Improving brand awareness on social media for retail businesses organically is undoubtedly a tough job, especially in the scenario where everyone is racing to grab the top position. The senior manager of Scanteam also agrees on the fact that the power of social media can take businesses to the next level.
Today, social media is populated with an audience of all age groups and mindsets that make it easy to approach your target customers and promote your brand. It’s the easiest way to reach out to the mob in no time.
Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Linkedin platforms offer paid advertisements and promotions. But that doesn’t mean that free promotions and posts are banned. You can still do it organically, although it is difficult, but not impossible.
But is it all about money? Nope! Money is just a part of it. Social media marketing tactics revolve around its algorithm that has to understand if you want to win more customers and boost your brand organically over social media for retail.
Benefits of Social Media For Retail Businesses
Knowing the incredible benefits of social media for retail and small business owners will compel you to increase your next social media marketing budget and help grow your business faster.
Social Media offers so many benefits that traditional media formats like television, radio, and outdoor marketing simply can’t offer. If your organization can fully leverage it, it will deliver increased brand awareness, drive loads of qualified web traffic and conversions, increase sales leads, and help convert those leads into paying customers. Let’s look at each benefit in detail.
Huge Global Reach
Today there are around 3.1 billion active social media users globally. These are crazy numbers when you realize that social media only emerged about 15 years ago.
One in three people around the globe are active on social media and all you need to reach them is an Internet-connected device. Using social media, every business can now find their customers active on social media. So businesses now have a wider reach.
Pinpoint Your Target Market
Social media channels hold a huge amount of data on their users that they provide to advertisers to help them make targeted ads. This includes basic information like gender, location, and age.
Also a massive array of demographic interest and behavioral data. In addition to basic targeting, you can also target those who have interacted with your organization before. These can be lists of people who have visited your website before, people from your existing email list, people who have watched a video of yours, or people who like your Facebook page.
Data Optimization
On social media, you can measure everything, say how many people see your post, how many people liked or reacted to the post, how many people commented, shared the post, click on the link, and so on.
Using a tracking record the social media channels can even remember the actions that people take as they travel around the internet. This allows marketers to track conversions and optimize their data to increase the return on investment.
Engage Your Audience
Traditional media like television, print media, radio and others are broadcast formats. meaning that the audience can’t respond to. These formats have evolved to make their media more interactive. With modern smartphones, everyone is a media publisher. Billions of people can take a photo and publish it on social media in seconds.
Then there are billions of other people who can respond to this. A unique attribute of social media humanizes a brand by giving you a unique voice. This helps to create meaningful connections with their audience and ultimately increases trust.
Increase Brand Awareness
SEM (Search Engine Marketing) which is predominantly done through Google is great because people who search for something have a high purchase intent. This indicates that they’re in the mood to buy.
Say if a person searches for RayBan that’s Glasses, there’s a chance that he/she wants to buy a pair. However, a search is only useful to the extent that people are aware of the brand. If they’re not, they won’t search for it. Social media plays a vital role in making your audience aware of your brand for the first time and then nurturing them to become paying customers.
Drive Website Traffic
Social media is now one of the world’s largest drivers of traffic on the Internet. This traffic can be from the organic links such as the single URL on your Instagram profile or link you include on a YouTube video or a link from a paid social media app.
Once on your website or landing page, marketers can invite social media users to take the next step of the buyer journey. A high-value piece of content that compels users to exchange their personal information most importantly there are email addresses to share.
Lift Conversion Rates
Social media users will typically follow a brand for a while before deciding to buy from them. They become aware of the brand. And with regular content developed trust that the product or services are high-quality and worth the investment.
This process leads to an increase in conversion rates on your website. With retargeting on social media you can also ensure that you’re only serving ads to people that are genuinely interested and not wasting money.
Improved Customer Service
Nowadays customers don’t want to sit on the phone speaking to an organization about a customer service issue they have. Instead, they turn to social media for help to instantly speak to someone.
Whether it’s tweeting your electricity company or speaking to your favorite clothing brand on messenger, social media is a fantastic platform for improving customer experience.
Boost Search Engine Rankings
The major search engines like Google now factor in the amount of engagement that a web page such as a blog article receives on social media. With correct keyword optimization, social media can deliver your website more free traffic.
Customer Feedback
Social media is a great place for customers to provide a review of your product quality, your price, your customer service, or anything else they like. This feedback from. customers can then be shared with other social media users to increase brand loyalty and credibility.
