Social Media Marketing In Business: Growth And Revenue

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The use of social media in business and marketing has become more than just a trend. It has become a necessity. Social media marketing has proven to be a game-changer for big and small businesses, helping companies increase revenue and foster business growth. 

So, if you’re looking for ways to leverage the potential growth that social media can offer for your business, then this post can provide some great ideas, tools, tips, and marketing strategies to increase your revenue. 

How Does Social Media Help Your Business?

Businesses that use social media marketing can benefit in a number of ways. 

One of the benefits of using social media marketing for your business is the versatility that it can offer. This includes the lower costs for paid advertising, quick and easy lead generation, demographic analysis, the intimate interaction you can have with your audience, and the opportunity to reach a wider audience than other marketing strategies can offer. 

10 ways that social media can help your business:

1. Wider reach and more diverse audience
2. Cost-effective
3. Increased brand visibility
4. Better customer engagement
5. Demographic analysis
6. Collaboration and networking opportunities
7. Multiple platforms for larger audiences
8. High return on investment (ROI)
9. Potential for passive income
10. Increased website traffic

Because there are billions of social media users among the world’s population, it is a necessity for any business to be active on them if they want to gain more potential customers. 

Since there are dozens of them, using social media platforms for digital marketing can be a great way to reach out to new audiences who may only be on certain platforms. So diversifying as you grow is critical for continued growth to reach a large audience. 

When you use any of the social media analytics tools that are only available for business profiles, you can better understand who your audience is so you can better customize the content you produce. 

What is Social Media Marketing?

Social media marketing is a digital marketing strategy that involves using social media platforms (like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc.) to promote and market products, services, or brands.

The power of social media has revolutionized the way businesses connect with their target audience. 

By establishing a strong online presence, and following a simple and clear social media marketing strategy, you can boost brand awareness, engage with your target audience, and drive traffic to your website. With the ability to reach a global audience, social media presents a unique opportunity for businesses of all sizes to expand their reach and tap into new markets.

One of the key benefits of social media marketing is its cost-effectiveness, which makes it a powerful tool. 

Social Media Marketing is Free, or Inexpensive

Unlike traditional marketing methods, social media marketing offers a much more affordable, and often free, way to promote your products or services and reach a broader audience. This is particularly beneficial if you have a limited marketing budget.

By designating a small portion of your marketing budget to social media advertising, you can achieve much quicker results without spending more than you are comfortable with. 

Pinterest is a great place to start for many niches in the lifestyle category (fashion, food, home, family, education, etc.), . 

For professionals and experts in their field, LinkedIn is the best platform to get started. 

Facebook is perfect for businesses that want to reach a much wider, and worldwide demographic. Try using my free Autumn Canva templates to brighten up your cover photo during the fall season.

For influencers and those who really enjoy being in front of a camera, or just like to create small bites of content, Instagram can offer this.

Ways to Promote Your Business on Social Media

When you are ready to promote your business on social media, you will want to set clear goals that guide your progress and encourage you to aim for certain metrics. This can be attaining x amount of followers each month, gathering x amount of emails a month, selling x amount of products each week, posting x times per day, and so on.

Setting S.M.A.R.T. Goals

The best way to set clear goals is to use the S.M.A.R.T. method. This stands for specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-based. If you want to learn more about using this method of setting goals, take a look at how Tony Robbins explains the S.M.A.R.T. method.

Before you start setting goals though, you will want to consider which platform is right for you and your business. Not all platforms are created equal, and not all platforms are right for every business.

So before you start signing up for all the social platforms out there, you will want to consider a few things first. If you have a virtual assistant that provides you with social media services, then this is less of a concern.

Choose The Right Social Media Platform

When choosing which social media platforms to promote business, do a quick evaluation of the type of business you have. If you sell to other businesses rather than to customers, then the best business-to-business social media marketing platform is going to be LinkedIn. 

For B2C or business-to-customer business models, most of the other platforms will work just fine. However, there is still some refining to do as to which platform is going to work best for your business.

You also have to consider which platforms you are most familiar with. This can make the initial growth process much easier. However, familiarity shouldn’t be the only deciding factor. 

Facebook

Facebook is by far the most popular platform for B2C marketing. It also works well for live videos or live streams. So if you are comfortable with this, I recommend starting here. After Facebook, the next most popular comes Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, Pinterest, Snapchat, and a few others. 

You can check out how these two soap makers successfully run their businesses on Facebook.

