Many small local businesses wrongly believe that social media marketing is an irrelevant strategy for their operations, however, nothing could be further from the truth. Even if you own a small shop in a rural village, you can sell your products and services nationally and internationally via an online business website and social media marketing can help to increase sales figures exponentially. In addition, you can use social media platforms to connect with tourists planning to visit your local area and to communicate with your existing customer base outside of trading hours.
Here are some of the key benefits of social media marketing for local businesses and international corporations alike:
Increase Business Traffic
Perhaps one of the most effective ways to drive targeted traffic to your business website is to publish an interesting post on a social media platform and include a link to your website. A single post on Reddit can drive tens of thousands of visitors to your website over a single day. Similarly, submitting a link to StumbleUpon can result in hundreds more visitors to your business site each day.
Improve Your Sites Rankings
The number of mentions a website has on the internet’s most popular social media networks is a key factor used by search engine ranking algorithms to determine the order URLs appear on search results pages. Consequently, social media marketing is a great way to improve your website’s SEO strategy. Increase the number of mentions your website has on Twitter and you should soon start to see your website’s SERP rankings improve for many different keywords and phrases relevant to your business.
Build Beneficial Relationships
Social media platforms are a great place to network and build connections with influential people. You should use the platforms to connect with non-competing businesses who offer products and services that complement those offered by your own business. For example: if you sell high-end digital cameras, you could build connections with a company that sells high-quality prints. You can then share customer bases on all the major social media platforms.
You can also use social media platforms to connect with thought leaders in your industry and journalists. Local businesses might be surprised to learn that they can often get some very positive free coverage in local media by connecting with the right people on social networks.
Cultivate Customer Loyalty
Social media platforms allow you to build real relationships with your customer base. Getting your customers involved in your business online can help to cultivate loyalty and will also result in invaluable referrals.
Let’s say you own a pet store: you could ask customers to post photos of their pets using a product from your store onto Instagram using a specific hashtag. You could then choose the best photo each month and offer the winner a free product from your shop. The hashtag could generate a large following and helps customers to feel valued, as your business is taking the time to view their posts.
Reputation Management
Social media platforms are a great way to build and preserve your business’s reputation. This is because you can respond to complaints immediately and publicly. If a customer posts a negative comment about your business on Facebook, you can reply to that comment with an appropriate statement. What you write in your response will help potential customers to see how well you handle complaints.
Get An Unbeatable ROI
Advertising via social media using targeted boosted posts costs as little as $0.10 per click and even less per impression. Boosted posts are highly effective, as they get information about your business onto the newsfeeds of your target audience. Compare the cost of social media advertising against that of traditional forms of advertising and you see that it offers very good value for money. Even compared to other forms of internet advertising, such as CPA ads from Google Adwords, adverting on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram is incredibly inexpensive.
Increase Sales
By keeping your company name in front of your target audience on all the main social media networks, you dramatically increase the chances of them buying a product from your company when they are next in the market for products that you sell. You can also regularly share incentives, such as unique coupon codes and printable money off vouchers, to entice people to buy a product from your business online or to visit your shop in person.
Presented above are a small selection of the many benefits of social media marketing. It is free to get started with social media platforms and you could create accounts for your business on all the main platforms in less than a day.
If your business decides to start developing and deploying a killer social media marketing campaign, you should know that there are hundreds of reputable social media management companies that can provide professional guidance for a very competitive price. What’s more, you are almost certain to see a healthy return on any investment you make in the social media space.
