No matter the size of your business, bringing new people to your website usually involves interacting with your target audience on a regular basis. While it’s possible to obtain these interactions with commercials, PPC ads, and other marketing techniques, among the most effective ways to interact with your audience is through social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram.
When you create social media profiles that represent your brand or business, it becomes possible for you to interact directly with your target audience, which should bolster customer engagement. This is a form of inbound marketing that gives you the opportunity to attract people to your brand. This strategy requires you to use creative methods to increase customer engagement.
One reason why social media platforms are advantageous for inbound marketing is because you can perform this marketing without needing to pay for costly marketing materials. The three core tenets of inbound marketing are to attract, engage, and delight. Any creative content you develop should be able to grab the user’s attention. This form of inbound marketing should also help you grow your brand’s online presence. In this guide, you’ll learn about five reasons why social media is critical for your inbound marketing efforts.
What is Inbound Marketing?
Inbound marketing is an effective marketing technique that involves helping possible customers discover your company. This form of marketing is best implemented before the individual is ready to make a purchase. If you’re able to contact these individuals early, you may be able to build brand preferences, which results in new leads and additional revenues.
There are numerous types of marketing that can be used with inbound marketing to bring in new business and improve brand awareness. The types of marketing that can enhance your inbound marketing strategy include:
- Content marketing
- Blog creation
- Events
- Social media
- Search engine optimization
While outbound marketing goes in search of new customers, inbound marketing aims to improve visibility to ensure that prospective buyers seek you out. It’s possible to bring buyers to your brand by building awareness, generating leads, and developing relationships.
What is the Difference Between Inbound and Outbound Marketing?
Before you create an inbound marketing strategy, you should understand how this form of marketing differs from outbound marketing. Inbound marketing involves attracting visitors to your business or brand before they are going to purchase a service or product. If you can get customers interested in your brand before they’ve made a purchase, they could choose to purchase one of your products or services.
When you’re developing materials to use for your inbound marketing strategy, it’s important to make sure that potential customers are able to understand how your services or products will answer their questions, meet their needs, or solve the problems they’re having.
Outbound marketing is a strategy that involves sending marketing materials to many people for the purpose of generating sales. When performing this type of strategy, the main goal is to reach as many people as possible to ensure a high return. The most common types of outbound marketing involve:
- Newspaper ads
- Cold calling
- Radio adverts
- Pay-per-click advertising
- Direct mail
- Billboards
- Events
When performing inbound marketing, you’ll benefit from being able to advertise to people who make up your target audience, which means that it’s much more likely for these individuals to become qualified leads. Both inbound and outbound marketing can be performed on social media platforms.
Why is Social Media Important for Inbound Marketing?
The majority of people believe that social media isn’t as great for inbound marketing as it is for outbound marketing. This, however, isn’t the case. Social media gives you the ideal opportunity to directly engage with your primary audience. Since many people spend most of their time on social networks when using the internet, focusing your inbound marketing efforts on social media channels can pay dividends when implemented correctly.
While there are many social media platforms that inbound marketing can be applied to, Facebook is a great option since it currently boasts more than 2.9 billion active users. Nearly 60% of all users who spend time on social media networks use Facebook.
YouTube is visited by around 2.3 billion active users each month, which puts it in second place among all social media networks. Keep in mind that video content is considered by many to be more engaging than other forms of content, which can help you when creating marketing materials.
5. It Connects You with Your Target Audience and Drives Content Creation
When using social media for your inbound marketing strategy, you can connect more readily with your intended audience. Customers are able to have interactions with you in a more efficient manner when compared to other solutions. If a customer wants to ask you a question, they can get in touch with you on your social media profile, which should result in a quick response.
When using social media for building customer relationships, a focus should be on providing the audience with value. Providing informative and relevant content can help you connect with your audience and may make your brand more relatable. If a user posts criticism on your social media profile, respond with a positive comment that focuses on solving their issues.
When you perform inbound marketing on social media, you should also gain a considerable amount of helpful feedback and information from the audience you’re attempting to convert into paying and return customers, which may be able to help you improve your offerings.
4. It Helps Establish Relevancy and Authority by Promoting Content
Using social media for inbound marketing can also help you establish relevancy and authority for your brand. Along with creating quality content on a regular basis, you also have verification capabilities with most social media platforms. For instance, verified businesses on Twitter receive a blue check mark. These features can provide your business and brand with more authority.
When it comes to creating quality content, try to provide your audience with content about the services or products you offer. You should also focus on delivering content that’s related specifically to your business. It’s through this content that users can determine if your business can fulfill their needs. Upwards of 86% of all consumers on social media prefer brand personalities that are honest and authentic.
Once you create compelling and interesting content, you should start to bring in qualified leads. These leads may comment under an article of yours or share your content, which further expands your brand’s reach.
3. It Inspires New Business Ideas
When you use social media, you should be able to obtain new product ideas and possible directions for your business and brand when you engage directly with your audience. Without these insights, it may be difficult to expand your company in a manner that appeals to your primary audience. If you listen to what your audience has to say, you might be given new methods for promoting your brand or offering new products. There are many ideas that could come to mind when interacting with your audience.
2. It Naturally Improves Your Website’s SEO
Social media also gives you the opportunity to improve your website’s SEO. Keep in mind that having a strong social media presence can substantially improve your brand’s SEO even though social media isn’t a primary factor for search engine rankings. If you regularly interact with your audience on social media and provide new content, your business and website will gain more exposure. Having relevant content and higher exposure should help you expand your reach and bring direct traffic to your website.
1. It Is a Valuable Audience Research Tool for Your Business
Social media is a great audience research tool that can provide you with many insights into your audience. Different social media platforms will allow you to gain psychographic and demographic data about your audience. For instance, you’re able to learn about your customer’s interests, hobbies, and other insights. Once you’ve gathered this information, you can use it to identify what these individuals want from your brand.
It’s also possible to use social media platforms to test your content and perform research on the competition. Let’s say that you put out two similar posts with one containing a video message and another consisting of links that lead to blog articles. You can measure the results from these posts to determine which one was most effective with engaging your audience.
You should also be able to determine what topics your audience and the broader industry find interesting. Competitor research is possible through social media as well. You can compare how many comments are posted under your content when compared to the competition. Try to identify what the top trending hashtags are for the industry you operate out of. Performing audience research through social media may help you gain an advantage against the competition.
Inbound marketing is a technique that allows you to effectively bring users to your business or brand without putting out direct marketing materials. While there are several methods you can use to implement inbound marketing, social media may be the most effective. Before using social media to bolster your inbound marketing strategy, consider creating business profiles on the most popular social media platforms.
