Five Reasons Why Your Small Business Needs a Social Media Presence

When you run a small business and you are competing for market share against big brands with seemingly unlimited marketing budgets, it can be hard to make your voice heard.  That’s where social media comes in.  As a marketing medium with great ROI and low barriers to entry, it is a fantastic place to find new customers, and retain existing ones.

Still not convinced?  Here are our top five reasons why your small business must have a presence on social media:

1. Brand Awareness

By using social media to demonstrate the USPs of your brand, you can help your name stand out amongst your competitors.  You can show your potential customers what benefits they receive by choosing your company, and by ensuring that all imagery and content aligns with your brand identity, you will help customers recognise your content wherever they encounter it.  As well as helping previous customers to find you, social media enables you to search out new customers looking for your product or service, and helps you to get your message in front of them.

2. Understand your Audience and Marketplace

There is so much information available to you about your customers and followers on social media channels.  Even if you just watch how people interact with your posts you will soon understand the interests and opinions of your target audience.  The tools available on the larger channels, such as Facebook, allow you to examine the demographics of your followers and target them more effectively with higher quality content.

3. High Return on Investment (ROI) 

Even the best product in the world will not sell if people don’t know about it!  Every business needs advertising.  Whether you do it yourself or outsource, social media as an advertising medium has extremely low ongoing costs, requires little to no start up investment, and can be learned and optimised quickly.  Both organic posts and paid adverts offer very high ROI compared to other advertising channels, and they offer targeted traffic which is of much higher value to your business.

4. Increased Customer Loyalty 

If you put out high quality content, you will retain your customers as ‘readers’ long after they initially purchase from you.  A good social media presence makes it much easier for previous customers to find you again, and by using it for customer service or by personally engaging with users on social media platforms, you will see an upsurge in customer retention and loyalty.

5. Increase Visits to your Website

Social media marketing can help to increase your website traffic.  By sharing your content on social media and giving people a reason to click-through to your website, you can easily generate targeted inbound traffic – an incredibly valuable commodity for any small business. As well as the direct links, social media presence is quickly becoming a factor in search engine rankings, meaning that a social media strategy can have immediate and long-term benefits to your business.

If you’d like some support kick-starting your social media marketing campaign get in touch for a free consultation.