Why Is Social Media An Important Part Of Inbound Marketing? Here’s The Answer
We can reach customers where they are in the buying process in today’s digital world; even better, we can advertise to them at the precise moment they are prepared to make a purchase. When you can draw attention at the bottom of the sales funnel, why concentrate on things like increasing brand awareness through social media posts?
Because getting your customer to that point of decision-making requires multiple layers of marketing.
Why is social media an important part of inbound marketing? Because marketing is the cake, and social media is the frosting. Social media is effective at all inbound marketing stages, regardless of your company’s name, product, or service.
For more specific information, keep reading.
Table of Contents
What Is Inbound Marketing?
Inbound marketing is a proven marketing methodology for today’s digital age. Since its inception in 2006, inbound marketing has become the most effective marketing strategy for doing business online.
This kind of marketing strategy enables the consumer to get to know your business on their terms, not yours. That’s important since 81% of retail shoppers conduct an online search before buying, according to GE Capital Retail Bank’s Second Annual Shopper study.
Inbound marketing, as opposed to outbound marketing (such as TV ads and cold calling), is concerned with creating valuable content that attracts customers to your brand and its offerings. The inbound methodology focuses on three key phases in the buyer’s journey:
- Attracting the right audience with the right content at the right time
- Engaging by presenting insights and solutions that align with their pain points and goals so they are more likely to buy from you
- Delighting current customers by delivering valuable content that increases loyalty and retention
This can be done using a variety of tools, including blog posts, SEO, social media, content offers, forms, calls-to-action, surveys, and your website, as well as other tools like content offers and content marketing.
Once you define your buyer persona or who your ideal customer is, you can tailor each of these tools to your target market and develop goals that are not only reachable but measurable.
Advantages Of Social Media For Inbound Marketing
Despite the fact that there are many best practices for inbound marketing, social media will always be on the list for the following reasons.
Social Media Helps With Branding
The inbound marketing methodology is built on the principles of attracting, converting, closing, and delighting readers in order to obtain visitors, leads, customers, and promoters.
Social media posts only last for a few days at most, but they give your pages a general experience that visitors can scroll through at their convenience. Additionally, more people will view that content the more your social audience interacts with it, likes it, and shares it.
Get To Know Your Target Audience Through Social Media
What makes social media such a crucial component of inbound marketing? because social media is a way of life for your target audience!
Understanding your target audience better through social media is a great idea. Social media users interact with content that they enjoy and find useful. Social media can therefore effectively reveal what your audience enjoys through trial and error. Your audience will interact with the information they find crucial, whether your pages are chock-full of educational material or descriptions of your services.
You can then alter your content to better suit the desires of your audience. Giving you the upper hand because you are aware of what they expect from your content and pages.
Increase Organic Seo Efforts With Social Media
By putting more of your content in front of the audience, SEO (search engine optimization) raises brand awareness. Rankings are not influenced by social media, but there is an undeniable connection between SEO and having a vibrant social media presence. It’s also a fantastic way to drive traffic to your website!
Since the majority of people transact business with you online, your website is where you want to focus your traffic. Increasing website traffic is made easier by social media. The more social media activity you have, the more exposure your brand gets. Reaching your target audience and creating enduring relationships is made easier when you have more exposure and valuable content.
Find New Opportunities Through Social Media
And finally, when you put yourself out there on social media, you never know what you’re going to get. You can grow by offering a variety of content on your social media pages. Not only will it make your content accessible to others, but it might also provide some insight into what you could be doing to advance your brand.
You’ll probably follow people who work in fields similar to your own. This will inspire you to come up with fresh, original solutions for all kinds of tasks. It can also keep you informed about the most recent trends in your industry that you might want to follow.
How Do I Use Social Media To Its Fullest?
Share engaging content that is pertinent to your mission because social media is all about interacting and having conversations with prospective customers. These pointers will help you use social media to its fullest potential.
Effectively distribute the same content over and over again. The most effective times of day to post on each social media platform to attract particular demographics can be determined by analytics research. For instance, around 6 o’clock is when Twitter posts usually do well., while Even at two in the morning, Pinterest posts are still effective.
Examine social media advertisements more closely. You may have heard of social media ads, prompting the question: Do I need ads on social media? With the help of social media ads, you can more precisely and specifically target your audience. When a potential customer clicks the advertisement, a form may open with the person’s contact information already filled in. The only action required of the potential customer is to click on the advertisement and submit the form, which has already been pre-filled. This makes spending money and time on social media advertising more worthwhile.
