Leveraging Social Media To Elevate Your Business Strategy

Today’s consumers have come to expect a personalized experience from brands they follow on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. As a business, you must be able to engage with your customers using these channels to compete in the digital age.

Why Is Social Media Important for Business?

There are several benefits to utilizing social media effectively for your company strategy, including:

• Brand awareness –– leveraging social media can help increase your brand awareness across various networks. This means more opportunities for potential customers to find out about your brand and ultimately drive sales.
• Advertising sales and discounts –– social media provides you with more opportunities to sell advertising space. Advertising can help promote upcoming sales, discounts, and promotional offers.
• Increased customer satisfaction –– using social media as a customer service resource helps improve customer satisfaction and brand perception.
• Easy access to customers and prospects –– being on social media gives your business easier access to customers and prospects everywhere. This allows you to understand better what these demographics are looking for in a brand.
• Improved search engine optimization –– having social profiles enables you to generate fresh, unique content regularly. This will help ensure you make your business more “discoverable” when someone is searching for it online.
• Reduced advertising costs –– utilizing social media can help reduce advertising costs across other networks while reaching a more targeted audience.
• Improve your hiring strategy — social media can be a helpful tool to better connect with potential employees and even reinvent your hiring methods. 

How Can Businesses Leverage Social Media?

With these benefits in mind, the only question is how to utilize social media based on your business’s purposes. This can range based on the size of your company and your business’s marketing goals. The most common goal, however, for businesses of all sizes and markets is to simply attract more customers and grow sales. 

If you have other marketing goals on top of increased sales in mind, you should use the appropriate tools and networks based on these goals. Each platform requires different strategies, shapes how customers interact with a company, and even accurately represents what kind of culture exists within that organization.

Consider the following to get the most out of your social media strategy:

Track Sales and User Behavior

Monitor what platforms your customers use during the process of purchasing your product. Tracking this information can help you funnel revenue in the right direction, where your product is most popularly purchased. You can also customer data from social media to identify your consumers’ purchasing habits and product preferences.

Additionally, understanding user behavior enables businesses to understand what messages have the most significant effects on their audience. This is a crucial metric for social media because it helps companies develop a deeper connection with their current user base, and it also attracts potential buyers interested in their product.

After completing and analyzing research for patterns and behaviors, establish benchmarks for each social network based on the findings. As a starting point, use the following as references:

• Follower count
• Engagement rates
• Conversions
• Traffic
• E-commerce sales

Though these are not the only KPI’s (Key Performance Indicators) to consider, they are a good set of resources to start leveraging for social media. Based on the benchmarks created, businesses can establish objectives to set new standards to begin leveraging more of the potential of their social networks.

Promote Content 

Approximately 40% of marketers say content marketing is a very crucial part of their overall marketing strategy. If your company’s only online presence is your website, you may be missing out on the potential advertising possibilities that social media channels provide. 

While marketing your products through a website is a great place to post blogs and give an overview of your company, social media elevates those efforts through videos, images, and other high-quality content. Sharing relevant and engaging content with your audience enables you to attract more people that might be interested in your product but are not actively looking for it.

Engage Audience

Capturing digital audiences is easier said than done. Oftentimes, brands need to meet their audiences naturally and find inventive ways to impress to hold their attention. 

Social media provides the perfect forum for conversations, which enables you to not only keep your customers happy when they have questions but enhances your company’s image as dedicated and attentive to their needs.

Nurture Leads

Social media marketing may help you find and develop new leads. To better nurture leads and turn them into sales, businesses can use social media to engage with them and find out more about the people interested in their product.

On your social media sites, you may offer a variety of material that addresses consumers at various stages of the buyer’s journey. Once people become familiar with your brand and know what you offer, they can turn into leads for sales by purchasing a product or subscribing to a service.

Be Transparent About Pricing

People are often skeptical of online shopping, especially when it comes to expensive items. Some may wonder if the product they’re considering is accurate in its description or available for purchase at all since there’s no way to connect with a live representative right away.

This transparency also applies to pricing. Let people know how much you charge for specific items and why they’re worth the price tag. This way, customers will be more inclined to buy something if they rely on your social media pages for information about your products and services.

Provide Customer Support

58% of consumers will cut ties with a relationship with a business due to poor customer service, thus showing the importance of excellent customer support.

Customers appreciate it when businesses respond to inquiries on social media. By using social media to provide exceptional customer service, you can exceed client expectations. You can do this in a variety of ways, such as responding to consumer complaints on Twitter or communicating with them via Facebook Messenger or Instagram direct message.

How Businesses Can Get Started on Social Media

Businesses should research the major social networks to determine which platforms best suit their business to develop a social media marketing plan. Knowing which platforms your audience uses can help you decide which networks are most beneficial for your objectives.

Otherwise, using one or more of these sites can help you increase awareness about what your business has to offer:

• Instagram –– Since this platform is a visual-based social media network, you can provide behind-the-scenes glimpses of your brand.
• LinkedIn –– This is a great platform for professionals to connect. You can post job listings, and offer a way to connect with potential employees.
• Facebook –– With being one of the oldest social media networks, Facebook is still one of the most popular networks as well. Your business can utilize the different business pages (brand page, community page, and vanity page) to establish authority and credibility.
• Twitter –– Use this platform to share posts and interact directly with audiences through tweets.
• Pinterest –– If your business offers digital media, such as magazines and blogs, you can utilize this platform to interact with users by pinning posts, promoting content, and finding ways to blend your ads into an appealing visual format.
• Youtube –– If pictures are worth a thousand words, videos would be worth twice as much. Youtube can be a great place to present your brand and show customers how to use your products in informative videos.
• Tik Tok –– This is a relatively new app that will allow your business to incorporate short videos into your social media marketing efforts.

Each platform has its procedures for setting up your social media profiles. As a result, it is critical for companies that manage social media pages to update them regularly, which frequently necessitates using an internal team or employing a virtual assistant or social media manager.

When it comes to utilizing social media for strategic success, consistency is critical. As a result, your social media channels should constantly generate timely, relevant, and high-quality material.

When posting, avoid common social media pitfalls such as confusing personal and business accounts, making updates that do not relate to your overall business objectives, and failing to utilize hashtags.

Moreover, it’s wise to be aware of the spoken or unspoken legal requirements needed for putting your business on an online platform, such as having the proper trademark registration.

You do not want to be sued over plagiarism, false advertising, or trademark infringement. Therefore, before you begin your digital journey, it’s best to learn how to come up with a brand name that doesn’t infringe on anyone else’s trademarks.

To avoid further infringement on social media you should: 

• File a trademark application to be 100% certain you are the only business with your mark;
• Ensure the company itself is legally formed, and all necessary documentation is filed with your Secretary of State;
• Have a privacy policy in place;
• Consider hiring a firm to take over your U.S. trademark application process.

When in doubt, you should always be mindful of the legal mistakes your company should avoid, especially when broadcasting over various channels.

Social media is a powerful marketing tool, but only if you use it correctly. The right social media strategy can help establish your brand as an authority in the field and build credibility with potential customers.