process, doing so at a minimal cost can only be profitable and advantageous.
Boosts Content Marketing
To attribute greater emphasis on content, even search engines like Google have recently changed their search engine algorithms. Even though content marketing emerges as the most important digital marketing tool of 2015, as per the digital marketing trends poll, it remains a sore area for any marketer to disseminate the content to maximum customers in the shortest time. Social media goes a long way in addressing the issue. Sharing content on your business has become quite easier and faster through various social media platforms. Nevertheless, while sharing content on social platforms, you need to ensure that the social content not only aligns with your brand but also whets the customer’s interest and attention.
Brings About an Increase in Sales
As more and more people engage with your brand and follow it, more and more successful opportunities for sales will ensue. The increased number of likes, sharing, or recommendations of content happens on various social platforms and leads to increased sales. More often than not, the contents are embedded with sales and marketing elements, which facilitate sales.
Provides You with a Better Audience Insight
Social media makes it easy for any company to know its audience and reach out to them. Through various tools, one can easily learn the dominant language spoken, age, gender, interests, etc. This assists you in designing campaigns and making relevant product offers, thereby giving you a better return on investment.
There is a myth that social media can only assist big companies, and not small businesses and startups, and this discourages them from making use of it effectively. Any business can benefit from knowing its customers and connecting with them on social media. It is even more beneficial for the smaller companies, as they have less money to invest in marketing and advertising.