What is Social Media Marketing?
Social media marketing is the process of generating website traffic or increasing consumer attention through social networking websites. Most social media marketing programs usually center on efforts to create new and unique content in order to attract attention.
Social media has become an interface that is easily accessible to anyone with access to the Internet. Therefore, companies are able to reach more customers, faster than ever before.
Social Media and SEO
Both Google and Bing have admitted to using social networks as an indicator for the popularity of websites. This results in a new force driving the rankings of webpages on the Internet.
Think of social networks as a crowd of people. When the crowd of people following something, it must be popular. The larger the crowd, the more popular it must be. As a result, Bing and Google use social media as an indicator of website popularity.
Engage Your Customers Through Social Media
On social networking websites, engagement means that the “friends” and “followers” are a potential resource. Using social media, you have the ability to reach more people that are eager for your business’ content. These interactions could be news articles about your industry, sales and discounts for products, or simply updates about the status of the company.
Social media has become an interface that is easily accessible to anyone with access to the Internet. Therefore, companies are able to reach more customers, faster than ever before.
Social media as a marketing channel
Social media marketing presents an excellent opportunity for companies to make greater contact with customers, the ultimate goal being to develop a partnership for brand development and growth.
Social media marketing involves using social networks such as blogs, social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn etc, bulletin boards, community forums, and many others. The main benefits of social media marketing include generating more business exposure, increased traffic, and provision of market place insight. If done properly, social media marketing is a great tool for marketing a company to a larger audience inexpensively.
Benefits of using social media as a marketing channel
It’s affordable
You don’t need a large budget to use social media for marketing. To help you get started with online presence, you can use a social media marketer to help you started with social media marketing. There are many social networking sites to choose from to get to your target audience. Social networking is about building relationships so enough time needs to be put to it.
Improves brand reputation
Ensure you put focused and correct content on the sites you choose. This will help you establish your brand as an authority in the field. It’s important to ensure the content builds on your brand by providing valuable and up-to-date content.
Its viral
Social media marketing when done right can turn viral. People like sharing good and valuable content and this will help spread your brand awareness fast and wide.
Increases traffic to a website generating more business and leads- A well-integrated social media presence will contain links to drive prospects back to your website. To increase ranking, ensure the landing page is optimized to help potential customers find you on Google’s search engine.
Helps a brand establish a great connection with the audience
Social media is interactive in nature, so the relationships created can be deeper and long lasting than using any other media. To maintain the relationships ensure your product comes across as genuine and transparent.
Building credibility
What others say about your brand in social networks can either have a positive or negative impact. Give prospects a positive experience during their interaction on your sites. Make sure you answer their questions promptly and give feedback when need be to improve your credibility online. Also, ensure the content posted is helpful and genuine. Social media marketing should be done in a way that builds online your credibility to your prospect.
Competitive edge
The main aim of using social media marketing is to build online presence to sell your brand. Many people nowadays look for information they need online. Many businesses use social networks to build their brand and you can’t afford to be left behind by not following suit. Make sure your site provides quality content and easy to click links to take prospects back to your site to have a better look at your products or services.
Increase revenue and customer engagement
Encourage customers to purchase more by providing incentives- After getting prospects to click on your link, provide incentives after every purchase to encourage them to come back and buy more of your product.
Give prospects a reason to purchase your products
Give deals and packages to your followers and fans. This can be achieved by using coupons to discount your product and services. In addition, you can promise your first prospects to buy your products a package.
Educate and encourage customers to try your other products and services
Provide customers with information about all the products you offer as a brand. Encourage them to try them, for starters provide free samples of the other products to customers when they purchase one of your products.
Provide quality content
At the end of the day, what really attracts prospects is what you have provided as content on your sites. Ensure you provide content that will be of value to customers to encourage them to buy your products or services.
Engage customers and nurture relationships
For success you need to not only connect with your followers but to engage them as well. You can do this by exchanging ideas with your prospects, answering any questions they might have and providing any feedback as required. Make sure to constantly post fresh content to keep your fans and followers updated.
Engage and empowering the workforce
Employees are among the important backbones of any company. Make sure employees are able to identify a customer’s engagement and work on it. Encourage the employees to understand your brand completely to help market it productively. It’s important to encourage employees to participate online with customers to answer their queries or provide any help as needed.
Go personal with customers
Instead of treating prospects as anonymous transactions; nurture them as individual prospects with their own stories. Customers are more informed than before and they won’t hesitate to move on if they find better treatment somewhere else. Make sure you answer their queries individually and follow up to ensure they had a good experience with the company.
Produce winning content
Instead of spending a lot of money on advertising and promotional messages, take time, and effort to create quality content. Make sure to incorporate photos, video in your content to make it more interesting. Customers rely on content to learn more about your brand, it’s thus important to ensure that all their questions are answered by reading your content. Make it easier for them to understand what your brand is all about.
Focus on building relationships than making transactions
Customers will feel valued when they genuinely feel that you care about them, not just for buying your products, but to build long lasting relationships. Encourage your employees to put the welfare of customers first and ensure they have a good experience on your sites
Social media marketing has the potential of turning a less known brand to a prominent one. By combining different strategies on different sites and ensuring customers have all their questions answered and have good experiences online, social networks are a great tool for marketing a company’s brand faster and inexpensively then other types of marketing.
