Are you looking for better ways to connect with your business clients and customers? In today’s world, reaching your customer base and target audience via social media marketing isn’t an option; it’s a requirement. In other words, if you’re not connecting to current and potential clients online, business growth and sustainability opportunities are extremely limited.

Read this article to discover how to make better business connections with customers and clients through social media marketing.

However, let’s first recognize that every company conducting business online will connect with their current customers, clients, and target audiences differently. And there are some guidelines we must take advantage of when incorporating social media marketing strategies with them.

When executed correctly, social media provides the ideal scenario for building lasting B2C and B2B relationships and making meaningful connections.

We’re discussing the following:

1. 1. WHY social media marketing works!
   2. HOW to start a social community
   3. WHAT to post
   4. WHEN to post
   5. WHERE to find digital marketing support

Social Media Marketing Still Works… When You Work It Right

Gone are the days when businesses considered social media too impersonal for establishing nurturing relationships and conducting business with customers or clients online. Yet, using social platforms as an extension of your digital marketing campaign efforts has proven to be the best way to make meaningful connections with current and potential customers!

In truth, SMM remains an innovative strategy for the following achievements.

• Getting to know your customers’ preferences and needs better
• Connecting with them in their preferred social spaces
• Reaching them when they’re already online searching for products, services, information, and for entertainment

First, set up your online social communities properly.

And the most critical aspect of starting a social media community is choosing the platforms your customers and target audiences use most. It also helps to ensure your social platforms best complement your business industry.

Choose Your Platform

For example, utilizing Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter offers various ways to develop connections with social media users. And even if your business already has its own social platform page, you can step-it-up a notch by establishing an online community exclusively for your followers and clients/consumers. Some social media platforms, like Facebook, provide a free option for creating social groups on your company terms.

Begin Posting with Purpose

And once you’ve set things up, it’s imperative to begin posting regularly with industry news, product updates, and interactive activities. As you build your online culture, you provide an avenue for current and potential customers to become a part of a vital community that shares their values and ideals.

Monitor Comments and Follower Feedback with Care

Lastly, ensure you stay on top of online responses and posted comments from your followers. When there is a problem, connect immediately and offer viable solutions to reassure them that you care and hear them²!

In addition, their comments and responses provide vital insights into who your customers are, what they like and need, and what isn’t working for them. Overall, social media communities offer another level of quality assurance and meaningful rapport for your customers and targeted audience.

What should you post? Pictures and videos and demos— Oh my!

When it comes to business social media posts, it’s not just about HOW often you post, but also WHAT you post! In truth, what you post is more important. Why, may you ask? Because what you publish must always create reasons for current and potential customers to keep coming to your platforms and end at your responsive website.

Show rather than tell.

People prefer watching videos and demos about products and services rather than reading about them 8 to 1. So, instead of consistently creating text posts, shake things up by incorporating video³ content and demos that include creative details about the following.

• 1. Your Business
  2. The Culture
  3. Vital Industry News & Future Insights
  4. Product Uses & Features
  5. Excellent Customer Service & Testimonials

Make your posts about more than just business.

Another perk of employing SMM is the ability to be slightly informal online and more relational with your followers. Your posts don’t have to be all about business; instead, consider sharing personal stories about how your product or service made someone’s life better and more productive.

People love authenticity in posts. So, if your company has a remarkable culture and a well-knitted community of positive people⁴, be open to sharing business stories and outcome updates regularly. Followers enjoy viewing posts about the exciting things happening within the company and how the culture celebrates staff, leaders, and their customers/clients.

And in addition to company news, products, and services, consider promoting industry topics pertaining to key social media events happening nationally and internationally. Humorous, intelligent, insightful, and inspirational posts can merit significant boosts in your following!

When should you post? Well, it depends!

