The Importance of Social Media for Your Business

The importance of Social Media for your business

All businesses, large and small, need to promote themselves effectively to customers both old and new. Despite every business being different, there are common marketing challenges that can keep the most experienced marketers and local business owners awake at night.

More often than not, these challenges include creating awareness, developing the right message and attracting new customers.

Social media is uniquely positioned to help your business solve its marketing objectives. It has the scale to appeal to the world’s biggest brands, but also the local presence to help local business owners achieve their goals.

By the time you’ve finished reading this article, you’ll be fully versed in why social media is the right investment for your business.

Social Media Equals Scale

Social Media is big. REALLY BIG.

According to wearesocial and Hootsuite’s annual global social survey, 3.8 billion people use social media.

The big social platforms have truly become global marketplaces. You can use their global reach to access customers from anywhere in the world, from Texas to Antarctica and everywhere in between.

Targeting your audience

But all that scale is nothing without precision. And this is why data collection is so important. Social platforms harvest almost infinite amounts of personal data. This data ‘granularity’ is used to create hyper-targeted marketing solutions. This in turns drives marketing performance and improves ROI to your business.

Scale + Data = Hyper-Targeting

Low media costs

Social media is truly cost effective. Organic social has no media costs if done by yourself – the traditional advertising ‘barrier to entry’ for small businesses. And paid social, although a media cost, is significantly cheaper than traditional media on a like-for-like CPM (Cost Per Thousand) basis.

For the first time ever, social media has given small businesses a chance to take on the big guys by leveling the playing field. This is why Facebook has over 90 million small business customers.

E-commerce

For many businesses, e-commerce has gone from ‘nice-to-have’ to business critical. In the US alone online retail sales accounts for 16% of the market (up from 4.2% in 2010).

Social has always been a key driver of e-commerce. With the help of great content, savvy marketers are able to leverage social’s huge scale and connect those audiences directly to their own digital assets and websites. Getting this right is critical to the success of any business. So, make sure you get the right expertise on board to help you unlock the right audience for your business. That's us!

Owned Media Channel

Unlike most other forms of marketing, your social media channel is wholly owned by you. You control the message and dictate the tempo. This is important as your social channel acts like a digital store-front to your business.

Used well, they can also be a great source of valuable first party customer data, enabling you to engage your customers and create direct relationships with them.

So, make sure you invest plenty of time into getting your social presence right. This means planning your activity on a month-by-month basis, creating content strategies, developing your content and managing the platforms on a day-to-day basis. If you’re not sure where to start, then Sprout Strategy can help.

Conclusion

The benefits of social media are plentiful. But the key is to make sure you have the right support team in place to maximize the opportunities that social platforms can deliver.

The expert team at Sprout Strategy are here to help you with all your digital marketing and social media needs. We can assist with everything from strategy and paid activation, through content design and development.

We look forward to helping you grow your business in 2021 and beyond!

The world around us is changing, fast. Make sure your business is ready for that change. Contact shannon@sproutstrategygroup.com today to get started. 907.390.7287.