It’s no secret that social media marketing for your startup is very popular right now. In fact,

 92% of marketers say that social media is important to their business.

The facts are:

That social media is a vital tool for your Startup’s success. There are over two billion Social Media accounts (and counting) which gives you access to a whole new market to explore.

I think you understand that social media is an extremely beneficial tool to grow your startup, but

you might be wondering:

What specifically are the marketing advantages of using social media for your Startup?

In today’s post, I’m going to show 8 of the most powerful social media media marketing benefits.

Social Media Marketing Benefits

1. Increase Brand Awareness

Having a well thought-out social media strategy for your Startup is essential in order to gain the brand recognition that your startup deserves. The first step to your startup’s social media strategy is to create social media profiles where your buyer personas “hang out.”

For example, if you were selling furniture to elderly people it would be waste of time for your startup to be active on Instagram because Instagram’s key demographic is males and females from 18-29 years old.

So once you have your social profiles set up and optimized correctly,  it’s a good idea to have some employees in your Startup dedicated to just interacting and engaging with people on social media for

just a couple hours a day.

The keys to success here are to find the balance between real human engagement and automation. Trust me when I say this your customers will know when you are over using automation. 

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If you or your employees invest just a few hours of real human engagement on social media each day, you will begin to see your Startup’s brand awareness skyrocket. Once you are popular, its high time to think about a warehouse.

In fact:

91% of marketers claimed that their social media efforts increased their brand exposure exponentially.

2.Skyrocket Customer Aquisition With Social Advertising

Social Media is one of the best ways in 2017 to advertise while simultaneously taking the lean startup approach. Advertising on Social Media is very cost-effective and very easy to setup. Social ads are one of the best ways to acquire new customers in a fast amount of time.

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Just like with every other type of digital marketing in order to be successful, you need spend time planning a killer strategy to attack your social ads.

That being said,

you shouldn’t just quickly create a facebook ad campaign, invest $1,000, and expect results.

When setting up the audiences to whom the social ad will be shown to, you should definitely play around with different audience types until you know what works and what doesn’t.

You can do this by only investing around $5 a day until you find your perfect audience to target. Once you find your “perfect audience” you can scale this audience with the budget you initially had for your social ads.

In terms of the social ad in its self, you should really think about incorporating video into your strategy.

In 2017 video ads are the best way to engage with your customers. In fact, One-third of online activity is spent watching videov.

Also, when you’re creating your video think about ways that your ad can resonate with your customers on a personal level. A quick tip to hack personal connections is to simply create a brand touch point by showing your face in the video.

You should also think about social retargeting ads. With social retargeting ads, you can boost the response rate of your social ads by 400%.

In my experience, the best custom audiences to retarget your ads to are people have more involved in all automatic spa fill system by Kona Labs who have been to your blog or have subscribed to your newsletter.

If you want to take this a step further and really laser target your potential customers you can also show your ads to people who have been to your Startups product checkout page, but haven’t converted into a customer yet. If you want to master social retargeting ads check out this awesome video by Webris

3. Social Media Lead Generation [Growth Hack]

I think it’s pretty obvious that when you post content on social media you will get direct traffic to your website, which will ultimately bring your Startup new leads and customers.

But it gets better:

I’m going to show you a quick growth hack which you can actionably use to acquire new customers through social media. These tactics may not be the most scalable, but that’s the point. Many business professionals say “always do things that scale” which is definitely true for your long term business strategy but with growth hacking it’s a little different.

You do things that don’t scale when you absolutely need to acquire new users for your Startup in a short amount of time.

So whats the bottom line?

If you want to hack your Startup’s growth and you need to acquire customers fast try these 2 tactics:

Leveraging Twitter’s Advanced Search Feature

The first step to acquiring new customers via Twitter’s advanced search feature is to come up with a list of keywords that are relevant to your target audience and have some type of buyer intent.

For example:

Hiring a [your keyword here]

Looking to hire a [your keyword here]

Looking for a [your keyword here]

#hiring #yourkeywordhere

In my case with my digital marketing agency, I could turn those keywords into something like:

Hiring a growth hacker

Alright, so once you have your keywords set you’re ready to use Twitter’s advanced search feature

You can mess around with the keyword filters, but you should make sure to use the date filter to only show results that were posted in the last 3 months.

From here, just scroll through the results and send direct messages or @ mentions to your potential customers that would be interested in using your Startup’s product or services.

Leveraging Facebook Groups

You can start finding new customers through Facebook groups by simply making a list of about 10-20 groups that you know your target audience is in. Next, just simply join the groups.

Once you joined all the groups in which your target audience hangs out in, just browse through the facebook feed for any posts that have questions relating to the products or services your Startup offers.