Promote an engaging eBook or blog post that drives immediate website conversions. If the content is good, other people may share it, potentially increasing your reach and online presence.
Use social media to publicize a main offer. An offer is a piece of content that a potential customer believes to be highly valuable. By making this content available, we give guidance or show a way to approach a problem. One of your content pieces, typically an eBook, report, white paper, or other type of content, should be the main offer.
Make sure this one content offer, though, has its own landing page on your website. Because they might become disoriented by distractions on your regular website pages, you don’t want to send potential customers on a mission impossible or to your homepage. Additionally, you can collect prospect information through landing pages in exchange for an offer.
To get potential customers to the landing page, use calls-to-action, or CTAs, on other pages of your website, or in the writing you do for content you produce, like blogs, emails, and videos. Customers are directed to the landing page when they click on the CTAs.
Which Social Network Is The Best?
Your target audience will determine everything. Starting with an analysis of where your clients spend their time is a good idea for any social media strategy. There are many social media platforms, and each one has its own user base.
To put it another way, you should never base your decisions solely on statistics. For example, while Facebook seems like a sure bet (69% of Americans use Facebook), you may find that your social media strategy has more teeth on sites like B2B companies can connect on LinkedIn. Websites like Pinterest or Instagram might be more helpful if you run a business like a bakery or an art studio.
Here are some additional food for thought courtesy of Hubspot:
- 98.3% of Mobile devices are used by Facebook users to access the app.
- With a 32.3% market share, LinkedIn is the top B2B display advertiser in the US.
- Instagram is the second-best social media platform for marketers.
- Males make up the majority of Twitter’s user base.
- The majority of people using Pinterest worldwide are women (more than 60%).
- 44% of Americans ranked Snapchat as their top social media platform in 2019. teens.
So how do you decide where your customers go? Consider reaching out to them and asking your customers about their social media usage and preferences by sending out questionnaires. Researching demographics, such as the data in the aforementioned statistics, can also give you some ideas. For example, 81% of 18- to 29-year-olds use Facebook.
How Are Social Media And Inbound Marketing Related?
The goal of the inbound marketing strategy is to attract clients to your company. It is predicated on the notion that it is more effective and efficient to devote all of your time and efforts to attracting customers rather than wasting both of those resources on attempting to persuade people who aren’t interested in your goods or services to buy from you.
It’s about concentrating on the features that will set you apart from the competition, help you be found online, and help you turn prospects into leads.
Social media marketing is the practice of using social media sites to advertise a good or service. To maximize exposure and engagement, it’s best to get your content in front of the right audience. Bidirectional communication is an alternative to traditional channels. A brand typically communicates with prospective customers through email, advertising, and even content marketing.
The situation has changed on social media. With their audience, smart brands know how to have a dialogue by providing relevant content. How HubSpot says “You can market directly and personally using social media, which is a one-to-one medium.”
Inbound marketing objectives cannot be met by relying solely on search engine traffic.
Best Practices For Social Media Inbound Marketing
Our lives now cannot be lived without social media. We use it to stay in touch with loved ones, post updates about our daily lives, and share information that we find interesting. We use a variety of social media platforms, from more formal ones like LinkedIn to more informal ones like Snapchat and Instagram. There are many intermediate channels, including Facebook and Pinterest.
The number of people using social media is rising daily. The significance of social media for business promotion is therefore difficult to ignore. You can use a variety of strategies to succeed on social media for your business.
For instance, Facebook has almost 2 billion users who log on each month. This means that if you aren’t using Facebook to promote your content, such as blog posts, you’re losing out on a sizable audience who might eventually make a purchase from you.
Utilizing social media for digital marketing has many advantages. The fact that it is free and open to everyone in any industry is the most significant benefit. Additionally, it enables you to connect with your audience on a more human level than traditional marketing techniques can and foster trust.
You don’t necessarily need to market on every social media platform just because you can easily access them all. Initially, consider your target market and inbound marketing goals. Find the social networks that best fit these.
Social Media Is Not Right For Every Business
If your business-to-business (B2B) company plans to use social media as its sole lead generation channel, you probably get disappointing results and wonder why. The only reliable way to determine whether social media marketing will be effective for your particular business is to give it a try and evaluate the results.
In some B2B markets, our clients have only experienced visitor to lead conversion rates of 1% or less per year. A 79% visitor to lead conversion rate can be found on organic search, in contrast. In these situations, your social media ROI is not acceptable.
then analyze, after which adjust. Make a choice later on regarding how to allocate your marketing budget.
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