Creating a social media strategy that works for your business can be a daunting task. You may feel like you don’t have the time to create and map out a comprehensive social media plan. If that’s the case, it’s helpful to think about the value of adding social media to your overall marketing strategy!
In many ways, social media is the face of your business. Whenever a potential customer wants to research or find out more about your business, one of the first places they’ll go is social media. In fact, 55% of consumers report that they learn about new companies in exactly this way.
Your social media presence adds to your brand’s personality, and can be used to amplify your company’s mission. Creating a comprehensive social media strategy capitalizes on this, as it works to communicate and showcase who you are as a brand. See below for five reasons why following a social media plan is crucial to the success of your business.
1. Building An Audience
Building an audience creates brand loyalty, which benefits your organization as a whole. Audience growth is built by consistent posting, along with creating relevant content for your customers. Each post should have a clear goal and purpose, should serve as a place for your followers to engage and interact with your company.
So what are the benefits of building an audience through your social media strategy? How do you create and maintain this group of followers?
Advantages of Building an Audience on Social Media
Attracting Users Around the World
Around 72% of Americans use some type of social media.This means the possibilities are endless for who you can attract to your brand.
Cross-Promoting with Other Brands
Being able to connect with other similar brands and partners allows you to reach multiple kinds of users and gain more followers.
Understanding Customers Better
When you build an audience, you’re able to gain unique insights into your customers’ personal interests. What content do they like to see? How can you use that to improve your strategy and overall social media presence?
How Do I Build An Audience? A Few Helpful Tips
Post Consistent Content
Figuring out when your followers are most likely to interact with your content is crucial. Keeping a consistent weekly posting schedule will help you stay relevant to and top-of-mind for your followers.
Post Valuable Content
A large part of social media revolves around posting engaging content. This means making sure you post content that not only meets your business goals, but also gives your followers something they’ll look forward to seeing.
Post Shareable Content
Sharing posts has become the quickest way to boost metrics, not only for the reach on each of your posts, but also to gain followers. Posting content that your audience wants to share is a great way to expand your following.
2. Learning From Your Followers
There is nothing more valuable in the modern marketing world than zero-party data. Zero-party data involves the collection of data that your consumers intentionally share with you, and is invaluable in finding ways to reach new consumers. Luckily, social media is the perfect outlet to collect this kind of data. Below are just a few things you can do with data from social media, and a few places where you can start collecting it.
Why Should I Track Social Media Data?
Identify Relevant Content
Your social media strategy has an impact beyond these platforms. Insights you collect from social media can tell you how your website should be designed, your website’s user experience, and other content marketing ideas, such as blog posts.
Understand Audience Behavior
Social media metrics provide information about what your customers want to see more (or less) of. Observing how your posts perform provides insights into what products or services are popular among your existing and potential customers.
How Do I Collect Data on Social Media?
Polling
Polling your audience is a quick and easy way to collect data from them. This can be performed via polling applications on every major social media platform.
Call-to-Action (CTA) Links
CTAs involve a trackable link as a part of your post on social media. This link will allow you to see how many people visited it and gauge interest in what you are promoting.
A/B Testing
A/B testing involves posting the same post but slightly changing one aspect of it. Platforms like Facebook allow you to A/B test through their advertising services.
3. Increased Conversion Rates
Having multiple platforms to generate leads from is crucial to running a successful business. It’s also important to understand what sort of results you could be seeing from each platform based on your audience type. LinkedIn as a platform ranks the highest among conversion rates with a 2.74% conversion rate, compared to other platforms like Twitter (0.69%) and Facebook (0.77%). These direct conversions from your content are great, but they’re not the only way that social media strategies can improve your conversion rates.
What Other Ways Can Social Media Improve My Conversion Rates?
Building Credibility
Social media generates leads and conversions based on credibility and trust. Having a consistent social media strategy will build your online reputation, and in turn, help increase your conversion rates.
Search Engine Rankings
Search engine optimization (SEO) plays a key role in increasing conversion rates for businesses across all industries. Having a social media strategy can also help with increasing your search rankings. Including relevant keywords and links to your website plays an important role in increasing traffic and placing you above your competition in Google rankings.
4. Continuing The Conversation
Your initial social media strategy establishes your place in the digital world. Social media strategy flourishes as it continues the conversation between you and your customers. Social media is able to bridge the gap and show a more personal side of your business. Below are just a couple of ways to continue the conversations with your audience.
How Do I Continue The Conversation?
Direct Messaging
Direct messaging creates a streamlined process for potential and current customers to contact you. Responding to messages is crucial to upholding trust between you and your customers. Recent studies even show that 76% of consumers expect a response within the first 24 hours.
Comments
The comment sections on your social media posts is not only a great place to promote engagement, but also to converse with your customers. Comments give you the opportunity to acknowledge compliments about your business and posts, as well as address issues your customers may be having. Just as it’s important to respond to bad reviews, it’s equally important to amend bad comments. Responding to bad comments contributes to your online reputation building, which increases your conversion rates in turn.
5. Stop Breaking the Bank
Marketing strategies are investments, both in money and time. A social media strategy allows you to set a budget and time for spend, which means you don’t have to put stress on yourself or your wallet to create a quality strategy.
Don’t know where to start with your strategy or your budget? That’s where we come in! We have affordable social media strategy plans that will fit your budget, and our team of experienced experts will take care of the rest. Contact us today to see how we can make a name for your brand!
