The benefits of social media to businesses cannot be overemphasized. Start up businesses have been discovering and finding out how the social media can be of great benefit and value to their businesses. There are still a lot of people who fail to believe or understand the workings of social media in relation to a business and how in the long run it really helps the business.
There are various ways social media can help your business, they include
1. Social Media help you meet your target audience anytime
Through social media you can easily and effectively send out messages to your target and preferred audience. Depending on the business you are doing you can carefully select your customers based on factors such as age, gender, lifestyle, level of education and send relevant messages.
For example if you sell a particular type of fabric or clothing, you may want so send messages to people based on their age and gender and lifestyle. There are tools on social media such as face book and twitter that help you this.
2. Social Media will help you to get new customers
Social media is a great way by which companies especially new ones can locate and get new customers. When you place your advertisements or profile it reaches a wider audience which should normally lead to more and new customers. Also new customers can know about the company and its services through referrals on social media from others who already patronize the business.
3. Sharing information with Customers just got easier using Social Media
Before in the past companies through their marketing executives had a difficult time getting out information to their customers easily and on time. There were situations where the company had made certain decisions and would like their customers to know about it immediately, especially before their competitors would know about it and react.
With social media this has been made much easier as information can be released to a customer real time, better and easier. This is done through social network accounts.
4. Social Media help you understand your potential customers better
Customers are always developing new taste and getting to try out new things. People experience changes in their life which needs them to adjust their lifestyle or make a change in what they buy and consume.
For any business, a key ingredient for success is for them to know about their clients and their needs. There are tools on social media that can help with this. For example if there are more teenagers in the environment due to a new school, the company can tailor their services to them and promote their business much more.
5. Social Media help business to study their competitors
With social media companies can monitor their competition and know what they are up to. Obviously competitors will not come out and reveal their key decisions or secret online but such information such as a product launch, hiring of more staff, expanding to another location can be obtained on social media.
With monitoring your competitors on social media you can get and acquire information which can help you improve your own marketing strategies, activities and promotion. This can help you in the long run create of find something to offer your customers which your competition is not doing.
6. IT HELPS PROMOTE YOUR BRAND MUCH EASIER AND CHEAPER
Businesses especially start ups usually use below the line methods to promote their goods and services. Traditional methods such as using flyers, posters, pamphlets, brochures, road shows among others that are used by businesses are in the long run are more expensive than using the social media.
With social media a business can easily promote their business on face book and twitter faster, better and easier. Another advantage as discussed earlier is the wide reach you can achieve with this method and avenue of promotion. This can also lead to business getting and having reasons to expand based on the response from customers on social media.
7. IT HELPS BUSINESSES GET AND RECEIVE IMMEDIATE FEED BACK FROM CUSTOMERS
Another good thing of social media is its real time effect. Business can easily feel the pulse of their customers and find out immediately how they feel about their products and services. The feed back received could either be positive and negative depending on what the company pushes out to the public.
There are various ways companies can know what their customers feel about their products and services. For example a company can launch a new product and get feed back from customers and know their feelings on that particular product. This will help the company to know what to do to change or improve the product or even completely remove it from the market.
This can also promote brand loyalty from customers who patronize the products and services especially when their input is taken into consideration in the making of such goods and services.