What Makes Social Media Indispensable for Today’s Business?

The digital age we live in today has unleashed a plethora of opportunities for businesses to market their products and services in a quick and cost-efficient manner. Social Media is one such quintessential tool, which can help you reach and connect with millions of potential customers, effortlessly.

Did you know that just a couple of most popular social media sites including Facebook have around 800 million active users? This is the extent of opportunity social media has to offer the businesses today. Apart from that, social media is a platform, which offers an equal room for both upcoming and established businesses to grow and expand. Social media marketing demonstrates a huge potential to increase sale and here’s how it benefits the businesses today.

1. Economical Option

Social media is the most economical marketing channel at present, both in terms of time and money. Traditional marketing tools like billboards, radio or Television ads etc are much more expensive than social media. A 30 seconds prime time TV ad costs $ 5000 on an average which is equal to a month of marketing cost on social media, depending on the number of platforms you want to engage with.

Also, in terms of time, as little as 6 hours of efforts every week is enough to generate tangible results on social media. With social media, you’ll never have to worry about your marketing budget in future.

2. Global Audience

Social media has a worldwide reach, which makes it a goldmine of potential buyers for your product or services. With social media marketing, you can take your business across the boundaries of your town, city, country, and even continent.

It enables you to take your products and services to millions of people all over the globe just a click of a button. It allows you to connect with your target audience all over the world while giving you an opportunity to see them up close and personally.

3. Measurable Results

Social Media allows you to track the results of your marketing efforts. Judging by the number of likes, shares, retweets and followers you can assess the reach and impact of your brand. You can also examine the traffic, leads, and conversions generated by social media posts for your website. Every post you curate on a social media platform gives an opportunity to capture customers. You can generate leads through Facebook or Twitter for your business.

While every like and comment you get on the post is a measure of your post’s effectiveness. The reaction of your followers on social media allows you to develop a marketing strategy by analyzing what is most liked by your target audience and what doesn’t interest them.

4. Brand Recognition & Loyalty

Social media personifies your brand and gives it the channel to be seen and heard by potential clients. Social media makes you brand easily accessible for new customers and more familiar and recognized amongst the old ones.

It offers you an opportunity to interact and connect with your target audience, which in turn establishes faith for the brand and enhanced brand loyalty. This is what inspires consumers to engage in business with you and also invites referrals from your delighted customers. Social media allows you to impress and invite new customers, while simultaneously addressing the grievances and

Social media allows you to impress and invite new customers, while simultaneously addressing the grievances and complaints to establish a trustworthy relationship with the clients.

5. Rich Customer Experience

Communication is the core of any social media channel. Apart from being an amazing marketing channel, social media is an effective customer service tool as well, which allows you to offer a rich experience to your customers.

Therefore, social media enables you to interact with your customers publically and demonstrate your customer service level to a large audience. This allows you to enrich your relationship with your customers and make them know that you care. You can thank your customers for their good reviews and also address their grievances immediately.

Social media allows you to delight your customers and we all know that customer satisfaction is the key to a successful business.

6. Losses are insignificant

Ask yourself, what do you have to lose? Social media marketing is a total win-win for every business. It is all about building the relationship with the customers and expanding the business reach.

Most of the popular social media platforms are absolutely free and the time required to use them for marketing your business is just a few hours a week. When you compare the benefits of social media marketing with traditional channels of advertising, the profits from social media far outweigh the other.

7. Your Competition is already on social media

Chances are your peers are already reaping the above mentioned benefits of social media. This means the potential traffic to your site is getting divided as your competitor is effectively taking advantage of social media marketing. In order to step up your game, social media as a channel for marketing cannot be ignored.

On the flipside, you get all the more reason to use social media if your competitor is not exploiting the benefits of the same. It enables you to gain an edge over your competitors and stay ahead of them.

8. Increased website traffic and better search engine rankings

Without social media, you limit the traffic to your website to organic searches. On the other hand, social media offers numerous opportunities to increase your website traffic. Every post you create, every piece of content you publish on social media is pathway to your website.

The more quality content you post on social media, more the number of visitors you will be receiving on your site. Apart from that, social media presence is a key point, which Google and other search engines use to determine the ranking of a site. As such, social media presence acts as an assurance for search engines that your brand is credible.

9. Opportunities for business partnership

When done properly, there is no end to opportunities that you can harness from your social media campaigns. Apart from creating a strong online presence it also offers various opportunities to earn profitable partnership for your business. This can be really beneficial for entrepreneurs in the initial stages of their business and small businesses seeking opportunities to grow.

A solid social media plan will only add to your efforts of growing your business and make them successful. Also use social media as a tool to connect with complementary, non-competing businesses, leaders, and tastemakers in your space.

10. Improved sales

According to the recent stats, 70% of the business-to-consumers companies earn customers with the help of social media platforms like Facebook. Social Media helps you keep your company’s name in front of the potential buyers, which makes customers more likely to purchase from you when they need your products. It also allows you to constantly offer incentives to your potential buyers and enhance your sales.

You can try by sharing coupons or special discount offers on different social media channels and see its effect on your sales. Not only, it will help you retain your previous customers, but also help you gain some new ones.

11. All companies can start on equal footing

It’s fair to say that social media arena is a level playing field. Whether you are a big fish in the industry or a start-up, when it comes to marketing through social media, all are at equal footing as opposed to traditional channels of advertising. Large scale companies have huge budgets to spend on their marketing efforts, they can hire a celeb to endorse their products, spend on billboards and what not.

Small businesses and start-ups cannot compete with big business houses through traditional marketing. But when it comes to social media, everyone gets an equal platform to endorse their business. If you pay attention to creating engaging and creative content, targeting your niche audience you can thrive and go viral.

12. Overall Business Growth

This day and age, most of the business activity is carried through internet and mobile phones and social media a major part of the same. Advantages of social media are multi-faceted as discussed above. It is cost-effective, user-friendly, helps in generating traffic, leads and increasing sales, allows you to know what you competitors are up to, helps in marketing and also acts as a customer service tool.

All these benefits of social media pooled together contribute greatly to the overall growth of any business.  The benefits of social media are endless, thus, longer you ignore social media marketing, the more your business is likely to lose.

Conclusion 

If you want to rocket ahead of your competitors, cut on marketing expenses, see you search engine rankings climb, or increase sales; you must take the social media by storm. Figure out which social media channels will work best for your business, create a marketing strategy and use social media to amplify your business and marketing efforts.

Social media is the way to conduct business in the 21^st century and if you are not already taking its advantage, now is a great times to start.

Subscribe to weekly updates

You’ll also receive some of our best posts today