Social media is now the ultimate tool to get potential customers online. Let us straight way understand the five reasons why businesses should learn and use social media for marketing.

1) The cost for entry is minimal.

At the very least, for the price of hosting and setting up a blog, you can begin to engage in social media marketing. You can spend dollars on buying banner advertisements, keyword placement on search engines and so forth. The cost barrier for entry is relatively low, compare that to the costly old-school and increasingly ineffective ways of marketing such as print, TV, radio and so forth. Don’t get me wrong, blogging is just one aspect of your marketing strategy, but the essential tools you will also use, such as Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, for example, for the most part, cost nothing to use. Your cost is time, time spent establishing and engaging your brand’s presence online. If you decided to retain a PR agency or social media consultant, you obviously would incur slightly higher costs. Still, by doing so, you will be at peace as the company will take care of everything. Doing it in-house, if you can, is the way to go a long way as you also have to focus on the business and the marketing part specifically. If you are a small business and don’t have a large advertising budget, you should contact the best social media marketing agency that provides the best price. With the economy in its current state, even the larger corporations feel the brunt, and they are slashing their advertising budgets in half. Some are eliminating them, which can be an opportunity for you to make a remarkable presence on social media as it is one of the most effective means of advertising. You can bet many big firms are outsourcing the content requirements and marketing efforts to save staffing costs to accomplish this.

2) It is used by your current and potential customers

We are not living back in the 1996-1997 era, where the Internet to most people was easy, and the way we accessed it was through 56K modems or lower. Things have changed dramatically. It’s now not an option to be online, and it’s a necessity. We live in a connected digital state of mind, and we are connected to your customer’s purchasing decisions are being influenced by social media, i.e. blogs. Before making a purchasing decision, consumers nowadays are smartly using the Internet to find, compare, and research before ultimately spending their money. Have you looked around? There is a reason why your competitors, especially those in the know, are already using social media. It would be best if you weren’t so, and there’s no reason.

3) Brand monitoring, listen, learn and react.

If your customers are online, you can bet they are talking, positively or negatively. Social media is mostly word of mouth marketing. Cheerful chatter can be used to your advantage and should be taken advantage of when possible. You should put forth the effort to respond to this chatter with gratitude. It never hurts to reward positive feedback, as it could only be beneficial to your brand. This can be done in many simple and efficient ways. Negative chatter, on the hand, can be detrimental and needs to be paid close attention to. On average, dissatisfied customers will tell somewhere between 13 and 20 other people how disappointed they were, and that’s offline we are talking about. Now could you imagine online? Learn how to use the tools to your advantage, and most importantly, listen and react accordingly.

4) Compete on an even playing field.

Social media allows you to compete on an even, level playing field. Using an effective social media and SEO strategy, you can achieve the same reach and success that your competitors have, no matter their size or bankroll. Social media gives you a headstart up on your competition if you are determined, motivated and willing to put the time into it.

5) Traditional websites have always been something of the past and just won’t cut it anymore.

Do you have a killer four or five letter keyword dot com domain with plenty of type-in traffic? Maybe so if you were lucky enough to repurchase it in the early to mid 90′s. If you don’t, you will need other ways of generating traffic and that are also budget-friendly. You could always spend advertising dollars on costly PPC campaigns. That’s one way of developing quality, targeted traffic, and by all means, it can be beneficial. If you are on a budget or, for that matter, have no account, social media marketing combined with organic SEO efforts is your only answer. Blogging, social networking sites, and Twitter are much more effective in getting the word out there and driving traffic than a static, stand-alone HTML website. The mentality “if you build it, it’s coming” doesn’t function on the Internet. It would help if you as had as many hooks as possible to lure customers in. Remember, this a fantastic ocean that you are fishing in. Social media marketing should be used in addition to your traditional website. 

So it is always better to hire the top social media marketing agency to get the best outcomes on the money incurred.