Social networking is now a substantial part of our day to day lives which is the reason why it is a huge segment of most of the marketers’ strategies. It is astonishing to know that there are 3.484 billion users of social media, up 9% year-on-year, worldwide reported in 2019. Social media marketing services have unlocked access to new potential buyers for almost all the industries, particularly Fashion Industry. Imagine spending 7 hours in a week to increase the traffic, recognition and sales of your business for no cost at all.
It used to be the story of most of the business some time ago, before Facebook became all about advertisements. Now, the stakeholders have to take out more than 20% of their marketing budget to optimize their social media presence in order to get sales & branding out of it. A lot of fashionistas nowadays are approaching an unexpected number of potentials , maintly through Instagram and Pinterest. If you are the one keeping social media lower on your priority list, here are the amazing benefits that would make you believe what are you missing on.
Significant increase in brand awareness
By setting up your business profile on social media, most importantly Instagram, you will get to interact with a number of people. It is one of the most cost effective methods to keep up with your branding and visibility over various groups and profiles. To start with the process, set up your profile on various platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Pinterest and then start interacting with people. Set up your trust by interacting with prospects so that in future if they need something that you provide, you will get a customer. Get your business partners, employees, sponsors to like your profile, share your posts as much as possible so that you can win over organic following. Each time any of your posts is shared, your brand will be introduced to a new network of people. The more people know about your business, the more customers you will be getting by organic means. By spending only a few hours a week over your account, 91% of the social media marketers experienced a great exposure.
Increase in inbound traffic
Without trying onto social media, you will remain limited to your loyal customers. There must be a specific set of keywords for which your website ranks. The people who are already familiar with your brand would be most likely searching you from the keywords you rank for. Social media marketing connects you with the people who are out of your loyal customers circle. Every social media profile or post is the gateway for customers to your website which significantly opens up new opportunities of getting customers. With social media, you will have a reach to different kinds of potential customers.
Improvement in search engine ranking
Though there is no direct connection of social media optimization success and ranking improvement on search engines but 58% of marketers believe that working efficiently on social media has improved their search engine rankings. If you are able to rank your business on the top results of Google then consider that you have come to the half of the success path. People generally prefer purchasing from first three results if they are searching for some unique offering else might go up to five results. It is very important to remain on search engines as people do not go past page 1 for anything even if you are serving something unique most. If you have a good presence and branding over social media then people would likely search you over Google as well to know more which would significantly increase the website traffic and hence sales. To give your brand a wide recognition and good reach, you need to work upon creating unique and engaging content in the form of blogs, infographics, news and more. You need to let people interact with your posts by commenting, forum discussion or may be sharing. This will introduce you to different kinds of audience. Once you start posting the required content, you will be able to build a social media community of your business which will follow and share your posts.
You will also get a chance to come in notice of influencers who are a great source of sales and recognition these days. For example, Gemma Talbot who is a London based Fashion blogger shares her unique personal style on her website What’s in her Wardrobe. She has a social media following of over 52k followers which has enabled her to work with multiple big brand such as H&M, REVOLVE, ASOS and more. Another one is Alexandra Lapp who talks about fashion looks, trends, advice and outfits with her followers. Her monochromatic kind of choice distinguishes her from the other fashion influencers. There are many more such Influencer who are doing great over social media sphere, promoting good brands and post reviews. The speciality of influencer is that they do not run behind too much of promotional kind of content. They focus on providing value to their followers by sharing important information and reviews with them. If you are able to turn the faces of multiple influencer towards your brand then there is nothing better than that at this time.
More chances of conversion
With a good visibility of your business comes more sales. If you are able to engage the audience with your posts and content, you will gain a good visibility among various areas and hence there would be more chances of conversion. With social media interaction, you can leave a positive impression on your prospects with a humanization factor. It personifies a brand when quality and useful content is being delivered and shared. 51% of the social media marketing companies believe that if you spend time in building relationships with people, there are positive results in the sales. Imparting a good impression on users would let them think about your products/services when they need any such thing. Social media has comparatively more lead to close rate than any other marketing method. Also, due to a heavy usage of social networking applications nowadays, it has become important for you to capture audience from there. If you showcase an online brand in front of your prospects, it would significantly increase its credibility. Your brand would also be recommended among family and friends by the users. Remaining active on social media and sharing the information about your products/services there would make it easy for people to approach you. Social media platforms make it easy for people to inquire about products and gather useful information to make an informed decision. Social media is not only providing amazing benefits to the buyers but also benefiting the businesses equally. There are a lot of sellers who do not even have an ecommerce website. They just post the product pictures over social media platforms, lets say, Instagram and by commenting or DM, people can approach them to ask rates. This is how social media platforms are even eliminating the need of having an e-commerce websites. You can start your e-shop even on these platforms.
