Is your business questioning which is the best, most effective way to engage in social media marketing? We can all recognize the pervasiveness of social media in today’s marketing, but you may still be wondering in what specific ways social media can truly help your business, and, even more so, how to best take advantage of it. For many businesses, navigating management on their own may be more trouble than it’s worth, but getting the right help from a professional social media management agency can truly make all the difference. That’s why we’ve laid out the reasons social media marketing is vital to your business’s success and why hiring a social media management agency can offer the most effective, advantageous solutions to your marketing needs.
Why Social Media Marketing Is Important for Every Business
Before you ask yourself whether hiring a specialized social media management agency is the right route for your company, it helps to understand why social media marketing is so important for all businesses.
1. Social Media For Business: Your Customers Are Social
Today, social media encompasses more than channels like Facebook and Twitter, and it’s not contained to an app like Instagram. It is integrated into every aspect of communication. The internet is social and so are your customers. It’s how communities interact and where your customers spend their time. It plays a major role in what we’re exposed to and helps shape our opinions and preferences. It’s how we share ideas and get our messages across to others. There’s no doubt that we are living in a digital age, which means that for your business to be successful, it has to have a digital presence as well.
2. Social Media For Business: Brand Recognition
Social media is key for brand recognition. It allows you to meet customers where they are. When your business is consistently present on social media instead of just your website, your brand will reach the screens of more individuals. A huge part of brand recognition is remaining in front of your audience in a consistent and relevant manner. Leveraging social media for brand recognition makes sense and will affect your bottom line as more people remember your brand and choose you over your competitors.
3. Social Media For Business: Website Traffic And SEO
Leveraging social media marketing is essential for driving traffic to your website or online shop and can help in boosting your overall traffic and sales. The Google algorithm factors in overall traffic as well as “social signals” in determining your expertise and value as a business. These factors all play a role in whether your website shows up as relevant in Google searches. That means leveraging social media marketing is essential to building your organic search rankings and increasing your chance to be found by potential customers.
4. Social Media For Business: The Power Of Word of Mouth
Word of mouth is a huge reason why people choose the products they buy and the services they select. People trust the brands their friends and family use, and customers seek out businesses that the people around them speak well of. In many cases, a personal recommendation is more effective for bringing in new business than any ad or promotion. Positive word of mouth is vital for business growth, and social media is one of the best ways to spread it. When your followers share your content, tag your account, or retweet your post, you’re reaching a far greater and more receptive pool of customers than you could ever do through traditional networking.
5. Social Media For Business: Community Growth
When using social media, your business is looking for growth in terms of loyal followers and repeat customers. Think of your customers as a community – social media is a superb way to grow this online (and even in-person) community. It presents many opportunities for your followers to interact with your business in ways that go beyond visiting a brick-and-mortar store. You can have your followers answer questions, share feedback or photos, enter contests, and even use social media to invite them to events. These kinds of daily interactions are what help build brand loyalty and a solid customer base.
Why You Should Hire A Social Media Agency
Now that you know the reasons that social media can be incredibly beneficial for your business, it’s time to look at the facts: having an effective, robust social media presence for your business is a lot of work. It can be difficult, confusing, time-consuming, and it takes a while to see consistent hard work pay off in terms of business and sales. Read on, and you’ll see that a social media marketing agency can be a solution to all of those very real concerns.
1. Professional Social Media Management: Saving Time And Money
While it takes a lot of time and effort to be effective as a business on social media, the pay-offs can be massive. By hiring a social media management agency, you bring in a team of professionals who already know exactly what they’re doing. A qualified social media marketing agency is likely to already have the necessary software and systems in place to operate your social media marketing effectively, which saves you time and resources in purchasing and learning new software yourself. That way, you can allow experts to manage your social media so that you can focus all your energy on what you do best: building your business.
2. Professional Social Media Management: Hiring An Agency Versus An Employee
Even if you know you don’t have the time to really pour into your business’s social media platforms, it can still be tough to make the decision to pay someone else to do it for you. So let’s quickly consider the alternatives.
Maybe you’ve thought about assigning an employee to be your business’s social media manager. After all, they already know your business’s brand and voice. The problem is that employee will still require a significant amount of training and experience before he or she can operate your social media successfully on their own. Social media marketing also requires certain systems and software that your business would have to purchase and learn to operate. Operating social media can also be a time consuming role that your already-existing employees just may not have the time or energy to take on. You will also have to oversee the work your employee does for your social media and that means you have to be tuned in and have a full understanding of how it all works. This takes your valuable time and energy.
You may have also considered hiring your own in-house social media manager. While it’s an option worth thinking about, and an individual social media manager may have the expertise, it takes a lot of time and resources to hire and train a brand-new employee. And even after that hire takes place, your company needs to think about how that employee will be managed and whether there is anyone in your business who has a high enough level of knowledge of social media marketing needed to oversee the work of that employee. You should also consider that social media is not always consistent, and, depending on your business’s needs, you may have enough social media needs to justify a full-time position, or your needs may require just a couple hours of management per day. The most effective social media management happens with a team approach, which means multiple levels of oversight and different expertise coming together to create your content, place your ads, manage your metrics and complete the other work required for an effective social media program. Most businesses cannot afford a team of 2-4 people dedicated to their social media marketing, but with a professional social media agency, a team approach is common and should be what you look for when hiring an agency.
When considering the pros and cons of assigning the task to an existing employee or hiring a social media manager, most companies find it can be far more cost-effective to hire a social media marketing agency to manage your channels. As we’ve said, social media management agencies are made up of professionals who already know the ins and outs of the industry and likely already have the necessary experience to represent the voice, message, and personality of your brand online. Finally, when hiring a agency like SocialNicole Digital, you are getting a full team of experts so that every client has a dedicated social media manager, social media director, and ads manager.
3. Professional Social Media Management: Professional Expertise Is Everything
Social media is an ever-changing creature, and it can be a headache to stay on top of it–so why not leave it up to the professionals? An agency dedicated solely to social media management makes it their business to stay on top of new channels (or changes to the old channels), what’s out-of-date, and what’s trending. Hiring a agency that stays up-to-date will help to ensure that your company stays at the top of the social media game. Plus, they probably have proven results and examples of work they’ve done for other businesses in the past! An agency worth its salt will be willing to listen to your needs and come alongside your brand’s vision to work with you and deliver results. If you want to take your business’s social media presence to the next level, hiring a specialized social media management agency may be the perfect next step for you.
Did you know that we are a full-scale social media management agency–like we’ve been talking about above? We would love to hear from you about partnering with your business to take your social media presence to the next level! Contact us today!