Did you know that 88 percent of companies in America are marketing on social media? Social media marketing is as simple as having a presence on a social media platform. You don’t need to buy ads, and you don’t need to hire a social media manager.
Those things do help, but you can reap the benefits of social media marketing by being engaged with people. Those people might be your current customers, future customers, or past customers who may change their minds. Social media marketing is often the most effective way to emotionally target your customer base.
If your company isn’t centering social media in its marketing strategy, why is that? If you don’t think there are enough reasons to justify the investment, think again. Let’s examine a few of these missed opportunities right now.
Brand Awareness
It doesn’t matter how big or small your business is, you should always work on brand awareness. Besides purchasing ads, branding on social media is one of the most effective ways to spread awareness. Watermarked videos, viral posts, and exchanges in comment sections all count as branding. In today’s AI world, you can increase your social media posting speed for videos you can use an AI video editor, and for images, you can try an AI image generator so it has more chance to viral post and boosts your branding.
Multiply this footprint by every employee in your company. Multiply these posts by every shared post, blog post, or podcast that mentions you in social media trends. As you can see, the potential for free advertising is almost limitless.
Starbucks tried to calculate the amount of free advertising that spread during the now infamous Game of Thrones coffee cup edit. They settled on the absurd number of $2.3 billion after estimating how many ads they’d need to buy to appear on all the websites, blogs, and social media. To a layman, that number sounds made-up, but that’s how much traditional ads cost, counting the thousands of smaller websites.
Moral of the story? Social media marketing is a powerful resource for reaching a wide audience for your brand.
Followings and Conversion Rates
Building a social media presence means earning followers and gaining their trust. Unlike buying ads, social media posts are always targeted to people who are likely to buy. If they’re following you already, then they are interested in your brand.
Scrolling past a random ad on Facebook or Instagram isn’t nearly as well-received. They probably didn’t express any interest in the brand in the ad, so the likelihood of converting is much lower. Social media marketing shares a lot of similarities with successful email marketing campaigns.
You don’t have them on an email list (yet), but your followers are consenting to your pitches and content. Retaining this interest also requires a drip feed of content/upsells, like email marketing. Higher conversion rates come from a steady delivery of content and creative sales copy.
Combine this with the opportunity to become an authoritative voice on social media and your sales can skyrocket. This is a much cheaper method than building and growing a website’s audience the traditional way.
SEO Benefits of Social Media Marketing
Continuing off that last thought, did you know that social media accounts rank on Google? No, we mean really well, better than any starter blog. You need to have experienced, insider help with SEO to get pages to rank well.
This is still true for ranking content outside of social media, though. Nail down your SEO team first, before relying purely on SMM. Use a good SEO proposal template to get the best ROI (try this one if you’re having trouble).
Outside of on-page SEO, though, Google will take your social media presence into account when ranking brands. A company that has a website, a blog, and multiple accounts established will look better in Google’s algorithms. They see your brand as more credible, which is everything in SEO these days.
Ranking for keywords organically is not enough without social media marketing.
Traffic Sources
To get a true understanding of just how effective social media marketing is, you need to look at the big picture. We touched a little on the snowball effect of social media posts. That scenario has more to do with virality.
Going viral is kind of a “lightning in a bottle” moment. The true power of social media marketing comes in the form of inbound traffic. Once you start ranking for keywords and hashtags, things take off.
People start seeing your posts, click on your backlinks, and further increase your website’s ranking. People find your website, click on your social media links, and increase your social media page rankings. Syndicated content adds a third major source of inbound traffic, repeating the same positive returns for leads and conversions.
Cost and ROI
Nothing in life is truly free, including social media marketing. Sure, you could invest your own time into building your social media accounts. Yes, you could even create all your own content posts.
You don’t have to, because social media marketing is one of the best cost-effective advertising strategies out there. While it is hard to measure ROI, there are methods to steer your marketing budget. You could see 100, 200, or 1,000 percent ROI, depending on how you invest.
A lot of social media campaigns are run on automated drip feeds, using tools like Buffer. Produce content on your blog or website, share it automatically on your social media accounts, and then sit back and enjoy the traffic. A social media manager is great for engaging with followers and providing a VIP-like experience for the customer.
Start a New Campaign Today
The key to social media marketing is more than following the numbers. Incorporating a human element into your marketing campaign is how you succeed. All those funny and entertaining social media accounts from companies like Hardees and IHOP aren’t by mistake.
Carve out your brand’s identity and use the benefits of social media marketing to sell to targeted customers. In order to succeed in today’s SEO world, you need to use all the tools at your disposal. Take your business to a bigger audience today by learning more about search engine ranking.
You should read this guide at Site Uptime, as they show you how to get results. Master the tools of SEO and your brand can become the next big deal on social media.
