Social media is growing at an incredibly fast rate. With a jaw-dropping 1/3 of the world using social media regularly, it has fast become an arena to not only introduce your brand and business to the masses, but to also battle with your competitors vying to do the same. Social media needs more strategizing, targeting, and research than some may think. Your social media strategy should be partnered with, but not directly reliant on, your digital marketing strategy, as both can contribute to each other. Social media is a different set of platforms, demographics, and expectations altogether. So, let’s see why it’s so important…
Brand Awareness
Social media forms a vital part of your digital marketing strategy because it allows you to formulate a comprehensive brand identity and awareness. Every bit of your social media, from your visual content to your caption copy, from your chosen platforms to your response rate, fleshes out your business and tells your story.
As of 2018, there are 3 billion active social media users and, while you can’t expect the full 3 billion, you need to try and get as many relevant users to notice you as possible. Take the key components of your business – maybe you’re a private clinic, specialising in aesthetic treatments, and offer free consultations – and run with them. Using social media to build your awareness is important to your business because it provides you with another place to engage, persuade, and convert.
Everything that you put forward and engage with introduces the world to you, your business, and your ethos. Your brand awareness can form part of your reputation, build perceived industry authority, and attract new enquiries and clients, and social media is the perfect place to build it.
Increased Web Traffic
A survey conducted on marketers revealed that 63% find lead generation their hardest challenge, but diversifying with a social media presence can in fact contribute to generating fresh traffic, enquiries, and conversions.
If your website has a blog (which it ideally should), then social media is a great way to promote your latest blog post that might be spotlighting a new treatment or forming part of your SEO strategy. By driving more traffic to your website via your social media, you’re again diversifying your web presence and guiding your followers to your services. This encourages existing clients to potentially return for another treatment, but also opens the doors for new clients to explore your website and services.
Even if you are not utilising a blog presence, posting your website link on recent Facebook posts and listing it on your Instagram profile can both drive traffic to your website. Similarly, your website can cross-promote and include your social media links and feeds, so you continue synergy across both platforms.
Conversion Rates
Social media can, in fact, have a positive impact on your conversion rates. By keeping a fully-rounded social media presence with regular posts about your treatments, outcomes, and qualifications, you render your clinic or practice an ‘industry leader’. It shows that you’re invested, proud, and qualified to deliver the treatments that your visual content show, increasing the chances of an enquiry and therefore a conversion.
Your social media content and its engagement represent social proof that your clinic or practice has been trusted to perform these treatments before, so by presenting visual content as a sort of portfolio, you increase your chance of a new enquiry. By indicating this established and trusting client base, you instantly add value to your brand in the eyes of a new enquirer. The likelihood of a consumer purchasing a product when referred by social media is 71%, so social proof and referral is really quite powerful.
Your social media presence can represent a communal client base that already rely on and trust you. Setting out your business’ social CV, as it were, lays bare all the reasons why this new enquiry should convert to a sale, or why this potential new client should choose you for their treatment.
Diversifying Your Audience
Social media may seem like a blanket platform on which you can lay your blanket digital marketing strategy, but it can be as diverse and targeted as you make it. For example, your Facebook strategy may be encouraging new leads and website traffic, your Instagram may be used for brand awareness, and your Twitter may be used for general relatability and communication. Your audience may be split into different target demographics, and these may be split between different social media platforms, so your strategy should change accordingly. Not all of your existing or potential clients are on social media, but the majority that are will interact differently with your content depending on the platform.
90% of Instagram’s 600 million unique monthly users are under the age of 35, so if you are seeking a younger client base for services and treatments you believe will prompt their engagement and interest, then Instagram may be where you focus this part of your strategy. However, 84% of 30-49 year olds and 72% of 50-64 year olds have an active Facebook account, so if you are tackling a more mature client base with treatments targeting them, then Facebook may be where you centre those services.
We’ve already explored how Instagram can help you gain new clients, so maybe there lies an opportunity for your digital marketing strategy. By diversifying your audience using different platforms, you can open your arms to different age and treatment demographics, effectively promoting a vast array of your services to the relevant audiences.
Customer Retention
Your platforms allow you to monitor your client base. By measuring and identifying their engagements with your posts you can recognise which services are popular on which platforms, and which prompt the most interest. It also allows you a personal window into how your overall branding and digital marketing is performing. If you’re noticing that your content, copy, and overall strategy is pulling in new engagements and new enquiries, then your social media strategy is functioning at its best. This kind of monitoring of your social media presence is essentially a litmus for your client base’s needs.
Furthermore, your social media presence can be used as customer service. Because this kind of feedback can be given and responded to almost instantly, you can respond to your clients’ messages quickly and efficiently. This snappy response time can lead to them placing more trust in your business and therefore will help to convert them into seeking treatment with you.
In fact, 70% of those helped by customer service based on social media return as a customer, presumably because of these faster response times and instant resolutions it provides. This coupled with the fact that 71% of those who have had a good social media service experience with a brand are likely to recommend it to others means that your client base’s experience could both keep them coming back, and invite new leads.
If you find yourself looking at another business’ social media and thinking theirs’ seems effortless and easy, we can guarantee you they’re doing a lot of research, targeting, and strategizing to make it seem so. Social media is a valuable part of any business’ digital marketing strategy and offers plenty of opportunities for business to customer engagement, community building, and conversions. Treat your social media as its own project and facet, with its own research and strategy, and you will definitely not live to regret it.
Social media can be daunting, however. If you’re not sure where to start, want to get things right, and promote professional content, then Cosmetic Digital can always help.
