The many social media marketing benefits for digital marketing strategy are unparalleled. Regardless, of your industry, having a social media presence has become a necessity. Most people are looking for businesses and information on the internet daily. If you don’t have a strong web presence, then you are seriously missing out. So what are some of the benefits of social media marketing for businesses?
1. Creating Brand Recognition
A strong brand identity should include a logo, tagline, and a color scheme, that matches your brands identity. Make sure that your branding collateral, which includes profile pictures, backgrounds, and banners, are all unified.
In addition, you need to make sure you’re using the right image sizes. Every social media platform is different has specific requirements for the sizing of these images.
Another tip is to ensure that your profile pictures and backgrounds aren’t too distracting. The goal is to use social media to drive more traffic to your website, meaning your content needs to be the primary focus.
Speaking of content, how shareable is the content you’re posting?
Effective social media marketing campaigns benefit the most from shareable content. The more people share your post, the more people see it, potentially like it, mention on their own social media accounts, and even check out your website to learn more about you.
2. Building Customer Loyalty
Much like building a house, building customer loyalty is a process that requires research and an intelligent plan. Here are a couple of tips for building customer loyalty as part of your social media strategy.
Listen to Your Customers
There are a lot of good tools for listening to your audience. Paying attention to how and when customers mention you (think hashtags on Twitter) can be really beneficial. It gives you a clearer idea of what your customers find interesting and valuable about your brand. Additionally, pay close attention to how and on what your customers compliment you, and pay even more attention to their complaints because addressing those can help you to quickly improve your marketing strategies and customer service efforts.
Diversify Your Content
If all of your content is too similar, then your audience is going to get bored and stop following you. There are a few great methods for creating diverse content. First and foremost, attach a blog to your website. Blog posts are super shareable, and they offer an opportunity to span many relevant topics and to be super shareable. Additionally, there are many different types of content that you can post. Podcasts have become particularly popular, and visual content such as videos and infographics are great examples. Similar to visual content, interactive content is an incredibly effective method for engaging and generating leads.
3. Increasing Website Traffic
By now, you’ve likely set up all of your social media profiles, but are still struggling to figure out how to likes, followers, mentions, and shares? You aren’t alone. A lot of businesses struggle with this aspect of social media marketing strategy.
Your first goal should be to identify your ideal customer persona, then figure out on which social media platforms they spend the most time. This will help you reach your demographic more effectively and prevent you from wasting time and money on platforms that don’t have a great return on investment.
Stay away from promotional sales pitches. Your audience is more likely to engage with helpful, informative content that is relevant to them and their social groups. Ebooks are an excellent example of this. Offer a free ebook download. Everyone likes free stuff. By offering free ebooks, you can direct traffic to landing pages that include subtle promotional sales tactics (think calls to action). Plus, people are more likely to share personal information such as names and email addresses, which helps you drive leads into relevant sales funnels such as email campaigns.
Research what content goes viral in your industry. Typically, visuals, humorous content, and unique takes on old topics appeal most to a wide range of people, meaning more people are likely to share your content.
Embed social media sharing links on your website, landing pages, and blog. Not only does this make it ridiculously easy for people to instantly share your content, it also improves your search engine optimization (SEO).
4. Improving Customer Service
Often customers are more likely to complain on social media than to leave positive comments and reviews. Unfortunately, this means that unhappy customers are generally the loudest. The best way to deal with this is to stay vigilant. Make sure you have a system in place for being notified immediately if someone comments on your content, mentions your business anywhere on social media, and leaves a review. Responding quickly, especially to complaints, indicates that you provide excellent customer service and that you really care about your customers and not just your bottom line.
As an additional note on this, it’s also important to quickly respond to positive mentions, comments, and reviews. Again, this shows your customers that you aren’t just some faceless corporation, that you’re a real person (or group of people) who genuinely cares about your customers. People who keep coming back to your business are people who trust you. Building trust increases customer loyalty, both of which are huge social media marketing benefits.
5. Helping with Link Building
Link building is a process of linking your own content with someone else’s content. For a quick example, imagine cultivating a good relationship with a business or thought leader that is complimentary to your own business. Let’s say that you’re a graphic designer, but you don’t offer any digital marketing services. Creating a symbiotic relationship with a well-branded digital marketing agency would be great. You each mutually benefit from the relationship by addressing the different needs of clients within complementary industries.
Once you form these types of relationships, you can leverage link building tactics by writing a guest post for someone else’s blog, and embed reference links to their blog in your own content.
Also, you can mention them on Twitter, tag them or embed links to their content on Facebook. Link building can apply to all social media platforms, so you can definitely use this method on whichever social media platforms are working best for your business. Additionally, link building can majorly increase your audience, and it can significantly increase your SEO.
To wrap it up, these are just some social media marketing benefits to improve your overall marketing strategy. Can you think of other social media marketing benefits that you’ve discovered through your own experiences? We’d love to hear your thoughts and tips!