Inculcate customer satisfaction:
Social media platforms humanizes your brand to a great extent. If you will compare your website with your social media presence, you will find that what customer finds more friendly is social media. On social media if the user tries to interact by various means such as commenting or messaging, he/she will get a personalized message rather than an auto-response. You website can throw an auto generated statement which would reduce the chances of conversion as this is an era of personalization. If you are not adopting it then hundreds of your competitors are working on it and would soon stand ahead of you. I will give you an example. Let’s say you like to visit pictures of celebrities to catch fashion elements. What would you prefer? Google, their personal websites or Instagram account! Probably, Instagram account because you feel a personal touch there. You think that you are looking at something that celebrities themselves have posted. So, there is definitely a difference. The customer interaction being carried out on your social media profile is a demonstration of your love and compassion for your customers. Using interpersonal comments, you can address the problems that your customers might be facing. People are always tilted towards the brands that are loyal and solve their problems at a personal level.
Cost effective method:
Social media marketing is a pocket friendly marketing which gives you a good return even on your little investment. Signing up and making a profile on popular social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest etc is completely free. Like we have already mentioned, these profiles work as eshops for the businesses who are not having their own website to sell products from. Social media also allows you to advertise your products or services. To start with the paid promotion, you need to first start on a small budget to see what you can expect out of your efforts. When you continue spending low amount and see some returns, you can increase your budget and fine tune your strategy. While the budget application, you need to make sure that proper targeting has been done on the basis of demographics, gender, age group and more factors. Nowadays, we see more and more businesses spending equally on Google adwords and Marketing over social media platforms since it does have perks.
Set up brand authority:
Brand loyalty plays an important role in making a product or service authoritative. When the customers see you posting over social media and providing a genuine response to the matters of other customers, you consider that brand credible. Customer interaction is an indication that your brand always longs for customer satisfaction by answering their queries and resolving their issues. Also, satisfied customers love to provide you a thankful review. Some customers do it themselves if you went out of the way to assist them whereas to some customers you have to ask for the review. Customers tend to judge online businesses with the reviews since this is the place where they can read the unbiased things about a particular brand. Apart from writing about your services, nowadays video reviews are also gaining popularity. Once you attain a good number of reviews, you can ask some of your very happy clients to literally speak about you in a short video. People tend to remember the things they watch and listen more than what they read. If your customers are vocal about their experience then not only with the video review they would communicate your quality offline as well with friends and family.
Brand Loyalty improvement:
Brand loyalty is tough to attain these days with a very high competition in almost all the areas. You cannot know when you customer is starts showing interest in some other services and leave you in shock while making a switch. Though, if you are really working hard towards maintaining the trust in their eyes, it becomes hard for them to leave since they cannot hurt their brand by going away from good services. Social media is not just about posting promotional videos and pictures of your products and services, it is majorly about the networking, connecting and communicating with people. With social media platforms, it has become easy for people to communicate with brand and also other people operating for the same domain. You must have seen a number of users communicating with each other in the comment section, even if they are completely unknown to each other. Some studies have shown that millennials are most loyal towards brands and like to communicate with them or about them on social media. Businesses must implement social media strategies in order to gain this large chunk of audience.
Establish leadership in the industry:
Posting a unique, thoughtful and useful content on social media can make you industry expert which means if people want to know about a particular thing trending in your industry, your brand would be the first one they would seek. You will have a great number of following by your prospects and apart from this, your competitors might also follow your posts in order to remain updated of trends. Your other marketing efforts need to be aligned with social media in order to attain a good reach. It might also let you be a great influencer who can influence the buying decisions of the potential audience. Being an influencer has several perks. You will have a huge following who will not only watch your posts but also actually follow you. If you are one of those businesses aspiring for a widespread recognition then social media can fulfil your dreams in much lesser time than you must have imagined. Influencers keep more power in attracting the customers than celebrities since Influencer are all about one particular niche. They do try and use products in themselves and then tell people about it which seems very much authentic. A lot of other businesses would also approach you to feature their products over your account. For the preambular actions, you can consider taking assistance from any leading SMO company.
Gain deep insights to your business:
Social media accounts help you gain a deep insight into the analytics and consequently help you in shaping up your content strategies. Once you gain a huge number of followers, you can take the help of several social media tools in order to analyze the demographics and other factors about your potential audience. With such insights you will come to know that what is being liked and shared by the audience most. Some tools also give you the ability to measure the conversion and let you know which way is the best way to bring customers your way.
Especially for SMBs, social media marketing is playing a great role since it allows them to understand the behaviour of their target market. Also, small business or even newly set up big businesses need recognition and a good branding to impress their potentials. Almost every business is jumping to social media nowadays in order to touch the people who do not know about them. Also, whether it is a crime news or a newly made machinery, social media keeps power to spread it like nothing else.
It is very clear that social media marketing and advertising have got their own benefits. With the consistent updates in social media strategy and content, you will experience an increased traffic and conversion rates.
