Learn Why Social Media Is Essential to Inbound Marketing

Inbound marketing is the new standard in marketing these days, and from its inception, social media was an important aspect of its success. Social media makes it easy to reach out to your customers, understand their wants and needs, and continue growing your brand in the digital realm.

Social media is essential to inbound marketing because it provides that element of human connection that is required when trying to grasp the attention of people looking to solve their problems with your product or service.

Here are some reasons why social media is essential to inbound marketing and why you should be giving your social accounts the love and attention they require.

A Helping Hand to SEO

Do you know how many people use the internet to make a buying decision? Back in 2013, it was 89 percent. That’s almost everyone, and since then, the number has inevitably increased.  When someone looks to make a purchase, they pull up Google and start searching. That means if your SEO content isn’t fully functional, you’re losing out to your competitors.

The beauty of social media is that it will help with your SEO rankings. As you continue to build your online presence through social media, you will develop relationships with brand advocates, influencers, bloggers—anyone and everyone that makes the internet their playground and professional home. As more people engage with your product by sharing links, video, and more, your SEO ratings will rise.

Developing Content Ideas

By wading deep into social media, you can actually generate a plethora of ideas for content to create. You can take a look at the kinds of content people are sharing—such as videos, which are becoming the most preferred kind of content on the net—and adjust your content strategies to focus on this media. But you can also discover the real problems and troubles that are plaguing people—problems your products and services can solve.

By watching trends, using social listening, and talking to users, you will start to see what’s important to people, what’s on their mind, and what’s resonating. Once you know that, tailoring your content to speak to those ideas means you’re creating content of interest to your audience—which will draw in more traffic to your website and, ultimately, more buyers to your product.

Understanding Your Audience

If it’s done on the internet, there is data to explain it. You can learn a wealth of information about people and trends by sifting through analytics, and when it comes to social media, the depth you can go to is outstanding. You create buyer personas to ensure you’re targeting an audience that’s interested in your product, and by spotting these people in your social media data, you learn about places to target to reach these audiences.

At the same time, and another reason why social media is essential to inbound marketing, once you find the places where your target audiences hang out, you can learn more about what matters to them—directly from them! By listening to and talking directly to people in your target audience, you’ll learn what they want and what they need, and then be able to create content for them.

Connecting with Your Audience

In the 21^st century, never underestimate the powers of communication and connection. More and more, people want to be able to engage in conversation with a business; they’re looking for more than a series of purchase transactions. They actually want you to know how they feel, be it frustrated or excited. Social media provides those spaces where you can engage. As mentioned, getting to know your target buyers personally provides you with constant, ongoing customer feedback that you can use to plan content, products, and your inbound and business strategies.

>In addition, the more people are talking about you, the more likely others will also find you. You can build credibility and brand awareness while creating a brand that people can get to know and appreciate when you engage on social media.

Promoting Your Content

You’ve made a whole host of really cool content, ready to explode onto the scene with a cool marketing campaign—but without social media, how do you get it out there? Sure, there’s email—and that’s certainly not going away—as well as all the old channels. But none can rival social media for reach and engagement.

When people go on social media, they are already expecting to engage. That’s kind of the point of social media when you get right down to it. When people log on they’re expecting to like the pictures of their friends’ new babies, learn more about food and what’s in it, and chat about the news. You can slide your campaign quite easily into that space and generate engagement.

Researching and Market Expansion

Everything we’ve shared already is reason enough that social media is essential to inbound marketing, but we have one more ace up our sleeve: market expansion. Consider everything we’ve said so far regarding getting to know your audience and creating content for their needs—now imagine using social media as a tool to hunt new markets.

You’re not just learning about your target audience, you’ve got the potential to find new markets. Using the same techniques—looking for users that regularly search and discuss keywords, specifically those related to your product—you can find markets that want and need your service; markets you may not have considered before. The ability to do primary research by learning from users is near limitless, and with so many people on social media, the possibilities are endless.

Social media is essential to inbound marketing; there’s just no other way to look at it. If you’re not already on social media, it’s time to get out there on the platforms that make the most sense for your business and start engaging with users. The things you’ll learn, the ideas it will help generate, the attention it will garner, and the effects it will have on your overall marketing strategy will all be well worth the investment. Now, more than ever before, it’s time to get social!