If you would like some free Canva templates for your cover photos, be sure to read my post Beautiful Autumn Facebook Cover Photos (Free Templates) to snag your freebie.

YouTube

If you create a lot of tutorials, reviews, and longer video content, your YouTube channel is prime real estate. Instagram does this a little, but not quite as well. Youtube is more of a video and visual search engine (similar to Pinterest). 

Instagram

Whereas, Instagram is great for both photos and short videos alike. And, is designed best for its users to constantly scroll. For those who enjoy creating this type of content, or whose business works well with this type of content, then Instagram can help you a lot with brand awareness. 

Instagram is also great for influencers, and those who sell digital products (courses, downloadables, etc.).

Pinterest

Pinterest works very well for all things in the lifestyle realm. Such as fashion, home and decor, education, blogging, food, travel, family, and more. 

However, Pinterest is unique in that it is more of a visual search engine. And over 85% of its searches are unbranded. Like most search engines though, Pinterest encourages its users to save their pins or interact with their content.

And, sometimes what these content interactions mean, is a click on a pin, to the website that it is linked to. This is great news for anyone seeking to drive traffic or generate traffic to their site. 

How to Grow Your Business with Social Media Marketing

With any successful social media strategy, the opportunity to reach a wider audience is one of the best ways to grow your business.

​The importance of social media when it comes to content creation is this great tool called brand building. Brand building requires “getting your name out there”, and social channels are an easy way to do this. 

As your social media traffic grows, you can begin to analyze your traffic by checking the demographics. Your social media analytics allow you to better customize your products and the content that you produce so you can better serve your target audience.

Social media is also the ideal place to begin collaborating with other businesses and even start working with influencers as well. Networking online is a much faster way to increase your visibility, your brand awareness, and grow your audience which consequently grows your business.

Additionally, social media is also the perfect place to show off the ‘behind the scenes of your business’. Behind the scenes gives your audience an opportunity to connect with your business even more because they get to see you at work, creating the content and products. It also helps to build trust and increases the authority your business has.

Ways to Increase Revenue in your Business using Social Media Marketing

A content calendar can allow you to track and keep up with your content marketing without taking up too much time. An unfortunate side effect of social marketing is that it can take time to keep up with all of the needs. Like responding to your audience’s questions or comments, and content creation. 

Social media campaigns are a powerful way to push you closer to your goals. Your top priority in these marketing campaigns should be to simply produce the content. You can do this by batching your content if you choose, or you can create content from day to day. 

However, if you find yourself too busy, you prefer to batch content, or you don’t want the hassle of scheduling your content a day at a time, there are social media management tools. These tools allow you to produce content, upload it onto their website, and then fill in the content from there. One of the most well-known social media management tools among bloggers is Tailwind. 

Tailwind can be scheduled to publish posts days, weeks, months, and even years down the road. However, there is the use of social media platforms with a scheduler like Meta Business Suite which can allow you to schedule posts up to 30 days. Pinterest recently updated their platform scheduler (2023) as well, for 100 pins up to 30 days.

How to Increase Website Trafic with Social Media Marketing

With social media marketing, each platform is a little bit different. However, they can all be set up so your audience can easily find you on your profile bio. 

So, no matter which platforms you use, you want to make sure that each one is optimized. 

If you haven’t already added in a privacy policy, disclaimer page, or terms and conditions page to your website, you will want to read my post to learn more about why you are legally required to have these on your site. If you want to get a free copy of Amira Irfan’s legal guide, you can get it sent directly to your email here.

If you are short on time, you can get all of the required legal documents for your website in Amira’s Comprehensive Bundle. Each template can be filled out in 30 minutes or less.

Optimized Social Media Bio

A social media platform is optimized when your website link is clickable and can be followed (the link actually works). Your profile information is accurate and complete. And, your bio includes a short bit of info that explains what it is you do and/or what your business is. 

Create High-Quality Content

Create high-quality content that engages your audience. High quality means that it provides actual value to your audience and includes useful information. Social media engagement is also an opportunity to get a little bit of customer feedback. Social media engagement includes valuable insights into what your audience actually wants and has a positive impact on them which encourages loyalty. 

If you sell products that help your customer’s hair grow thicker, a good example of this could be an infographic. This infographic could include statistics explaining the benefits of each ingredient. 

If you sell a digital course, you could give a sneak peek that explains why your course works better than the competition. 

