Social media is an important business channel. Hardly anyone can deny that. Nearly every modern business today maintains social media pages. Not just on Facebook, but Instagram, Twitter, Linked In, and even Pinterest (if they have visual offerings). But while businesses understand that being on social media platforms is important, they often fail to understand the underlying value beneath this importance.
Social media has several valuable uses, from being a communication channel between a potential subscriber and a brand like Cox Cable to being an extension of your branding strategy. But the most value for businesses on social media isn’t what it offers to a brand. Instead, the real value is in understanding how it impacts their target audiences and shapes their behavior. Brands like yours could potentially leverage the following information to influence your consumer’s buying decision. Read on to find out more.
Educating Audiences About Your Product and Brand
One of the most distinguishable advantages of social media is the expanded space for branding. Social media offers a unique avenue for brands to reach out to segmented audiences, targeting those most likely to buy. From a cost-effectiveness perspective, it makes far more sense to convince people with a higher likelihood of converting into customers. On the other hand, convincing an audience at large will mean more failed efforts, which effectively means inefficient use of your marketing and advertising budgets.
However, it may not always be possible to dedicate the entirety of your budget to just marketing or advertising your product. If you’re new to your niche or have come out with a revolutionary product or service, you can’t expect customers to be as enthusiastic about it as you. At least not until they understand your brand and your offerings better. Social media offers various ways to educate your audience about your product or service, particularly its value over similar competing offerings. Using a mix of video, animation, images, and texts, you can start carving out an interested audience in your niche.
Creating Greater Credibility with Social Proof
While internet scams are by no means extinct, consumers as a whole have gotten smarter. Rarely do consumers buy from unknown brands these days? They are usually very skeptical, and anything shady about your brand or business could scare them away forever. Moreover, most buyers have access to the internet, which means they usually conduct their own research on your product and brand. This includes your business history, offering strengths, consumer reviews, and even business page ratings.
These are also what are known as social proof indicators. They help consumers decide whether you are a legitimate business with a legitimate product. With enough social proof of the right type, a consumer can decide to buy from you. Therefore, you need to work on building up a sizeable volume of proof, including engaging with your social media audience, posting relevant content, maintaining a consistent brand tone, and chasing good reviews with each sale. All of these will only serve to add more customers.
Targeting Refined Audience Samples with Promos and Deals
You would be sorely disadvantaged if you didn’t make use of social media’s audience segmentation features. The ability to exclusively target the best segment is something conventional marketers would have killed to possess. Don’t underestimate the versatility this offers. You could create particular campaigns around Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Black History Month, and much more. All you have to do is create an engaging campaign that exclusively targets these subsegments of your larger audience segments. With exclusive limited-time offers, you can add a sense of urgency that usually results in a higher volume of conversions.
Affiliate Marketing and Social Media Influencers
The social influencer phenomenon is genuine, and it offers a tangible advantage to brands everywhere. No matter the size of your business, it is important to continue adding to your audience and increasing your chances of acquiring new customers. A social media influencer, particularly one relevant to your niche, typically has a sizeable audience of their own. Using them as an extended channel, you can piggyback on their social authority while also offering them more followers from your own.
Affiliate marketing can also involve an influencer reviewing or endorsing your product to encourage more conversions among their audience. The influencer can either be paid for a sponsored post or paid for each conversion via affiliate links.