Most small business owners know that social media marketing is a great way to reach new prospects, customers, and business partners and is no longer an optional when it comes to your marketing mix. But, that doesn’t mean that it's easy to find the time to work on your social media strategy, to create content, and to execute your plan - doing social media marketing effectively is really time-consuming, and when you have a thousand other things to do on your business, it is easy to let is fall to the side.

So, to give you that extra bit of motivation to post that Facebook post or reach out to a prospective client on LinkedIn, here are some other really, really good reasons why you should do social media for your small business.

#1. Increase Your Brand Recognition

Social media is a really good way to increase the visibility of your business with customers and prospects. These days, people expect businesses to be on social media, and if you’re not, it’s almost as if you don’t exist. So it’s important to take the time to set up your brand on relevant social media channels - the ones that your customers frequent - or risk becoming invisible.

#2. Improved Customer Service

Today’s consumers use social media to seek assistance from brands, ask questions about products and services, and provide feedback (or complain). If you’re not on social media you miss this opportunity to interact with your customers and hear what they have to say, solve their problems, update them on new products or business announcements, and basically offer 5-star customer service (which actually, they can rate you on).

#3. Lower Costs than Traditional Marketing

Traditional marketing channels - like TV, press, and outdoor - usually price small companies out of the competition with their prohibitively large costs, but social media advertising can be run at much lower costs and can really help small business owners get bang for their (small) buck. And if you really have no budget, you can still engage organically through social channels for free.

#4. Compete with Bigger Brands

The lower costs of social media marketing mean you can compete alongside the bigger players in your industry - with the right content, pushed through the right social channels, you can get an immense amount of traffic and reach a large prospective audience. It helps to make the playing field a bit more even for the smaller guys.

#5. Boost Your SEO & Website Traffic

Many search engines, like Google, consider your social media presence as a factor in your organic search engine rankings, and this in turn can help drive more organic traffic to your website. More traffic = more prospective clients, tick!

#6. Gain Valuable Customer Insights

Social media generates a huge amount of data about customers in real-time - every post, every share, every click is recording customer information for businesses to use - who their customers are, what they like, what they think of your brand, and much more. Businesses can then use this information to inform businesses decisions, target their advertising better and engage with their customers.

#7. Targeted Advertising

All of this data means that social media channels can offer powerful targeting options for advertising so that you can reach the right audience - based on their location, gender, age, likes and dislikes, interests and behaviours, etc. You can then also track and measure the performance of these ads in real-time, turning off anything not working, tweaking ads where you need to, pausing activity if it's done so well you’re close to hitting your budget and so much more!

#8. Provide Rich Customer Experiences

Think about how you feel when you leave a comment on a business page and someone - a real human - replies to you, thank you for your feedback or answers your question. Now, don’t you want to give your customers the same feeling? One major drawcard for customers going to small businesses instead of large brands is customer service, and social media gives you the chance to really showcase this point of difference, and give your customer a really rich, layered, and personal experience when they engage with you.

#9. It’s a Way to Explain Yourself

Rather than fearing negative comments and feedback, social media gives you the chance to address these, solve problems, and find solutions, which brings you right back to providing a rich experience for your customer. If you’re afraid to be on social media because you might open yourself up to bad feedback, unfortunately, you not being there doesn’t actually stop anyone from saying anything bad about your brand - it just prevents you from replying, and turning a negative experience into a positive one, and possibly a lost customer into a brand advocate.

#10. Customers Can Play An Active Role In Your Business

Instead of spending a fortune on focus groups and surveys, you can use social media to learn from your customers - ask them to offer suggestions on new products or services, share their likes and dislikes in relation to your industry, vote on new names - anything you want! And customers love to feel like their opinion is valued by the businesses they support, so this is a great opportunity to develop brand advocates for your business.

There are heaps of reasons why your small business can benefit from social media marketing, but if you’re still not sure where to start or have the time to manage it all properly, we are here to help. We can help you set up your strategy or manage your day-to-day of your social media activity - or both.

Whatever you need to get the most out of social media for your business, we’re the marketing partner you’ve been looking for. Just get in touch today to set up a free consultation so we can see where we can help you!