You can utilize a variety of factors to determine the best times to post. Hootsuite, for example, offers professional recommendations on what times are best to post on social media. Those suggestions are based on the following:

• Your industry type
• When your followers are most active online
• What times to post based on social topics/subjects

Speaking of topics and social subjects, you should always post about things your company supports, especially during real-time local events, national news, and social headlines. Posting about community trends and hot topics is a great way to support what you value most and display your business stance on the issues. But be careful in this, however, by keeping your content clean, insightful, and highly professional.

When your company rallies around critical issues or supports vital community organizations and causes, tell your followers about it! During those times, it’s okay to toot your own horn and rally their additional support towards the cause.

Whether you have a large corporation or a local business, there are plenty of entities to support that are bigger than you and help guide your followers to also rally behind something great! Collaborating with organizations and supporting something other than your business shows your audience that you CARE and helps create brand awareness.

Overall, these posts, including engaging pictures, content, and videos (when appropriate), should be launched in real-time or ASAP so people can engage in the moment.

Essential Social Media Marketing Tips to Consider

And on a fundamental note, consider the following three posting tips—

1. 1. Best Times- Posting in the afternoons or evenings on Wednesdays, Thursdays, or Fridays is ideal, as followers are more likely to begin winding down their days.
   2. Track & Measure- It would help if you also considered checking campaign performances and visitor behaviors by viewing monthly reports and analytics. This data provides additional insights into when your followers are online, which platforms they prefer, and when they visit your website.
   3. Post Conveniently– When you know they’re on, that’s the best time to post.

Where can you find true social media marketing success? Look no further than BUILDINGBLOCKS!

Let us assist your business with social media and other digital marketing campaigns. We aim to ensure you receive a tangible ROI and accurate results!

So, connect with us online to schedule your meeting time, or call 281-203-0529 for immediate assistance.

References

1. ^{Featured Image- Social Media Business Collaboration. Image concept by Austin Distel. Thank You!}
2. ^{We Hear You. Business response concept by John Tyson. Thanks!}
3. ^{Facebook video capture concept by Sticker Mule. Thank you!}
4. ^{Inspiring business post concept by Ian Schneider. Thanks!}

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Social media marketing has become the most vital and influential online space available today. And well before the pandemic, people were already networking through various social media apps and platforms. But at the onset and afterward, usage shot up by more than 10% since 2021. That increase represents a global social media reach of over 4.6 billion users!

So, what makes marketing with social media so powerful?

Undoubtedly, the way we do business today continues to change globally and at a rapid pace. Therefore, companies, great and small, must learn to continuously adapt and stay on top of the marketing game or get left behind. And since our traditional marketing methods no longer work as well as they did ten years ago, we must leverage automated digital marketing through social media to get better results.

Social media has become powerful because it allows businesses to utilize platforms for social networking, making personal connections with customers, and for company brand digital advertising! In addition, SMM’s essential goal is to help your business generate quality leads effectively, as its power remains commendable in:

• Reaching larger audiences within seconds of posting ads
• Helping companies reduce ad costs, and
• Ensuring their ads reach out to new potential audiences

Get Your FREE Lead Generation Checklist

Did You Know?

Here’s the bottom line, social media users are not only using their phones to access their accounts, but their also spending a substantial amount of time networking— one-third! So, when businesses incorporate digital marketing through social media, they significantly increase their chances of reaching the maximum number of potential buyers online. Remember, the days of printed ads are swiftly fading away. And though TV ads/commercials remain effective, their reach isn’t greater than social media marketing.

Why does social media marketing work better these days?

Here’s where you get to decide how you prefer to read this article! You can continue reading through and exploring the top seven reasons we’ve discovered or freely jump to the information that interests you the most.

1. Grow and Specify Your Target Audience
2. Cost-Effectiveness with a Larger Reach
3. Enhance Brand Awareness
4. Increase Website Traffic/Visitors
5. Track and Improve Your ROI
6. Learn and Understand Customers Better
7. Stay Competitive

Reason 1: Social media marketing helps build and specifically target your ideal audience and customer base.

Believe it or not, many businesses today are still wondering how to reach more potential customers without recognizing the vast opportunities that come through leveraging social media platforms. With over half of the world’s population accessing social media daily, companies can access essential data at their fingertips!

