Importance of social media marketing for your eCommerce business

Introduction

Social media has become an integral part of marketing in today’s time. Businesses rely on social media marketing as a way of reaching thousands and millions of potential clients worldwide.

The best part about social media marketing is that it allows you to market your business without putting an enormous amount of time and resources into it. Thus, if you know how to use social media effectively, your business can benefit from the pros that it comes with.

If you don’t have knowledge on the subject and social media marketing feels intimidating, we’re here to help you out. This article will talk about the importance of SMM for your eCommerce business and help you understand it in the best possible ways.

The Definition of Social Media Marketing

Using marketing strategies to leverage various social media platforms and networks like LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, etc., to promote products and services and interact with potential customers is known as social media marketing.

SMM allows you to create a personalized experience for your prospects and connect with users through the web. With the world going online and a majority of users falling back on social media to consume content, SMM has become an integral marketing tactic for eCommerce businesses.

Why is Social Media Marketing Vital for Your eComm Business

People all across the globe have become addicted to different social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitter, etc. Users spend several hours a day on social media, and hence, social media marketing has become vital for eComm businesses. Following are a few reasons why SMM is crucial for your eComm business:

Boost Your Website Traffic

When you’re using social media marketing to grow your eComm business, your primary motive is to redirect users to your website for sales and conversions to take place. Social media marketing will help boost your website traffic as you’ll have your website link on all social media platforms. Thus, with an active social media presence and quality content across different social media platforms, you’ll be using SMM as a way to make sales.

Establish Brand Authority

Building brand authority is the key to growing through social media. With strong and effective marketing strategies in hand, you’ll be able to attract customers to your products and services. Having a strong strategy will also establish brand authority. This will lead to sales. Then, if your customers are satisfied with what you sell, they’ll not only become loyal to your brand, but they’ll also encourage other users to buy from you.

Spike Your SEO Ranking

Social media marketing has a huge impact on your business’s SEO ranking. Google observes your activity on social media and grades you accordingly. Thus, Google will determine your SEO ranking depending on how your brand is perceived on social media.

Upsurge the Customer Growth

One of the biggest benefits of social media marketing is that it upsurges your growth by adding numerous customers and attracting them to your business. With the help of social media marketing, you don’t just promote your business; you also gain a huge customer base. Thus, you should ensure that the content you’re putting up on social media in the form of photos and videos should be top-notch and of a high-resolution.

Benefits of Social Media Marketing for Your eComm Business

Follow are a few of the many benefits of social media marketing:

Gain Brand Loyalty from Your Customers

The best part about social media is that it allows you to contact your customers directly. The stronger your connection will be with the users on social media, the higher your brand loyalty will be in their eyes.

When you’re connecting through social media, your interactions make a lot of difference as they create an impression in the customer’s mind. Thus it is important for you to interact with customers and stay active on all social media platforms to gain brand loyalty from your customers.

Social Media is Growing Rapidly

Businesses have rapidly started to invest in social media and expand their budgets for social media marketing. This is because social media is growing continuously, and increasing your business’s budget for social media will help you in the long run.

Get Insights

Social media is filled with data. Through social media, your business can get an insight into the industry trends, analyze what customers like, and keep up with the demand shift.

Build Strong Relationships

Social media offers you the opportunity to build a relationship with your customers to increase customer lifetime value and acquire more potential customers. Additionally, these relationships help you to work on product development when you get feedback from your customers (which you can also do via social media!).

Make Social Media Influencers Your Best Friends

Joining hands with top influencers from your niche will put your brand in the limelight and help you reach users who will be genuinely interested in your business. The right kind of influencers can really do a lot for your eComm business.

Gain Several Benefits by Putting Little Effort

No matter how small or big a business is, every business is on a budget and needs to be mindful of the money it spends. While using social media marketing as a way to connect with users, you won’t have to worry about exceeding your budget or putting too much time into the process. Social media marketing is not at all complicated, and you can gain a lot with basic knowledge of social media.

Drawbacks of Social Media Marketing for Your eComm Business

In this section, let’s quickly discuss the drawbacks of social media marketing:

Low ROI

A drawback of social media marketing is that it helps you in the long run. Thus, you can’t expect to use social media for a short span and gain website traffic, boost sales, etc. Social media marketing’s return on investment is low compared to other marketing strategies.

It also takes a combination of all three aspects, money, effort, and time to ensure your marketing strategies fall in place.

To ensure you make the most of social media, you’ll have to post regularly and stay in touch with your audience to keep reminiscing them and attracting them to your business. It is a slow process, but once you create a good audience base, and start getting high organic reach, it will be worth the wait.

Low Reach & High Competition

Everybody is constantly using social media, and while you gain a lot of users through these platforms, you also need to compete with other businesses who’re there.

What you need to understand is that your business might get low reach due to your competitors, but with consistency and quality content, you can breakthrough to gain high organic search.

Moreover, you should be patient and have faith that you’ll get good results from your inputs.

Negative Feedback May Impact Your Brand Image

It would be best if you were prepared for your business to be exposed to both positive and negative reactions. People often openly share their experiences on social media, and if someone doesn’t like something about your business, they may share negative feedback.

Thus, you should always keep an eye for criticism and ensure that you positively work on your shortcomings. Make sure to communicate with the users quickly and properly, so you don’t give them a chance to badmouth your business.

How Can Your Business Connect with Target Audience through Social Media

Just like how all marketing strategies work, social media marketing focuses on grasping the attention of your target audience and making connections with them. It makes for a great way to promote your products and services and get potential customers to know about your business.

Social media gives you a platform to interact with people and tell them what makes you stand apart from your counterparts. You also keep your audience interested by sharing interesting and catchy content. You can easily gain customers through social media by creating content & staying active. This will allow you to reach and hook users to your business organically.

To understand how you can connect with users on various social media platforms, you need to decide which platform is gourmet to be the best for your eComm business:

• Facebook: Facebook is the largest platform for social networking in the world. Facebook’s users have a high demand for businesses; hence, having a consistent presence on this social media platform can help your business reach heights.
• Instagram: Next in line comes Instagram. Instagram is visually-dominated, and thus, using Instagram will help customers view your products and get attracted to them through impressive images and quality video content.
• LinkedIn: LinkedIn is majorly used by professionals as a networking platform to connect with other professionals in the industry. If your business revolves around thought-leadership content, LinkedIn should be your go-to. You can also use LinkedIn to share business-related tips and wisdom and talk about technical and intellectual aspects to get the attention of your audience.
• Twitter: If you use it properly, you can gain popularity and engage with customers on Twitter as effectively as on Facebook. Use content marketing and effective strategies to stand out on this social media platform.

Final Thoughts

Social media marketing has proved to be an effective way to drive sales and attract customers to your business. Not just that, social media marketing is way easier than traditional methods of marketing as it allows you to reach out to users conveniently.

Now you know the importance of social media marketing and how it benefits eComm businesses. If you’re interested in going ahead with a social media marketing course, you should check out the SMM course offered by IMS Proschool. It is an incredible course that covers everything related to SMM, and it will give you a kickstart to enter the world as a social media marketer.