It would be absolutely right to say that we have entered the digital age. With advancements in technology and increasing penetration of internet into the society, online marketing has gained solid popularity.

Social Media networks play a vital part in executing marketing strategy. It fosters your business growth. It is done through marketing, using Social Networks, online communities, blog marketing etc. It has now, become easy for small and high scale businesses operating in multiple domains, to engage in Online Marketing.

90% of small businesses have successfully employed Social Media Marketing into their system.  Analysis revealed by Social Media Examiner points out that 96% of marketers employ social media marketing. Social media connects your company directly with the customers.

Ways in which Social Media Marketing can steer your business forward

Social media marketing shapes your business, boosts the sales of your brand, invites people to like your product and more. Lets us carefully examine seven ways in which social media marketing can effectively drive your business.

• Elevates Your Brand Recognition

Syndication of your content and increasing its visibility is an issue of great importance. This is best done through social media.

To begin, you can create a social media profile for your business and ask employees, partners and well-wishers to “like” and “share” your page.

Make your presence in most of the social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, YouTube, and Pinterest which will boost your brand recognition. We should not forget that nearly half of the world’s population uses social media and that, there is a high level of chance for your potential customers to be in any one of the social media networks that you are in.

• Improves Your Brand Loyalty

One of the main goals of your business is undoubtedly, to increase the loyal customer base. Without just being only a platform to view your products and promotional campaigns, customers, especially the millennials, tend to use social media networks to directly communicate with the business.

Brands that make their presence felt on social media networks gain higher loyalty from their customers.

Loyal following is all about better engagements and better conversations.

• Enables Higher Conversion Rates

Social media marketing boosts your conversion rates. It is done more significantly through its humanization element, i.e., your brands tend to become more humanized through interactions in social media channels.

As you know, people use social networks to actively talk and stay close to their families, friends, and communities. In such an active environment of communication, throwing your brand into busy talking will definitely improve the conversion rates in your existing traffic.

• Scales-Up Your Inbound Traffic

Adding to more Social Media profiles opens a new gateway to your site and more syndication of contents on those profiles increases the opportunities for new visitors. Your inbound traffic will be limited only to your existing customers without marketing your business on Social Media.

Those who are searching for keywords related to your products and services are few in number than those who are not involved in such a search. At this juncture, social media comes in aid to the large chunk of the population who are a huge market potential. Here is where your Social Media Marketing kicks off and gains momentum.

Social Media Marketing also helps you to connect to a versatile customer base thereby increasing your inbound traffic.

• Places You Higher In Search Engine Rankings

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an important factor in the success or failure of a search engine ranking.

We have to be conscious of the fact that search engines like Google have set a benchmark for rankings based on social media presence. It has to be also understood that powerful brands always step-up using social media.

You have to optimize your blogs, and links to social media strengthen your business. Your presence in social media validates your credibility, trustworthiness, and legitimacy.

Your most effective SEO strategy should include the creation of high-quality contents that enable multiple inbound links directing to your website.

Food for thought is that people no longer tend to rely only on search engines to seek to connect with someone or something. Rather, social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter have become the new search engines. It is now clear that a strong social media presence is inevitable if you want to rank for a set of keywords.

• It Decreases Your Marketing Costs And Boosts Your Sales

Social media platform is the most cost-effective avenue for marketing. You need not invest in huge sums to do marketing on social media.

By the way, as you know, signing up and creating a profile in social media is free and paid to advertise through Facebook and Twitter is considerably cheap. Just spend a little amount of money and time in order to visibly increase your conversion rates and also to get a return on investment on your initial spendings.

Social media is also a good platform to boost your sales. With the increase in the number of people using social media, and as social tools evolve, social networks will gain prominence for product search and eCommerce. It is high time you align your social marketing and sales goals.

• You Can Gain Better Marketplace Insights

You have the advantage to gain marketplace insights through social media. If your business doesn’t have a social media presence then you cannot monitor activities on your profile in order to better understand the interests and gain opinions about the customer. This is called Social Listening. Better social listening is done through,

• Segmenting your content syndication lists topic-wise in order to see the types of content that generate more interest and produce similar contents
• By analyzing the demographics of your customers

You can eventually measure conversions on the basis of different promotions posted on various social media channels thereby ending in the generation of more revenue.

Finally, here is a snippet from the discussion above regarding the main uses of Social Media Marketing,

• You can have your own company page on the social networking site
• You can post status updates and articles of interest on social media sites
• You can build strong networks through sites such as LinkedIn
• You can monitor feedbacks about your business
• You can maintain a blog
• You can tweet about areas of your expertise and
• You can use social networking sites as your service channels.

Your competitors are already using social media effectively and that means your viable social media traffic and conversions are being nabbed off. The sooner, the better for you to either begin making your presence on social media for marketing or to enhance your Social Media Marketing Skills further.

Author Bio

Isaac John is a professional Content Writer based in Chennai. He has a great passion for writing topics related to eCommerce, Social Media, and Marketing based on recent trends. He is working as a Content Writer at Zuan Technologies Pvt Ltd, Chennai.