One main reason social media works so well today is that it allows you to target your ideal customers and build a significant database of potential buyers based on exact client demographics³. Furthermore, it helps businesses show suitable ads to the right people on their preferred social media platforms. And with the help of professional marketers, you can target users based on age, gender, buying behaviors, interests, and even location.

Outside of targeting specific audiences, social media marketing also assists with building your database. For example, as potential customers interact with your business online, you can collect their information and save it to use for future ad campaigns. So, when you develop and build landing pages for your ads, you also build your marketing database from new leads who show interest in your products and services.

Reason 2: It’s Extremely Cost-Effective

If you’re looking to get more bang for your buck, no other online tool provides that option better than social media marketing. Incorporating an innovative SMM strategy is a great way to reach your ideal audience without breaking the bank.

So, when it comes to campaign ads on social media platforms, it’s remarkably cost-effective because businesses only pay when users click on their ads. You can also choose how much you want to invest in your digital campaigns (pay-per-click ads).

Fortunately, the most remarkable thing about social media is that most of its platforms are free. So, even if your business has a small advertising budget, you can still market and promote products and services on many networking forums, seeing digital growth organically. Companies can also make a relatively low-cost investment to boost their online posts and run ads on various platforms for greater brand exposure.

Reason 3: Social media marketing helps enhance company brand awareness.

Adopting and incorporating social media in your marketing strategy is also a great for improving and creating digital brand awareness and authority. Each platform offers innovative space for sharing website content and industry resource knowledge with customers who need your products/services. In addition, if your content is engaging, customers will freely begin sharing fun posts⁴ as they experience your brand.

And as you consistently share beneficial and valuable insights, users begin to view your company as a reliable and resourceful industry leader. Marketing your business on social media also means making critical connections with leading industry heads and organizations. So, as they share your brand content on their platforms, people will begin to place greater value on your company brand and view your products and services as reliable. Overall, promoting products and services on platforms like Facebook and Twitter has become substantially easier today.

Each social media tool enables businesses to launch and post images, video demonstrations, and detailed industry content about their products and services. In turn, ideal and potential customers can readily engage with companies more conveniently.

Reason 4: It helps increase website traffic and improve organic search ranking.

Another major benefit of utilizing social media for your business is its direct impact on website traffic. For example, as you submit company posts on your platforms⁵ and include your website URL and other landing page hyperlinks, potential customers and visitors can quickly access and engage your website. In truth, the more targeted links you provide on your social media posts and pages, the more traffic and online visits your site gets.

For instance, social media users enjoy entertaining posts showing a company’s community involvement or culture through intriguing photos and video marketing. So, when you post those things as teasers, then entice them enough to click on your website for more details, they are more inclined to engage and share.

Surprisingly, social media can also influence your search rank position. As you post top web page links and blog articles from your social media platforms, those links help search engines decipher whether your site is reputable, enabling you to rank for specific keywords. In addition, Google’s algorithm constantly evolves to help eliminate spam websites and appropriately rank legitimate ones. Therefore, social media also becomes a simple tool for helping improve search rankings and lead visitors to your website so you can engage customers by showcasing your products and services.

Reason 5: Social media marketing can improve and track your ROI.

The fifth reason to incorporate social media with your digital marketing strategy is to track your ROI through ad campaigns. For instance, you can directly build your targeted ad information into Facebook’s Ads Manager platform. This tool enables you to view your budget’s performance and analyze ad spend returns (ROAS), among other measurable costs.

This tool is a remarkably cost-effective benefit for most digital marketers because it allows them to track campaign performances directly. You can also make spending adjustments along the way, like cutting undesirable campaigns and scaling well-performing ones for better results.

In the end game, the key to winning is making small, targeted ad spends and seeing large sales returns.

Reason 6: You can learn, understand, and stay connected to your customers.

