4 Obvious Reasons Why Social Media Is Vital To Your Marketing Strategy

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4 Obvious Reasons Why Social Media Is Vital To Your Marketing Strategy

Social media permeates every aspect of our lives, 24 hours a day. It plays hosts to millions of diverse customer demographics, making it ripe for businesses of any size wanting to enhance their marketing strategy.

 If you’re not making the most of your social presence, here are four obvious reasons why it matters and how to enhance your strategy tenfold. 

You can build a real rapport with customers

You might have the best product on the market, but if you haven’t built a genuine rapport with your customers, then it’ll come to little. Because it’s not just about the product — it’s about the experience.

Your customers’ experience of your brand is formed by how you are on social. The things you say, how you interact with your followers, your tone of voice — these all go towards creating a positive customer experience which in turn fosters a powerful social rapport.

A strong relationship encourages customers to engage (and shop) with your brand. They return to your store not just because they like your product or service, but because of you.

Takeaway tips

Your social strategy is a two-way street. When your customers reach out to you, you need to respond.

Respond to comments and queries, and do so sincerely. Avoid generic bot responses — savvy customers can spot these a mile off. Be friendly and personal, speaking in the same brand voice that you use throughout your marketing.

Yes, making a concerted effort at genuine social interactions demands time and effort… but it pays off.

You can deal with customer complaints swiftly

A staggering 80% of customers head to social to engage and raise issues with brands. And complaining on social isn’t like complaining over the phone or by email: it’s visible, it’s impactful, and it can easily spiral into a marketing nightmare.

Consequently, it’s important that you deal with complaints on social rapidly when they arise. Be reactive to head any issues off at the pass.

Because it’s not just about resolving an unhappy shopper’s complaint. It’s about showing your followers that you care about your customers. You’re a brand that cares and you value their happiness.

It’s essentially PR management. Where your reputation would have previously been protected in print and digital media, today it’s different. Social media is the battleground on which brand reputations are won (and lost), so it’s important you’re present to fight for it.

Takeaway tips

Use a social monitoring tool to react to complaints as they happen. There are plenty of affordable options out there, and one single dashboard is all you need to respond to issues swiftly.

And remember, always be polite and sincere in your response. Some brands can pull off the irreverent, tongue-in-cheek retort, but they’re in the minority.

Instead, respond to their original tweet or post calmly, letting them know that you understand their concern. But you should then ask them to direct message you privately with details of their issue.

Taking the discussion off social lets you resolve issues discreetly without potentially damaging your reputation in the public sphere.

You can boost traffic and generate leads

No, social media will (probably) never replace SEO. But if your SEO is lacking or you’re struggling to make a dent against your competitors, social media can give you some headway.

A strong social media strategy drives traffic to your website. When you share interesting or useful blogs, images, videos, and other content on your social feed, you compel your audience to click through to your homepage, in turn helping you generate leads.

Of course, it isn’t quite as cut-and-dried as that. The content has to resonate with your audience, and it has to be worth their time. If you know your audience, you’ll know what makes them tick — find that, and you’ll find what they want.

Takeaway tips

I hate to break it to you, but on social, a click doesn’t come for free. You have to earn that click.

How? By giving your followers a reason to click. It’s a simple premise, but one worth diving into.

And while creating valuable or entertaining content such as guides or listicles are certainly compelling enough for many followers to click, going beyond that will increase your clicks tenfold.

Offer customers a social lead magnet, something tangible that they can take away and keep. Flipbooks, ebooks, even Kindle books — these freebies are easy to create and a goldmine for clicks. And the flipbook creator by Designrr lets you create a lead magnet in minutes from your existing content that’s affordable, quick, and clickable. Nice.

And remember to direct followers to a specific landing page where they can sign up for your lead magnet. Make it visually seamless and instantly attractive to really see those leads.

It’s cheap and versatile for growing businesses

A social media presence is absolutely free in its most basic form. Signing up for a Facebook page or YouTube channel costs absolutely nothing, even for businesses. Even getting verified is free!

The only real cost of a social media marketing strategy, aside from any scheduling tools or content creation apps, is your paid social ads.

Social ads are great for businesses of any size. They appear on your customer’s feeds in visible places, either directly in their feed or to the side. Plus many of them offer comprehensive targeting options so you can aim certain ads at specific customer demographics for better lead generation.

Paid social ads will likely be your biggest expense on your social strategy. But with such a wide and diverse consumer base on social, they’re worth it.

Takeaway tips

If you do use paid social ads, don’t splurge your budget early on. A careful, considered approach to your social ad strategy will pay dividends — it just takes time.

The great thing about social ads is that you can pay as much or as little as you like. The cost will vary from platform to platform and industry to industry, but by and large, they’re very affordable.

To start with, create a small batch of ads to be shown to a small target audience. Use the platform’s built-in A/B testing service (or try a third party tool) to determine which elements resonate most with your audience.

