Strong marketing is essential to business growth. With a good marketing plan your business can reach more customers, make more sales, increase its cash flow and generally achieve more success within your industry. One important aspect of your marketing plan is your social media presence, which is no longer optional in this increasingly digital world. With a well-crafted social media strategy you can nicely complement an existing plan and bring a larger customer base to your business. You can also use social media to interact with existing customers, increasing the likelihood of return customers. If you want to implement or improve your social media presence, it pays to hire a social media marketing professional for a number of reasons.
1. Increased Traffic
One huge benefit of increasing your social media presence is an increase in traffic to your website or other online assets. A tweet linking back to your website can draw customers who may engage with your brand and possibly purchase. Sharing an image of a product on Instagram with a link back to your site can bring customers to inquire and possibly purchase. No matter which sites your company uses, a social media expert can make the most of your online presence and increase website traffic.
2. Brand Continuity
When you don’t have a social media professional on your staff, you might have different folks managing each social media site you belong to. This means each profile probably looks different, the content shared is inconsistent and overall there’s not much brand continuity going on. Having a consistent, well thought out brand is important for a successful business and a social media marketing professional can help keep your brand personality consistent strong across all websites and accounts.
3. Plan Creation and Integration
If you’ve already established a strong social media presence, an experienced social media professional should be ready to build upon that plan, instead of replacing it entirely with their own ideas. When you do choose to hire a social media marketer, they can come up with a social media plan of attack based upon what your existing marketing team has put in place. A good social media marketer will integrate with existing structures in the interest of brand continuity (as previously mentioned). As a result, the themes and ideas already in use will be enhanced by a professional whose perspective can balance everything you love about your brand with industry trends and effective implementation.
4. Wide Range of Subject Knowledge
While you might be able to tweet a few times a week or put up a Facebook post every other day, a social media marketing professional has a much wider range of knowledge about various social media sites. This means that they know about the existence of many more useful sites, best practices, and trends.. As a result, they can create the most useful content possible, share it efficiently and design your page and profile to match your existing brand design.
5. Sufficient Customer Communication
Chances are that if you’re in charge of your own social media, or if you have one person who runs the social media accounts in addition to all of their other responsibilities, your customers could get neglected. When you have a dedicated social media employee, they have a sufficient amount of time to dedicate to customer communication via your social accounts. Whether you’re dealing with consumer complaints or compliments, it’s important to make sure that your customers are getting the attention that they need.
Having a strong social media presence is a must for a successful business. If you’ve got a marketing team in place already, a social media professional can complement the existing structure quite nicely. The benefits above are just some of the many ways a social media marketer can improve your company; consider hiring one today.
Sara Collins is a writer for NerdWallet. She works to help readers learn about a range of subjects, from the best travel discounts to planning for college tuition. Stop by and say hello to Sara on G+.
Jessica Rogers, PhD. 