Or, maybe if you have in-person classes for a crafting session, you could show your followers some of your previous students’ results. And even include a brief and simple step-by-step process on how they can too.

By creating high-quality content, you increase your chances of bringing in new customers every day. Especially when you follow the next tip.

Post Consistently

Posting consistently is a great way to drive traffic to your website and how to drive traffic to your blog posts. When you post consistently on social media sites, you encourage the algorithm to show your content more. This allows your audience to see it more often, which then increases your chances of clickthroughs and conversions. Your social media posts s

Create Shareable Content

Creating shareable content allows you to take a ride on the ‘share train’. When your content is shareable, this allows your audience to share your content with their friends and family and become a trend that keeps growing. So, if you want to play around with different types of shareable content, you could show off one of your new products, and even offer giveaways for followers who have the most shares. 

Create Relevant Content

Creating relevant content is another key business strategy for building good customer relationships. Good customer relationships lead to a loyal audience, which means they will keep coming back your your content, and your website, time and again. This means more traffic to your site.

Using Google Analytics, you can get a better look at the specific demographics of who is clicking through to your site. Unfortunately, social media metrics can be a bit limited in what their demographics can track.

Pros of Using Social Media for Business

The pros of using social media channels for business include better engagement with your audience, a larger audience demographic and reach, opportunities to collaborate with other businesses, and increased leads and lead conversions. 

With increased leads, you have a better chance of getting potential clients to click through to your landing page, and with increased clickthrough comes better conversion. 

When you find the best social media platform for your business, your marketing efforts become much easier. Using any type of social media communication, you can better learn the pain points of your customers. 

​The benefits of social media include the opportunity to build a bit more social proof as well. Social media can be a great way to gather and show off your previous customers’ testimonials, and reviews, complete case studies, and even earn the chance to get endorsements from other influencers and other well-known celebs.

Your social media presence can greatly benefit your opportunities to increase revenue, build brand awareness, build social proof, 

Cons of Using Social Media for Business

With many positives, come a few negatives. 

Even though there are many benefits to using social media for business, there are some downfalls that may cause some to shy away.

If you’ve been on social media for any amount of time, I’m sure you’ve experienced or seen some poor soul who was scammed or hacked, or even had their information stolen. While I’d like to say this only happens with social media, it’s just a part of the online world.

I have actually had this happen once on my personal Facebook account, but have since been much more careful and aware of potential threats and things to avoid. Fortunately, there are ways that you can avoid these unfortunate events as well.

10 Best Practices to avoid being hacked on social media:

1. Use strong and unique passwords
2. Enable two-factor authentication (2FA)
3. Be aware of Phishing and Spam (most common in emails)
4. Avoid public Wi-Fi networks
5. Log out of shared devices
6. Use biometric authentication (Face ID, fingerprint, etc.)
7. Avoid clicking links you are not familiar with or look sketchy
8. Report suspicious activity (and then delete the message)
9. Avoid links from people you know, and don’t know, that are completely out of the blue, have little to no context, or make no sense (if suspicious, try another method or platform to contact them)
10. Stay updated on information and updates, and don’t share information that isn’t absolutely necessary

While I am still on the track of talking about hacking, I have actually had a member of my Facebook group whose account had been hacked, and she was unable to contact her followers for a long time. She was eventually able to get back into her account and post a few things, but Facebook had actually locked her out of doing certain things on her account for a while.

The benefits of email marketing

This is one of the main reasons why I highly suggest you begin working on growing an email list. Should you ever be locked out of, or lose any of your social media accounts regardless of how long, your email list is still yours. Every business owner should be growing an email list from the beginning. 

I personally use Convertkit for all of my email marketing, and I have since day one of starting my blog. I find their user interface super easy to use, their forms and landing pages professional and clean, and their templates perfect for quick content creation.

This email list allows you to connect to your audience at any time (and can be scheduled ahead of time) and increases their chance of actually seeing your content.

Another negative of social media is that you have to work with the algorithm in order to see the best results. In many cases, this means that the platform wants its users to stay on their platform. 

So, any content you provide that directs them away from the platform is typically seen less frequently than content that keeps them there longer. Only about 3% or more of your followers may see the content you post since you are competing for many other spots on their notifications and feeds.

But, if you post consistently, produce quality content, and create a variety of content (reels, stories, and standard posts), then your audience is more likely to see your content in their feed, or check out your page or group more frequently.