If you run a business, particularly a small one, it is vital that you spend your marketing budget wisely to get the most for your money. Whilst there is an array of amazing marketing tools, we always recommend our clients to consider social media marketing. In this blog we discuss six important benefits for small businesses to utilise social media marketing. Social media is not only a cost-effective, but also a very versatile way to market your business. Some of the many advantages are increasing brand awareness, reaching your desired target audience, building a loyal customer base, and boosting sales.
Despite being such an affordable and effective marketing platform, only about 77% of small businesses use social media to reach their customers, build brand awareness and drive revenue (Forbes, 2023).
Want to know how social media can help you grow your business? Here are our top six benefits:
1. Social media can help increase brand awareness and recognition
If done right, social media marketing can have a positive impact on brand awareness and recognition – and the best about it is, it doesn’t have to cost a cent.
Regularly posting engaging content about your business, products and/or services, will allow you to connect with your target audience on a more personal level and foster loyalty, credibility and trust.
At Marketigation, we understand that determining and creating the right content can be challenging. This is why, as part of our social media audit, we offer a content plan, which recommends the perfect mix of content tailored to your industry and business needs. Read more about our social media services.
Here’s why a social media audit and content plan are so beneficial
‘Do I need a social media audit’ is what you might wonder, and our answer is yes! The reason is that just small optimisations to your profile and bio can make a huge difference in generating leads and driving traffic. For example, ensuring that you have your website link on your profile, in your bio and on your social media posts, will allow you to direct traffic straight to your website.
We discussed profile optimisations and the importance of great content, now it’s time to take advantage of increasing your brand visibility. This can be done by not only posting on social media but also driving up engagement, for instance, through responding to comments, and encouraging likes, shares and reposts, which leads straight to our next benefit.
2. Social media marketing lets you engage with your audience
Social media lets your business engage with your audience. In contrast to sending emails, marketing your business on Google, or using more traditional marketing tools, such as billboard ads, social media allows businesses and customers to interact. As aforementioned, you can engage with your target market, for example, by responding to comments, but also by sharing user-generated content and following up directly with customers. By using hashtags in your posts, you can even connect with an audience, you didn’t know existed.
Another great fact worth to mention is, that social media also gives you the opportunity to learn about your customers’ perspectives on your products and services. For example, by reading feedback they left on your page, or by studying what they are saying about your business in their comments. In other words, by keeping an eye on social media, you can collect valuable information on what people like and dislike about your offerings and use this data for improvements.
3. Marketing through social media is cost-effective
When talking about the six benefits for small businesses to use social media marketing, we agree that one of the greatest benefits of using social media marketing is that it helps you save money without having to compromise on results. Organic social media marketing is pretty much for free. By just investing a few hours weekly into posting content and engaging with your customers, you can achieve significant increase in leads and website traffic. We know that running an effective social media strategy can be daunting, particularly for small businesses, who are busy with their day-to-day operations. This is where Marketigation can help. Did you know that we offer social media content creation and scheduling as part of our services?
If you want to target a specific market segment, or reach a wider audience, you will be thrilled to learn that even paid social media campaigns are inexpensive and achieve fantastic results, when comparing to other marketing tools, such as direct mail, newspaper ads, radio, billboard, or tv ads.
4. Social media advertising allows you to target and retarget your ideal customers
Unlike traditional marketing tools, social media marketing allows you to target a specific audience and retarget your ideal customers. Yes, that’s right. Platforms like Facebook and Instagram provide sophisticated targeting options when running marketing campaigns. The targeting function allows you to define your market segments, for each product or service individually. Marketing to a more relevant audience, rather than to the greater public, will generate better leads, drive website traffic and increase your sales. No doubt that this is a great way to get the most out of your marketing spend.
If you’re an e-commerce business, this might be interesting for you: according to Adobe (2022), the average online shopping cart abandonment rate is 70%. Something we all can probably relate to. Through social media marketing you can retarget these customers and motivate them to complete their purchase. Sounds amazing? We agree.
5. Marketing through social media can help improve your SEO ranking
Did you know that Google is pulling information from social media platforms? Having a great profile and a healthy social media presence can help you rank higher on Google. Remember when we spoke about social media profile optimisations? Well, here is another reason to conduct a social media audit. By optimising your social media profiles and pages, for instance through using keywords and high-quality images in your profile and on your posts, you can improve your search engine result page (Google ranking).
In general, it’s important to consider that people search for your business or products online and there is a chance that they might stumble across your social media accounts that are listed in the search engine results. If potential customers click through to your profiles and find them unengaging or even outdated, it might influence their brand image and perception of business authenticity and trustworthiness.
6. Through social media you can keep an eye on your competitors
Let’s face it. If you’re on Facebook, Instagram, or even LinkedIn and search for your competition, you will find at least a handful. This means, it’s safe to say that your potential customers are following your competitors and are engaging with them. That’s why it’s so important to stand out in the crowd with a great social media profile and a steady presence.
Having competition on social media might sound threatful, however, it also opens great opportunities such as conducting free market research. For example, you can monitor your competitor’s profiles and find out which products and services work well with customers and which don’t. It also allows you to see which marketing strategies are successful and appealing to your potential clients.
How Marketigation can help you
Start leveraging the six benefits for small businesses to use social media marketing now.
If you aren’t taking advantage of social media marketing yet, it’s time to do so. Put aside any roadblocks such as feeling time constraint or not technically savvy, because Marketigation is here to help! Contact us today to discuss our great range of social media services and let our specialists create a detailed marketing strategy for your business to execute effective social media campaigns.