Social media is one of the seven main categories of digital marketing, including search engine optimization, pay-per-click, social media marketing, content marketing, email marketing, mobile marketing, and marketing analytics. Social media marketing is fundamental to your business’ growth and success because of how intertwined it is with your brand visibility, brand recognition, acquiring new customers and audience members, and driving traffic to your website.
The return on your time and investment in social media, therefore, can be quite significant, with results relatively quickly following implementation. With that in mind, below are some of the ways you can and should be using social media promotions to grow your followers, users, customers, and business.
Save Money
Marketing and promoting your content on social media tends to be one of the most cost-effective components of a digital marketing strategy. Of course, things start to get more expensive the more PPC you introduce, but signing up for a profile on the big social media platforms is free, and paid promotions–such as influencer generated or sponsored content and display ads–can be very cost-effective, especially if they are used primarily for promotional purposes and are in addition to a solid SEO strategy.
If you are either not confident in your ability to execute a comprehensive SEO strategy or don’t have the time, consider performing a quick Google search of something like SEO Brisbane and letting a professional and reputable SEO agency take charge. The bottom line is that a small amount of money and time spent on your social media can yield significant business growth, but you have to keep at it.
Grow Your Brand With Social Media Promotions
Social media promotions are by far and away one of the most inexpensive ways of promoting and syndicating new content, thereby making your business more visible. It is also the best method you have of getting people to interact with you.
Businesses need to be present in the mind of their target market and, better yet, as human as possible. This is how you get people not only commenting, responding and engaging but sharing and amplifying your message, presence, and new content. It also reflects well on your customer service.
Even just investing a couple of hours a week can have a marked impact on your exposure. Your brand and how you are perceived will impact your business. Your brand influences the number of people who will stick around, continue to buy from you, and, importantly, who will spread the word to friends and family, acting as loyal brand ambassadors.
Increase Inbound Traffic
If you are not marketing your business and promoting your content on social media, your inbound traffic will always be limited to people organically searching you in the search engines. If you have a good link profile and publish SEO-optimized content on a regular basis, your organic traffic should be consistent and a large part of your marketing, but promoting on social media allows you to reach beyond your already loyal customer base and even your target market. Each time you incorporate a new social media platform into your overall digital marketing strategy, you are potentially reaching an entirely new type of consumer, who will see the website links you have posted, the content you share, etcetera.
Using multiple social media channels is also an important part of increasing inbound traffic because different consumers favor different social media platforms. This is especially true of different age groups, with Baby Boomers preferring Facebook over news platforms like TikTok and Instagram.
Improve Your SERP Performance
There is a lot of debate surrounding whether or not increased visibility on social media and the inbound traffic it drives has an impact on performance on page one of the search engine results. While posting on social media and cultivating a following is a good idea, and you can drive plenty of traffic to your site in this way alone, SEO is the foundation of any good digital marketing strategy.
However, a large number of marketers indicate that regular use of social media for a year or more has a noticeable impact on search engine rankings. If you are able to move up the rankings in the SERPs, more people are likely to click on your page, which means more traffic and, depending on how well your site is optimized for buying, more conversions for you.
Another way in which regularly promoting your content and website using social media helps is via the exposure it can get you in front of influencers and bloggers who will then mention and link to your website in their own content. This helps your site build its link profile, which is the foundation of Google’s page rank criteria.
More Conversions
Conversions are a function of website visits, so, in theory, the more people visiting your site, the higher the number of conversions you can achieve. Social media promotions and marketing are powerful tools for growth in this respect because using your social channels to advertise content and interact with your customers not only drives traffic to your site but humanizes your brand as well.
At the end of the day, people want to do business with brands they feel they have a personal connection to. Building relationships with your customers can have a marked impact on sales.
Conversion rate is one of the key performance KPIs for businesses of all sizes and in all industries. If your conversions are healthy and your costs are under control, chances are your business is growing and doing well. There are plenty of ways to improve your conversion rate if you are driving traffic but failing to close the sale.
