Are you not sure whether social media marketing (SMM) would be a good option for you to develop your business? What if we tell you that you will just need to spend a few hours a week to achieve several goals at once, such as increasing traffic, boosting brand awareness, improving conversion rates, and more? Just keep reading this article to find out 10 great reasons from Depositphotos to start using social media networks (SMNs) for marketing your products or services.
1. Boosting Brand Awareness
Increasing brand awareness is one of the goals that every business sets. This is how people get a clear idea of what you are, what products or services you sell, etc. One of the best ways to let people know about your business is through SMNs. There is no need to invest any money if your budget is limited, as you can promote your business using free means, such as posting helpful content, replying to comments, providing prompt customer support, and more. Just think of this — by spending just several hours per week, more than 91% of business owners were able to increase the awareness of their brand.
2. Attracting Greater Traffic
Getting more visitors to your website is another serious task that you as a business owner have. While there are other means to reach this goal, using SMNs will allow doing that much more effectively. When turning to search engines, people are looking for something specific; but when going through the content on SMNs, they may come across something interesting to them without initially thinking of that.
3. Improving Search Engine Ranking
It has been reported by over 58% of business owners that they noticed a significant improvement in search engine ranking after using SMM for several months. No need to mention how it is important for businesses to get high in search results and how it is difficult to achieve high positions without investing lots of money.
All you need to do is to create a profile and fill it out with helpful content and relevant keywords. It can be blogs, case studies, quizzes, infographics, and more. Remember that SMNs have this great sharing feature that allows spreading your content instantly across a single or several SMNs.
4. Increasing Conversion Rates
The greater your visibility on the Internet, the higher the chances to increase your conversion rate. Every piece of content published on your social media page may lead users to visiting your website and making a purchase. Also, SMNs provide excellent opportunities for brand personalization.
People prefer dealing with live people, and SMNs grants them this option. Potential customers can contact you right away to ask questions, leave their comments, or share your posts and make them visible for their friends. All this eventually leads to the final result — making a deal with you.
By building relationships with your target audience on social media, you can achieve much better results than just by posting ads. In fact, more than 51% of business owners reported that investing some time in creating good relationships with their customers eventually ended up in sales.
However, remember that SMNs are not magical! The way you lead conversations, how quickly you respond to comments, questions, and complaints, and the quality of your content are all crucial matters. Eventually, SMNs are just tools you can use in your work.
5. Increasing Customer Satisfaction
While SMNs are great at delivering information, they are primarily designed for communication. Therefore, if you are willing to step on this road, be ready for conversations. Luckily, you do not have to do everything yourself. For instance, you can use chatbots. They will be programmed to provide your customers with basic information by replying to their questions in live chat.
Also, you can pay someone to be available there for customers to solve their problems and deliver helpful information. If you do not have a large customer flow, you can simply do this job yourself. Eventually, we have all those mobile devices allowing us to get access to our accounts on SMNs wherever we are.
The main point is that using SMNs is a great way to improve customer satisfaction. As long as you are capable of providing customers with the information they are looking for in a quick and friendly manner, you have nothing to worry about.
Remember that people tend to post their complaints about businesses if they are unhappy with something. No matter how hard you try, such situations are unavoidable, as it is virtually impossible to keep everyone satisfied. Quick and effective problem resolutions will not only help you please unhappy customers but also improve your business reputation.
6. Instant Delivery of Useful Information
SMNs are a great way to spread useful information. Do you have a special offer? Are you going to arrange an interesting event? Have you got any news? Spread this info on FB, Instagram, and other SMNs, as they are great tools for this purpose.
Moreover, you can quickly make changes to the content if you believe that customers need more details, and you can reply to their comments related to your posts quickly to keep them interested.
Remember that it is also important to post helpful content regularly. Please note, however, that there is a very subtle border between engaging your users and frustrating them. Posting something once per 1-2 days is a good pace. But there is no need to wait to inform your customers about attractive discounts or other interesting offers that you have.
7. Cost-Effectiveness
Cost-effectiveness is a very important thing to consider when it comes to marketing and advertising, and SMM can surely beat other means. It is totally free to create a profile on SMNs, and you can publish your content with no expenses if you do this yourself. Also, you do not have to pay anything for using in-built messengers to communicate with your customers.
Even if you decide to invest some money in ads, you will be able to enjoy a great return on investment. All of your expenditures will be under your full control. Also, you can make quick changes to your marketing and ad campaign depending on the result it shows.
8. Getting Insights into Marketplace
One of the greatest things that SMNs allow doing is collecting helpful information on user preferences, complaints, interests, and more. You can get this info from viewing the profiles of your potential customers or talking to them directly.
For instance, you can create interesting polls or questionnaires. It may be challenging, however, to convince everyone to complete them. That is why you need something to encourage people. For instance, you can offer a reward, such as a discount on your products, which can be applied on certain dates, or a small gift like a branded T-shirt or a cup.
Remember to pay your attention to the following things:
- what type of content people respond to (like, share, comment);
- what they complain about;
- how much time they spend on SMNs;
- at what times they usually use SMNs;
- what pages they like and what brands they follow.
Also, you can get more personal information, such as:
- age
- locations
- marital status
- job position, and so on
Please also note that it is possible to use customer segmentation to divide your target audience into several groups. This is how you will be able to post content relevant to a certain group of people without distracting those who are not interested in it.
9. Showing Your Expertise
Creating posts and providing customers with the information they need is a great way to prove that you are an expert in your field. You can give helpful pieces of advice, find solutions, recommend other businesses, etc.
Remember to create unique and interesting content for posting through your accounts. This can be your analysis of a situation, your opinion on something, and things like this. Also, you can share interesting content from users or other brands with your comments attached.
10. Accessibility
SMNs are accessible virtually at any time and from any place. Once you have a smart idea, urgent news to share, or negative comment to deal with, you can just use your smartphone or another device for posting and replying. This is how you can always keep the situation under your full control.
