Why is Social Media an Important Part of Inbound Marketing?

Nowadays, you’ll hardly find anyone who has no social media account. According to Datareportal, every 9 out of 10 internet users now have a social media account. And there is a whooping number of 4.47 billion social media users around the globe, shows a report from Kepios.  In this regard, social media has become one of the marketing tools. And why not. You can easily reach a large audience through an effective marketing strategy, especially inbound marketing.  In this article, we’ll try to find why social media is an important part of inbound marketing. Before that, let’s understand what inbound marketing is.

There are two basic methods in marketing: inbound and outbound marketing.

Inbound marketing refers to creating valuable content to attract potential customers to build long-term relationships. Sharing blogs, helpful social media content, and useful guidelines are some of the best ways to do inbound marketing.

Here are the phases of inbound marketing to build up the buyer’s journey:

1. Attract the right customers at the right time with the right content
2. Engage them by giving solutions that address their pain points
3. Delight them with high-quality content and graphics.

You can accomplish this in various ways. Some popular examples of inbound marketing include social media posts, surveys, forms, etc.

Inbound marketing was officially introduced in 2006 and has become the most useful marketing strategy. Specifically, it’s the most effective for B2C businesses. If you have an inbound marketing strategy, you plan for your customer to get acquainted with your service so that they come to you on their own.

A study shows that 81% of retail customers search online before buying something. And the internet, especially social media, greatly contributes to your customer's buying decisions. Your aim should be to inform, educate, or entertain your customer. Once you have valuable content, you will get it shared more and more, thus reaching a broader audience.

Social media like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Snapchat, Pinterest, and LinkedIn can help you find more leads and convert those into sales. But you must implement it correctly.

If you don’t use social media for your inbound marketing, you’ll be missing out on three main advantages:

• Expanding customer reach
• Boosting brand awareness
• Promoting products and services

Inbound marketing aims to drive customers to your website even before they are prepared to make a purchase.

According to Oberlo, up to 63% of your potential clients start their online buying journeys by looking for relevant content to meet their needs or solve a problem.

As a result, your content should describe how your products or services will meet their requirements, solve their critical matters, or both.

Outbound marketing, as opposed to inbound marketing, involves spreading a message to a large audience in an effort to increase sales.

The outbound strategy is based on the idea that the higher the number of people your message reaches, the greater the return. Examples of outbound marketing include direct mail, events, billboards, cold calling, newspapers, radio, pay-per-click advertising, and email outreach. They are made to disrupt others in order to get their attention.

                   Source: aimstyle.com – Inbound vs. Outbound marketing

Compared to outbound techniques, inbound strategies help you interact with a much bigger audience that is simpler to identify as prospects or leads.

Inbound marketing success depends on how you use social media because most online time is spent on these platforms. Still, Statista states that social media offers the best opportunity to interact with your audience.

Source: Most popular social networks worldwide as of January 2022, ranked by number of active users

Facebook is the primary channel to distribute content among all social media sites, with over 4 billion users.

So, there are mainly 5 reasons why marketers use social media—

1. Help You Connect with Your Prospects and Provides Content Ideas

What do you do when facing a product or service problem? You browse on the internet or visit their social media profile. And it’s not different for your customers.

Using social media, you can build a solid relationship with customers by offering them value – what your customer expects to get from you today.

Additionally, your customer would like to connect with you more if you can show relevant and informative content. The reason is that your customer wants someone who truly can understand what they need.

Can you see here why social media is important?

Most businesses try to build stronger with their customers by responding to comments. You can also do it by replying to any criticism with a welcoming yet problem-solving attitude.

Regarding customer comments on social media—it’s a great opportunity to get valuable feedback. And feedback is a good source of further information about your customers.

Furthermore, through social media, you can get content ideas too. You can see what problems your customers are facing and what they want.

Finally, every social media has reviews and Q&A sites. Based on customer reviews and Q&As, you can improve your service and create relevant content. Thus, by integrating all the online platforms, you can always be at the top of your game to create content your customer can relate to.

2. Make Your Brand Relevant and Forms an Authoritative Online Presence

In social media, you can easily educate your customers, whether it’s a topic related to your business, product/service, or it could be something they believe in.

Looking at your content, your customers will decide if you would be the right solution for their needs. It’s not just the content you present. There are factors like the tone you’re using and the topic they're discussing.

Again, if you post interesting content that engages qualified leads, they will most likely comment on and share your content. As a result, you can expand the customer reach.

Besides, as stated in the first point, you will know what content you want to create for your customer by looking at their feedback.

Overall, you will have a larger customer base if you utilize social media. And that way, you achieve more visibility online. In other words, your presence online will have more authority.

3. Assist You in Long Term Business Development

Along with gaining feedback from your customer, social media can deliver ideas to develop your business. Engaging with your customers is such a boon!

Once you know what your customers are saying about your business, you can generate plans to change the direction of your business.

These insights are necessary for you to experience a new market segment. So listen to your customers on social media to find new ideas to promote your service. This will help you expand your offerings to customers.