Once you’ve nailed the perfect ad formula, you can gradually scale it to increase leads for your business. Don’t overreach though — let your social ad strategy grow with you.

 

Above are just four reasons why social media is essential for your marketing strategy. While there are dozens more reasons, the above should be enough to make you fall in love with social media marketing all over again. Be inspired and make the most of your social strategy today.

How to Go Visual with Your Social Marketing

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Whether you’re looking to brighten up your social content strategy, or you want to make your social media more colorful, adding some fun visuals to your updates can work wonders.

Posts that include images receive (on average) 650 % more engagement than their text-only peers, so it’s worth taking the time to experiment with your visuals.

From infographics to high-quality product shots, there are plenty of different ways you can add images to your social strategy, regardless of your budget, time, and internal resources.

Read on to find out how you can go visual with your social marketing today…

Create infographics

With their ability to increase web traffic by up to 12 percent, infographics are a popular choice for brands and marketers to inject their social marketing with a little color.

Infographics make it easy to present usually uninspiring facts and figures to audiences in an engaging way. Plus. a colorful, eye-catching design combined with bitesize statistics also makes infographics super shareable as well.

It’s important to get two things right: use valid, interesting statistics and ensure the design is brilliant. The information you include should be taken from respected sources and relevant to your topic, and of course, referenced properly at the bottom.

Your design should tell the story of your data – it’s important to link the visuals to your narrative. If you aren’t a designer and you don’t have the resource to take on a freelancer, use tools like Piktochart or Canva to create attractive infographics yourself.

Learn to take photographs

Whether you want to document life behind the scenes at your company or start sharing inventive, candid shots of your products, learning to take a good photograph is vital.

With the technology and software used on smartphones, you don’t need to splash out on an expensive professional camera. There’s an art to taking photos on your phone, but you can pick it up with a bit of practice.

Experiment with editing and filters too. You don’t want to go overboard and post synthetic, unrealistic shots, but a careful tweak can make your photos really pop out in people’s timelines.

Using great photos is sure to pay off. Tweets with images get 150% more retweets than those without, and Facebook posts with images get 2.3X more engagement than picture-free ones.

Use video

Incorporating video into your social marketing is getting more and more important. Over 500 million Facebook users watch video every single day, and 43 percent of B2C marketers say video is their most successful type of marketing content. By 2021, it’s predicted that video will make up 82 percent of all consumer internet traffic.

You can create all kinds of videos: from tours of your facility to quick interviews with employees. You can give customers a better look at your products, or provide live video of any events or days out. Live video is becoming increasingly popular with audiences, and it’s a trend that shows no sign of slowing down in 2019.

And it’s easy to do on your phone too – you don’t need any expensive kit. There are plenty of free video editing apps around, in addition to the built-in software that comes on most smartphones.

Go behind the scenes

Customers love getting to know the people behind their favorite brands. Small things like a candid shot of where you work, a photo from a company day out or an image of your team hard at work can go a long way in engaging your audience and giving them an insight into who your brand is.

It’s also a great way to show off the workplace culture and how your teams work together. This is valuable for your recruitment and hiring process: prospective employees are highly likely to browse your social accounts before coming in for an interview, and it gives them a quick snapshot at what life could be like.

TOMs is a great example of how you can portray your company culture and ethos visually. On Instagram, the brand posts pictures of the local children who receive donated shoes as part of TOMs’ one-for-one charity initiative.

Collect user-generated content

User-generated content helps you build a loyal customer base by engaging with individuals who love your products. It also serves as testimonials for potential customers who are just dipping their toe into your brand.

In fact, 85 percent of users find user-generated content more persuasive than content created by a brand. And as an added bonus, it also provides you with some extra visual content to cascade across your other marketing channels.

People love being featured by the brands they shop with, so reposting an image taken by a customer – and tagging them in it – will always go down well.

And user-generated content doesn’t just work for the big brands either. Even small businesses can use UGC to grow a strong, closely-knit consumer base. Look at any of the established businesses for sale on Exchange and you’ll find stores that got to where they are now by building a close, loyal community. They achieved this by engaging their customers directly with user-generated content that makes them feel like they are part of something bigger.

If your customers know that you’re posting and sharing their content, they’ll make the effort to join in. Make it easy to collect user-generated content by creating a branded hashtag for your customers to use.

Share advice

If you’re short on time but want to share something poignant and resonant, think about posting visual quotes. Use a relevant image as the background – or low, muted colors – and put either a great tip or an inspiring quote on top.

These are easy to produce and often go down well on Instagram, Pinterest and Facebook. Sharing your knowledge is easy but can go a long way in improving your community engagement.

Not only does visual content help brighten up your social feeds and improve your engagement, but it strikes an emotional chord with your audience. Customers can discover more about the people behind the brand, as well as the products or services you supply.

