6 advantages that social media marketing brings to your company

PLMR's Grace Pye explains six advantages that social media marketing brings to your company

1. More inbound traffic

By establishing a presence for your business on social media, you have a whole new audience that you can reach. Every new platform that you add for your company is a new gateway to your website. This means that you increase the amount of inbound traffic that your website gets, rather than having your normal customers finding you online, or being found through keywords.

Social media has people using various platforms with a range of different needs. This means that everything you post gives you a potential to reach out to someone completely new who could become a potential consumer and even advertise your company further through their social media.

2. Increased brand awareness

Investing just a few hours a week on your company’s social media can dramatically increase your company’s exposure. If your company implements a well thought-through social media strategy, this will increase your engagements, website traffic and potentially your conversion rate.

If you have a presence on different social media platforms, a wider audience is able to see you. Even by your employees sharing your social media pages, you’ll attract a wider audience for your business.

3. Higher conversion rates

Having social media accounts for your company that post regularly with blog posts, images, news and updates, increases your visibility. This means that everything you post has the chance to lead people back to your website, therefore improving your chance of a conversion.

Furthermore, social media allows you to humanise your business. As most people prefer to do business with other people, rather than companies, engaging with consumers on social media and sharing posts will make your company look more approachable.

1 in 2 marketers have claimed that making time to develop relationships with their consumers had a positive impact on sales. This also helps you to have improved brand loyalty. This is because by engaging with your consumers online, you are showing that you can be trusted, due to the bond you will develop with them.

Millennials are known for being loyal to brands and are more likely to become attached to a brand that engages with them on social media. Since technology has become a huge part in everyone’s lives, it’s important to have a presence on social media, so that you can reach out to these new, tech-savvy consumers.

4. Improved search engine rankings

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is incredibly important when it comes to advertising your company, as it effectively determines how high up the Google search rankings you will appear for your market. Even though your SEO ranking isn’t based solely on your social media, it does contribute.

By posting content that is rich with keywords in their copy onto all of your social media platforms, your brand reputation will increase and this will slowly start to improve your search ranking. This is because, as time goes on and you have more and more posts linked to your company mentioning your keywords, you start to rise up to the top of pages when those keywords are searched for.

5. More brand authority

If your company is regularly engaging with consumers and posting new content, it makes your business appear more credible. Interacting with potential consumers insinuates that you care about customer satisfaction and that you want to answer any questions they may have.

Satisfying your consumers encourages them to tell more people about you. This can work for social media too, as it effectively encourages further brand recognition through word of mouse (a digital version of word of mouth, but instead people share through technology instead of verbally). This is a form of advertisement that is free for your company, yet extremely effective, because potential consumers need a reason to trust your brand, and people usually want to hear from others in their situation to know what worked best for them.

6. Gain marketplace insights

The best way to improve your business is by asking your target audience what they need. There is no better way to do this than to ask your social media followers to give you their honest opinions and vote in polls. Even by searching for keywords or categories on social media, you can see what people are interested in and talking about. You can really get a feel for what they want and need from your business. This will give you a greater insight into the industry you’re working in, for free.

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PLMR’s crisis communications experience is second to none, and includes pre-emptive and reactive work across traditional and social media channels. We work with a range of organisations to offer critical communication support when they are faced with difficult and challenging scenarios.