To better understand that how these social media platforms work to boost posts. Let us give you a brief of the algorithm followed by social media these days.
Social Media Marketing Algorithm
Mark Zuckerberg, while addressing the issues on Facebook, has made it clear that though Facebook pushes paid advertisements, the vision is to “Engage more and more users on the platform”. He further clarifies that this can be done only by posting the most engaging content.
Similar to Google’s algorithm, social media adopts the News Feed algorithm. It is a sheer myth that Facebook and Linkedin-like platforms only give priority to paid promotions.
Everything is based on an algorithm that works by putting any post in a small pool of followers. If the content finds engagement, it moves to a larger pool of audiences. In this way, slowly it becomes visible to more people. The only condition is ‘Engagement’!
Now, the most important question that arises is what makes a post engaging? Because what is ‘Engaging’ for social media platforms, is nowhere defined. So, to hack growth organically on social media, pay attention to these popularly adopted ways to improve your brand presence on social media.
Optimize Your Business Profile
Start with optimizing your profile. This can give you a good breakthrough in the number of fans for your post, story, or page. Every small and major area of your profile should be well-crafted for better visibility to your audience.
For this, you have to implement small yet crucial changes, say, keeping easy to remember username for your Facebook page or Insta profile. Plus, you should set a brand logo that is easily recognizable from your profile picture. Don’t forget to add keywords while writing your brand description. Provide details so that interested ones can trace you such as email id, website link, or contact number. Last but not least, add a ‘Call to action button/phrase.
Get to Know Your Audience
Knowing your audience helps you to find the best route to reach them. You should understand and try to collect insights about your target audience like their interests, most visited social media channels, websites they count on, brands they like, and such other useful information that prompts them to engage with you.
To do this, you may conduct polls, surveys, and welcome them to comment and start the conversation. In addition, keep an eye on your competitors and industry leaders. When you know your audience, you better create unique and engaging content tailor-made for them. Also, don’t ignore the search trends, following the trend is a wise strategy.
Invest More in the Content
When you know exactly what you want to post, the next important consideration is to create out-of-the-box content. The bottom line is ‘Content is the King’. You can’t compromise with the quality of the content at any cost. Social media experts recommend adding multiple elements to your content to call it engaging and interesting.
Add images, quotes, videos, figures, or a balanced combination of all. Remember that once you win the trust of your audience, you can’t afford to lose them. Whatever you post, they believe you as an authority. Hence, they deserve content that is informative, valuable, useful, and helpful. It is more likely that they bring new followers to your page.
Find the Right Time to Post
A general tendency among social media marketers is that the right time to post is when most of the followers are likely to be online but it is not so. Age-old social media marketers sharing their experience recommend posting at non-peak hours. Doing that, the chances are less than your post will be lost in the flood of posts by others like you.
Although, it is difficult to provide optimal posting times. Moreover, it keeps on changing based on your audience base. A general study on publishing trends on varied social media reveals the following best time slots. Have a look –
Linkedin –
Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, between 3 to 5 P.m.
Facebook –
Weekdays between 10 a.m to 3 p.m, on Wednesday afternoon, and 1 to 2 p.m on Thursday.
Twitter –
In the morning till afternoon on weekdays and between 9 to 10.00 a.m on Friday.
Instagram –
On Wednesday at 3 p.m, early morning at 5 a.m on Thursday, and before evening on Weekdays.
Spread Over Multiple Social Media Platforms
Diversify your reach by updating the single post on multiple social media platforms. This is a great hack to promote your brand organically. According to author Michelle Thomas, There are many networking destinations including TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Pinterest, Twitter, and Linkedin where you can lay up the attention of the people around the world.
Mention your social profiles and link them everywhere (Your website, follow buttons, emails, etc) because you never know when it’s a lead! This way you can divert organic traffic cross-platform. Presenting your business on all the popular platforms ensures organic reach immensely.
Hashtags Help a Lot
This might sound irrelevant or silly but hashtags make a huge difference. Hashtags play a vital role in sending your posts to the desired audience. Hashtags are keywords that establish relevance between the audience and you. To elevate your brand, it is necessary to add quality hashtags to your posts.
You may add hashtags on almost every social media platform be it Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, or Twitter. To make a difference, you may start a new hashtag also.
However, there can be hundreds of hashtags related to a single post. To saturate your post to the right group of people and connect new followers, hashtags help a lot.