In my case, I joined a Facebook group called Entrepreneur Hustle  and I found this post:

I thought this post in the group was relevant to the services my digital marketing agency offers, so I decided to make a comment.

Now:

If you want to see any type of results you need to make sure your comments provide real value to the facebook group as a whole.

If you want to be 10x more efficient when generating leads through Facebook Group comments,

check out this simple 3 step comment template:

Heres an example from one of my Facebook comments that I used to attract 10 new leads with just 5 minutes of writing:

My comment can be broken down into 3 simple steps which you can use to scale your own Facebook group comments.

Step 1: Value

To start your comment off write around 175 words of real value that exactly addresses any questions that the post may ask. You should also think about using emojis in your text to make your comment more engaging.

Step 2: Clever CTA

After you have written about 175 words of helpful information you should come up with a clever way to add in your “Call To Action. “Your call to action should invite the readers of your comment to take a certain action that would move the lead into your sales funnel.

Step 3: Link

After your value and your CTA text just simply end the comment with a short link that will ultimately convert the comment reader into a lead.

4. Use Social Media Marketing For Explosive SEO Growth

One of the most powerful benefits of your Startup using social media marketing is the SEO traffic increase your Startup will get.

When you post your content on social media you are actually shortcutting googles algorithm to increase your organic search rankings.

As soon as you hit the publish button on your new article you should directly go to your social media scheduling tool to schedule your new content. When you post your content in social media you get some crazy benefits:

-Get instant traffic to your website directly through social media it’s self.
-Get a very large amount of search traffic (in a month depending on your sites overall DA) when your content ranks on the first page of Google.

5. Social Media Will Make Your Startup A Thought Leader

Using social media is a great way to show your expertise in your field which will ultimately increase your influence as a though leader. Establishing yourself as an expert will increase your conversions and traffic:

Some  quick tips to increase your influence are:

-Responding in detail to any questions relevant to your industry.

-Be consistent with creating unique and valuable content that genuinely helps people.

A large majority of your Startups target audience will have genuine pain points and are looking for some sort of help. This assistance that saves the day for your target audience is through your Startups content. Your Startups content strategy is vital when building trust with your target audience.

And when you have trust you can actionably skyrocket your sales.?

6. Get Key Insights On Your Target Audience ?

Social Media is not only a great way for your Startup to interact with your customers, but social media can be used to learn how your customers interact with one another.

Every day, there are over 4.5 billion Likes on Facebook, 95 million photos/videos uploaded to Instagram, and 500 million tweets.

Hidden under all these statistics is vital information that your startup can use and leverage to further understand your buyer personas or “target audience.”

Through understanding how your customers interact with one another on social media your Startup can learn many valuable insights such as:

These are just 2 simple and cost effective ways to further understand your potential customers by using social media.

By simply being active on social media you can learn a whole lot more about your target audience than you would reading blog posts online.

In addition to the insights I mentioned, though extensive research on social media you will understand your buyer personas on a much deeper level.

7. Build Valuable Relationships

Social Media is a great way to create relationships with not only your customers but with other thought leaders in your industry’s space.

Creating relationships can be very beneficial for your Startup’s overall growth. 

Relationships can help your Startup with:

-Increased website traffic through social shares. When you make genuine relationships with people that have large followings on social media you can leverage their following to show your content to a completely new audience. 

-You can also build high-quality backlinks through the relationships you have, which will increase your organic search rankings greatly.

8. Customer Support

Another, benefit of using social media marketing that most Startups miss is awesome customer support through social media.

Starbucks, for example, does a really good job with this.

To be successful with customer support just always be aware and reply to any questions or comments your customers have. You can easily know whenever one of your customers needs help by using a media monitoring tool such as Mention.

Closing Remarks

Although my post was not a monster list of social media marketing advantages I talked about the 8 most actionable advantages that will growth hack your Startup’s customer acquisition.

The bottom line:

Your startup needs to continuously acquire new customers at a scalable level. Being straight forward, without your startup acquiring new customers and making new sales your Startup will run out of money and crash.  “Guarantee” is a frowned upon word in the marketing industry, but it’s safe to say that it’s a guaranteed win win situation for your Startup and your Startup’s customers when you’re active on social media.

One last thing, there are many other additional benefits of social media marketing that you definitely should check out as well.

Even More Social Media Marketing Benefits:

• 75 Benefits of Social Media Marketing

• 38 Benefits of Social Media Marketing Every Business Needs to Know

• The Top 10 Benefits Of Social Media Marketing

• The Importance of Social Media for Web Traffic

As always, thanks for reading. ?