Visual content is more likely to be read and shared too, helping to grow your audience and spread awareness of your business.

Ensure that what you post is always high quality and is suitable for your audience. Test what works and what doesn’t, and start to build successful visual assets into your social strategy.

Kayleigh Alexandra writes all about startups and small businesses for Micro Startups, a site committed to supporting great charities and helping them grow. Check out the website for some informative articles, and head to our Twitter account @getmicrostarted to follow our updates.

What Millennials Want From Brands & Businesses – It’s Not Always Obvious

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If you haven’t heard any heated commentary on the nature and plight of millennials, you’ve evidently been living under a sound-proofed rock, because it’s very much a hot-button topic. Some argue that this particular generation is rife with apathy and entitlement, while others contend that it faces unique challenges and is more responsible than its predecessors.

 

The truth, of course, is nowhere near simple enough to be captured in a sweeping statement, and people should recognize that the millennial generation isn’t all that different from any other. However, when it comes to marketing, setting the generalizations aside isn’t an option — segmentation demands a kind of stereotyping, aiming at group identities to maximize return.

 

So when you’re trying to market your business to millennials, what should you focus on? With all of the overblown statements being made about them, it can be hard to figure out what’s actually going to have an impact. Well, to that end, this piece is all about what millennials want from brands and businesses, all based on reasoned argument instead of hyperbole. Let’s get to it.

Transparent business dealings

The days of people trusting that corporations have their best interests at heart are probably dead and buried. It’s now the default for the discerning consumer to assume that any business targeting them is ready and willing to exploit them however possible to make profit. While this isn’t exclusive to millennials, they’re in the position of having grown up with internet access granting them a window into a world of major economic collapse and uncertainty.

 

Because of this, it’s extremely important to millennials that the businesses they buy from and advocate for are transparent in their dealings. They need to feel secure in their monetary and emotional investments, confident that they can trust the companies they use to say what they mean, mean what they say, and diligently protect their data (GDPR would likely never have been formed had companies not done such a poor job of this).

 

When you’re trying to earn trust, you can’t fake transparency for long — you must legitimately commit to doing it properly, and even then it will take quite a while for people to actually become convinced that you’re reliable. Don’t lie to customers, admit mistakes when you make them, and provide some insight into how you operate. It will show the humanity of your staff and position you in a more empathetic light.

Rapid high-quality support

Having grown up with the rapidly-maturing option of online search, millennials know how to efficiently consult the astonishing database that is the internet. Inevitably, having the ability to almost-immediately find the answers to their questions has raised their expectations when it comes to customer support and resources.

 

In addition, someone who mightn’t think to bother a brand with a phone call would readily send an email, so younger people are far more likely to submit multiple queries and subsequently expect prompt replies. Any business that doesn’t have a solid system in place to handle a significant level of support traffic is going to struggle. You need to not only answer your customers but actively engage with them.

 

Brands that want to impress millennials need to embrace complex and automation-rich support methods, providing multiple communication channels, using social media platforms effectively, and implementing helpful tools such as knowledge bases, live chat systems, or chatbots. Tools are particularly vital for ecommerce businesses, especially since they’re so easy to provide today — any mainstream ecommerce store host can work with a free tool such as tawk.to.

 

But as they use complex systems, businesses must maintain a strong focus on good UX: all the functionality in the world won’t help if customers find it frustrating. For instance, if a support ticket ever requires the customer to provide their details multiple times, it will likely lose them.

Consistent moral codes

Millennials likely care more than any preceding generation about business ethics, and it’s easy to see why — their collective adolescence has been rife with questionable dealings placed prominently in the limelight (Goldman Sachs, BP, etc.), and through a combination of worsened conditions and increased online exposure, they’ve been left strongly invested in causes such as recycling and improving working conditions.

 

So on top of being transparent, a business must be ethical in some sense to really capture the interest of millennials, or at the very least not clearly unethical. In ideal circumstances, a company might maintain charitable efforts, but if that isn’t viable, it should be incredibly careful to avoid doing anything that might attract the ire of a passionate, powerful (particularly through the force of social media) and vocal generation.

 

After all, there are so many businesses around (and there’s such little diversity in exclusive products) that a millennial unhappy with a certain company can do a quick online search and find another company to serve the same role. It simply isn’t financially justifiable to push away customers who could prove very loyal if kept happy.

 

Ultimately, millennials have higher expectations than previous generations because they’ve grown up with quickly-advancing technology and a strong sense of skepticism about brands. If you don’t meet their expectations with the service you provide or the image your project, they’ll abandon you — so don’t disappoint!

 

Kayleigh Alexandra writes all about startups and small businesses for Micro Startups, a site committed to supporting great charities and helping them grow. Check out the website for some informative articles, and head to our Twitter account @getmicrostarted to follow our updates.