Social media has become a critical aspect of everyday living. Without social media, your inbound marketing may never produce tangible results. It has become a gathering of sorts where you can easily access customers en masse. But more specifically, you can still personalize conversations to a tee.
There’s no better union than social media and inbound marketing. You’ll find prospects and create meaningful conversations with your customers.
To a large extent, social media is a staple in inbound marketing. Unlike other marketing channels, prospects and customers hang out on social media.
That said, you may be unaware of why social media is an integral part of inbound marketing. Or how to execute your social media strategies in line with your overall inbound marketing.
For starters, inbound marketing is the type of marketing that makes customers aware of your company. Inbound marketing takes place even before a customer decides to buy. You can use a variety of channels in inbound marketing inducing:
- Search engine optimization (SEO)
- Content marketing
- Blogging
- Webinars
- Social media
- Etc
However, our focus is why is social media an essential part of inbound marketing?
Building Your Brand Using Social Media
Every so often, a fad or trend, if you like, gets social media users excited and brand leverage on this to market their brand. In most cases, it’s the quirky and creative responses that get users excited.
If a brand is lucky, its tweet might go viral with massive engagement. In the end, thousands, if not millions, will know about your brand if they haven’t already. A social media presence allows users to access information about your company efficiently.
Now your goal is to ensure that potential customers or followers view your company as credible and authoritative. When customers trust your content, they’ll engage with you accordingly. You need to select the right images that convey confidence or stick to recognizable tones in your posts.
Of course, you need to have a brand’s voice. The brand voice should be consistent in all your social media channels. And then again, each social media channel relies on different forms of content.
You could share a similar message but in different forms and styles in each social media channel. A good example is the content on TikTok and YouTube.
While both of these channels are primarily video-based, Tiktok videos tend to be shorter than Youtube.
The other requirement is to share social media posts consistently. This could be daily or weekly, depending on the social media channel and your target audience. Most importantly, use a language your users will understand.
Get Valuable Customer insights Through Social Media Channels.
Traditional marketing methods such as newspaper ads or TV commercials dont have immediate responses. However, digital marketing channels such as social media and blogs have prompt responses.
For one, this kind of user interaction is valuable in marketing. The fact that you can easily access your customers’ feelings about certain content or product is incredible.
Further, all social media channels provide insights to marketers. With the valuable data, you can learn more about your customer needs, which helps you fulfill them. When it comes to creating engaging or SEO-optimized content, social media insights are valuable assets.
Again, you use social media as a lead generation tool. You direct your followers and readers back to your website where they can learn more. Essentially, social media provides a deeper understanding of your followers.
Attract New Readers To Your Site
Think of it this way; social media offers a free platform to market your company or brand. How cool is that? You only need to sit down and create a two-way engaging communication channel with your prospects and existing customers.
So far, social media channels have a billion-strong worldwide fraternity. Locally, we are talking of tens of million potential customers, depending on the kind of product you are selling. Well, for better results, you need to hire professional assistance.
They’ll help you attract new readers to your social media channels, thus your website. There’s a catch! You need to create relevant and engaging content. When readers feel you have valuable content, they’ll share it with others.
Your posts should be accompanied by eye candy images while your videos should be creative and full of life. Your content is competing with other companies for attention. As such, you need to stand out.
This is where copywriting skills come in handy. Remember, you only got a few seconds to capture the attention of social media users on their timelines. Ideally, you should review your content frequently to see what works or doesn’t
Build Impressionable Relationship With Your Followers
Customers tend to look at a company’s social media before buying. This is not unusual considering recruiters use the same method to check a potential candidate’s behavior. The customer will learn more about a company’s products or culture.
If you have active social media, customers can quickly review them. Additionally, they get to see what’s on offer. Now, this is where you come in and impress them with your content or user engagements.
Potential customers are looking for a simple thing such as your response time or type of response.
If your engagement is lively coupled with highly positive customer care, customers will associate further with your brand.
All you have to do is share consistent, informative, or entertaining content that users can engage in.
Social Media Boosts Seo Organically
Search engine optimization(SEO) is also part of inbound marketing. Social media boosts SEO even if it does not affect ranking directly. An aggressive social media marketing positively impacts your SEO.
In the real sense, when you have a consistent social media presence, you create more awareness for your business. If you combine this with alternative digital marketing methods, you get more eyeballs on your brand’s content which generates leads.
Over time your social media gains traction and might achieve authoritative status. As a result, your business gets influencers linking to your content. Again, this extends your reach further and adds broader recognition.
When you become a credible authority, this will have a significant impact on your SEO standing. Unlike paid SEO, this form of reach occurs organically.
Also, the great thing about this form of marketing is that you can build long-lasting relationships with your followers.
Social Media Boost Content Creation
Social media such as Quora and Reddit are excellent sources of content for your business. When you visit these sites, you get a glimpse of what’s trending. But that doesn’t mean you limit your searches to social media channels only.
Other sources of content include niche-specific forums and online reviews. Moreover, social media is excellent for tracking your competitors. Insight tools in most social media sites allow you to track your competition content.
Heck, they even show you the performance of these tools. Still, you can use social media monitoring tools to gain more insights from your competitors.
The information helps improve your content strategy. Your followers’ feedback allows you to streamline your social media content further. This means you attract customers when you offer content they crave for.
Social media monitoring tools come in handy. Once you create pieces of content, you can track its performance over all the social media platforms. Tools such as Hootsuite allows users to schedule posts to maximize high traffic.
For your overall inbound marketing strategy, you can regularly review these sites to see what’s popping.
Example of Social Media Channels
- Youtube: a social media platform that focuses on video content; typically, long videos are better here
- Tiktok: a short video platform that’s exploding in popularity, especially among gen Z.
- Facebook: blogging platform with billion users
- Instagram: owned by a new co company that owns Facebook, Meta. A photo-sharing platform
- Pinterest: great for sharing creative ideas.
- Twitter: a microblogging platform
- LinkedIn: a social media platform that connects professionals
Final Thoughts
Inbound marketing is an excellent way of getting prospects’ attention even before they are ready to purchase. Social media adds to this equation by contributing to the funnel. Social media helps you gain valuable insights or content creation ideas that are effective in your inbound marketing.
Furthermore, social media organically contributes to SEO. The bottom line is that social media can’t be ignored in your inbound marketing strategies. For better results, identify the most effective social media channels for your product or service.
Also, it would be best if you got to the heartbeat of every social media channel to ensure you do not lose your audience.