Social Media Marketing is the Way to Learn Your Customers and Their Buying Patterns

Since today’s social platforms have billions of daily users, companies can follow consumer and potential buyer search behaviors and engagements. This data helps marketers become more aware of target audiences, their likes and dislikes, while also learning online behaviors.

This data helps businesses adjust marketing strategies, create better customer social media experiences with their brands, and attracts new customers. And with increased customer engagement, companies learn their customers and better understand which marketing strategies are working on each platform.

Understand what your clients need on each social platform and consistently provide it.

For example, regardless of how old-fashioned you may think it is, word-of-mouth “referral” marketing still works today! So, customers still look for trusted recommendations on social media through reliable sources, their network of friends, and top social influencers.

These days, it’s common for people to hear about your products, services, and brand via social media marketing using their Smartphones and other digital devices⁶. In fact, it’s become a pretty powerful and beneficial tool for business marketers! For example, roughly 81 percent of people feel that social posts from their family and friends significantly influence their purchasing decisions. But, again, we’re referring to that digital marketing “word-of-mouth” phenomenon that remains highly effective.

In addition, companies can now encourage satisfied or loyal customers to submit positive product/service reviews and high-star ratings on their social media platforms. Studies also show that today’s word-of-mouth “digital” marketing can influence 80+ percent of visitors’ purchasing decisions.

Stay connected through social media marketing by continuing to provide exceptional customer service.

There’s no getting around the fact that people expect quick, convenient customer service experiences. And social media provides an extraordinary venue enabling businesses to do just that by meeting those demands. For example, company profiles on various social media platforms conveniently allow businesses to communicate to customer followers in real-time.⁷

And when businesses respond quickly to customer comments or inquiries on social media, they convey three things to their followers. It conveys that they listen, care, and remain dedicated to customer satisfaction with their brand. As a result, this engagement perpetually fosters loyalty and makes positive impressions on their followers.

However, careful and informative responses to online customers are critical to conveying genuine and exceptional service. So when clients are irate, apologize immediately and have them DM a service representative to efficiently resolve the issue(s). Be sure to specify time frames for resolving service needs if you’re not a 24/7-response company. And lastly, post common customer service issues that may be helpful to other followers. By posting the responses/solutions via social media, other customers can know what to expect and save time.

Reason 7: Social media can help you stay competitive.

If you don’t play in the game, you cannot win. So, be mindful that your industry competitors are already leveraging the power of social media marketing. Therefore, be sure you are too! Staying competitive⁸ on social media helps position your business as trustworthy, professional, and up-to-date with today’s methods and trends for product and service delivery.

Social media help you stand toe-to-toe with your online competition and become more aware of their weaknesses, strengths, etc. For example, you can find your company’s unique niche and proposition value from that knowledge. This strategy overall keeps you competitive and lets potential customers know you have what they’re looking for and need in products and services.

Could you use help creating an effective social media marketing campaign?

If all these benefits and advantages of incorporating social media marketing sound impressive, it’s time to take the first step in seeking a professional digital marketing partner. BUILDINGBLOCKS is here to help remedy the areas where you need supplementation. We provide full social media marketing and ad campaigning if you don’t have the time or capacity to DIY.

Along with contacting us, be sure to get this FREE resource!

So, connect with us online or call us directly at 281-203-0529 to meet and discuss your marketing needs. We’re always happy to help!

^References

1. ^{Graphic collage of individual social media icons by BBMS. 3D icon images and concept by Alexander Shatov.}
2. ^{2021 Statia Research Study. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1289755/internet-access-by-device-worldwide/ Retrieved July 7, 2022.}
3. ^{Businesswoman social media posting. Concept by Christin Hume.}
4. ^{Social brand awareness Baskin Robins Ice Cream. Unsplash photo by Crystal Jo.}
5. ^{Social Media word image by Merakist.}
6. ^{Smartphone Social Media image concept by Piotr Cichosz.}
7. ^{Online customer service concept photo image by Austin Distel.}
8. ^{Swim team competition image concept by Arisa Chattasa.}

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