As long as you pay attention to what your customers are saying—you’re never running out of ideas for business development. And that’s another reason why social media is important for your business.

4. Promote Your SEO and Overall Reputation

There isn’t a direct connection between social media marketing and search engine optimization. But there’s a correlation between these two aspects. 

How?

If you use social media to promote your business with content and interact with your customer with social media, you can get more exposure than usual.

You will have even more reach with relevant content, more exposure, and other digital marketing tasks. This way, you can reach people outside your targeted audience, giving you more leads.

Further, influencers can help you get more website visitors. If you share high-quality content, influencers will link to your posts more and more. As people find an influencer more credible, people will find you reliable, too, if they see the influencer promoting it.

All these translate to your authority on the internet and why social media inbound marketing is important. With famous influencers or experts, you will have authoritative online visibility. And this will naturally boost your SEO.

5. Gives You Easy Access to Customer Research

Social media has a lot of other opportunities to understand your customer better. If you’re already using social media for your business, you know that there’s an option for audience analysis.

In the analysis option, you can find the demographic you’re focusing on. Also, you can get psychographic data.

You want to know about a potential buyer's interest, role, and industry. Social media audience analysis can make that happen! You can check the location of your prospects. Consequently, you can reach more leads with similar buyer profiles.

Once again, this is just another chance to make better content for your customer/ audience. You can test content on social media to determine which type of content is performing the best.

Additionally, you can check out what your competitors are doing. It’s research work, and you consider questions like–

• What are the trend hashtags right now?
• What are your industry’s hot topics?
• What are your customers’ hot topics?
• Should I send video links in a message or an article link?

In the next section, we have specified why people consider social media a good tool. Read to gather more information on the importance of social media for marketing.

You learned 5 reasons social media is a major part of inbound marketing. But have you considered what makes social media a go-to option for inbound marketing?

Here’s why—

Less expense

Let’s be real; marketers want less expense but more exposure. In that case, you don’t have to spend much on outbound marketing while using social media. Most social media allows you to open an account for FREE! All you need is to create high-quality content with good graphics.

Yes, you will have to promote your website with that. But still, the expense will be way lesser than your outbound marketing budget.

Quality leads

You already know that inbound marketing pushes your customer to reach you independently. So, if you visit your social media profile or website after seeing an ad, they mainly want to see what you have to offer them. All you have to show them if your product/service can solve their problem.

On the other hand, in outbound marketing, you won’t be sure whether a customer wants to buy from you. In this regard, inbound marketing gives businesses more qualified leads than outbound marketing. And social media is a great way to do that.

Meaningful bonding

With social media inbound marketing, you can immediately develop a good relationship with your target customer. 

One of the reasons for that is you aren’t overwhelmed with too many messages pleading with them to purchase from you. Instead, you’re using inbound marketing strategies on social media, providing valuable content and giving them a choice to contact you.

As you can establish a bonding with your potential customers right from the beginning, you can further nurture the relationship. This way, some of your customers might become your brand ambassador.

Bottom Line

Inbound marketing is your best strategy if you truly want to reach your customer right time. And the sooner you start conducting inbound marketing, the faster you can grow your business. And there is no counterpart to using social media for inbound marketing.

The biggest advantage of social media is you can utilize social media in various ways. You can elevate your brand's identity by establishing a meaningful connection with your prospect and customers. 

Alongside these, social media makes your brand relevant and improves your SEO automatically.

Finally, remember that social media are platforms where people mainly go to have fun or see some information and ideas. Considering that, you need to create content to entertain your customers.

Got more questions on your mind? Check the following queries and gather more information on social media inbound marketing.

Why are animated GIFs useful on social media?

Moving graphics are always more powerful than static ones. GIFs are one form of moving graphics. As you’ve just a couple of seconds only to grab your customer’s attention, GIFs can engage your customers immediately. This way, you can successfully deliver a message to your customer in the shortest time.

What is the importance of buyer persona in social media?

A buyer persona is a research-based character of your target customers/ ideal customers. A buyer persona gives you the clearest visibility of your customers' needs. As a result, you can tailor your offer/plan accordingly for them. This way, you can become trustworthy to your customers.

What are the social media advertising best practices?

There is no specific way, but you can follow some ideal formula followed by all:

• Identify your target audience
• Select the right platforms
• Fix goals for ads
• Test, monitor, and analyze ads
• Establish a brand tone
• High-quality graphics
• Always make relevant landing page
• Include correct CTA

What are examples of inbound marketing?

Some of the common examples of inbound marketing strategies are:

• Blog
• Infographics
• Ebook
• case study
• Webinar
• Podcast
• Video series
• SEO

Why is social media important in inbound marketing strategy?

You need an inbound marketing strategy to draw your customer in slowly. With social media, you can gradually attract customers with every attention-grabbing image post. Also, you can keep your social media followers informed about your business. This, in return, can provoke them in future buying decisions resulting in a purchase from your business.