More Customer Satisfaction
Using your social media promotions to showcase the new content and interact with your followers and customers goes a long way to improving customer satisfaction; but you have to be responsive. People like to know that if they post a comment on one of your business pages that they will receive a personalized response from you.
Being able to respond to all the comments you get can be difficult the larger your business grows, but it sets you apart from your competitors that rely on automated messages, don’t respond, or fail to respond within an adequate time frame. There are even marketing experts who believe that your customer experience is always going to trump the product or service you are selling.
More Insight Into Your Market
In addition to being a must-use promotional tool, staying active on social media is also a great way to do market research. There is really no better way to understand the thoughts and needs of your target market than by speaking directly to them.
Analyzing the demographics of your consumers and taking note of the kind of posts and content they respond most positively to allows you to better tailor your future posts and content to most resonate and, ideally, maximize sharing. You can also segment your social media sharing and content strategies by studying which kinds of posts gain the most traction on a particular platform. What creates the largest number of impressions on a place like Instagram may not necessarily achieve the same results on Facebook.
The more insight you have into the market, the less haphazard your content marketing and your interactions are with your target market. This is good for your brand and good for business.
Establish Yourself as a Thought Leader
Actively promoting your content and engaging with your users on social media are important parts of growing your business because both help to establish you as a thought leader. The intimacy of social media allows people to better see your expertise and authority in action.
Whether you are offering your opinion on a recent event, publishing a long-form article on a trending topic, or simply answering questions and dispelling myths posted by people in your groups, there are plenty of ways to show your audience that you know what you’re talking about, are plugged into what is going on in your niche or industry and, therefore, are a reliable source of information, and should be a go-to part of their information diet.
Pay Attention to Holidays
If you want to maximize the efficacy and results of your social media promotions, you need to make sure you understand how holiday shopping and browsing habits affect sales and which of these special periods to pay attention to. It is also important to pay attention to holidays in other parts of the world. If a significant part of your market is located in a country or in several different countries that have different holidays, you can take advantage of this and it can pay off impressively. Also, pay attention to which holidays are the best for driving traffic to your site. Your customers, for a variety of reasons, might be more inclined to make holiday-focused or incentivized purchases for some holidays or special events, but not others.
Cross-Promote Your Channels
If you aren’t already employing cross-promotion as a strategy with your social media promotion, you really should be. Anytime you post content or attempt to spur discussion on one of your social media channels–whether it be Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter or TikTok–you always have an opportunity to drive traffic not only to your site but to your other channels as well.
A follower or audience member who follows you on YouTube may not be a follower of your business Facebook page. Someone who exclusively browses your Instagram might be a valuable Facebook community member. You should always treat your social media posts as an opportunity to direct audience members from one channel to the others. The reach and impression potential of this cross-pollination is too important to pass up.
Stay Abreast of Video Marketing Trends
Video content marketing is already so important, and it will only grow in importance as time goes on. Videos are essential for explaining your product or service and educating consumers. There is also a growing number of technology and tools out there to help simplify the video creation and editing process, meaning that the cost of creating video content has come down substantially in recent years, and even non-pros can see a great return on investment. Also important to pay attention to is the value of the live stream. Live streams tend to get far more interactions than even regular videos.
Understand the Power of Hashtags and How They Work
Making good use of hashtags on social media is important because it is the key to getting your posts and content in front of your target market. If you are looking to grow your social media audience, hashtags are crucial because it is how you reach people who may have an intrinsic interest in your business or content but not know how to search for it. Hashtags are also great for building partnerships with other businesses in your industry or those offering complementary products and services. A strategically placed hashtag can get other companies to take notice of your post and, if they like it or see a mutual opportunity in sharing the post, you can end up getting even more exposure through someone else’s user base.
Conclusion
Using social media promotions to grow your business is a must. Your SEO and other digital marketing strategies are important, but social media is essential as both a complementary and foundational marketing method. There are plenty of direct and indirect ways that making better use of social media can help expand your customer base, increase your visibility, allow you more contact and connection with customers, and help you build both SEO and link authority in more roundabout ways. The best part about social media is that it is free to create a page and start posting, optimizing your posts with your knowledge of social media promotion and marketing best practices.
