Whether you are a small business that is looking to grow or a mid-market business that wants to make itself stand out from competitors, having a social media account is beneficial.
Social media marketing is the new standard in marketing, and every marketing team relies on social media to gain high-quality leads for its sales teams. Lead generation through social media is easy and effective. It provides the best return on investment and competes with the likes of email marketing campaigns. If done correctly, social media has the power to unlock exponential growth for any consumer business.
Different social media platforms, like Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, etc., have a combined monthly active user base of 4.7 billion people. If you are unaware of the benefits that social media marketing brings to a business, you’ll be amazed when we discuss them in the next section.
So let’s get started with the benefits of social media marketing. After that, we will have a look at how mid-market businesses leverage social media to increase leads and revenue.
When you post regularly, it is natural that your reach will increase. As reach increases, more and more people will come to know about your brand, and awareness among consumers will increase significantly.
Increased brand awareness means more chances of growth and revenue. Moreover, that also helps you create more leads and potential customers.
As a business, the more awareness you create about your business, the better the chances of leaving your competitors behind and emerging as the category leader.
With social media marketing, you can learn and understand your audience better. Constant connection and communication with the target audience help you to find out hidden knowledge and tips that can enhance your marketing efforts.
You can run analytics on your social media posts and find out details about who interacted with them, what is their age group, which kind of data is popular among your audience, and all the other stuff. Moreover, you can leverage that data to make better decisions in your marketing campaigns, making them highly effective.
Once you’ve understood your audience well enough, you can target them, create high-quality social media content that they want, and become an instant hit.
Many businesses have fantastic websites, but due to the tight competition, they may not have visibility. There can be SEO issues that push the website down and reduce its traffic. The best way to overcome such issues is by having social media marketing. Another major benefit of social media marketing is that you can redirect traffic to the website.
You can promote your products, and in the caption, you can provide links that take the customer to your website, where they can place an order. Such redirection can increase your chances of making a sale, and customers will not have to look for your products elsewhere too.
Being connected to customers all the time allows you to serve them better. With active social media teams, companies have brought down their customer service times to significantly less and increased brand loyalty and awareness manifolds.
Marketing and Customer Service work together, creating a link of events that ends with the company gaining more leads and revenue. It also creates a positive image of the company throughout the market, and anyone who is looking to know more about the company can do so by looking at its customer service.
Better customer service is personalized, and that’s what new customers love. Communicating with your customers and audience through social media posts will make them trust you more and help you grow.
Social media is highly cost-effective. It provides one of the best returns on investments in its segment. Moreover, social media marketing is highly customizable, and anyone can do it with just enough understanding of the target audience and business. Due to this, there are many social media marketers in the industry, and you can leverage this to get the best value for your money.
Social media marketing is time-saving too. You can save significant man-hours that go into solving customer issues from a call center.
Having known about the benefits of social media marketing, now is the time to understand mid-market IT companies and how they leverage social media.
IT as an industry is enormous. There are many parts of it, and companies often specialize in different things that create their revenue streams. As the name suggests, a mid-market IT company is a company that does not have extremely high revenue figures and is not a startup too. It’s a company that has evolved into a smaller corporation with a significant workforce that works on the development, sale, and maintenance of IT products.
As you know what a mid-market company is, you probably have understood why it needs social media. Such companies need to create their brand awareness to grow beyond a particular stage, and that is where social media helps them. It helps them gain a much-needed brand presence and customers.
Now is the correct time to find out how companies use social media to drive more leads and revenue.
Building an effective strategy is as important as posting on social media. Without a strategy, you’ll wander the social media pages aimlessly, and there will not be much return on investment.
The best mid-market IT companies use social media analytics to create fool-proof and effective social media strategies. These strategies involve everything from how many times the company should post and when they should post, who is their target audience, what sort of content is trending in their genre, and many other things.
Everything in building an effective social media strategy is based on the business expertise and understanding of the marketing team. If the team analyzes past social media outcomes effectively, those analytics can pave the way for effective social media strategies.
Once a good strategy is developed and understood by the marketing team, all that is left is the implementation. Almost no one can go wrong in the implementation phase, and having an excellent social media strategy enables companies to gain more sales.
Such sales come from targeting the correct audience every time with the type of content they love to indulge with.
Today, content marketing is no longer a one-size-fits-all thing. Every user is different and has different needs. Hence, each of them has to be approached and catered to differently. Almost all mid-market companies research, segment, and create target audiences to provide a personalized experience.
Suppose you are a business that sells games, and you’ve created a video that shows the latest games. Such videos are irrelevant to a broader business audience, and the target audience should be teenagers and gaming enthusiasts. In such cases, how do companies find the right person to get more revenue?
The answer is by segmenting and researching through their databases and leads. The right way to find an audience that will buy your products is by understanding what the person likes, what he does, and what his age group is. With such research, you can create a well-defined target audience.
Once you get the right target audience, you can sell your products every time. Moreover, another common thing that mid-market IT companies do is create content based on their audience on the platform. Specific platforms like LinkedIn are professional; hence there, companies try to be professional and generate B2B leads.
Whereas B2C leads and customers can be acquired through informal social media channels like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc.
A company that is good at researching and understanding customer needs well is one that succeeds in personalized marketing. The better and more relevant the target audience, the more the chances of driving more leads and revenue.
Creating quality content is how businesses generate high-quality leads and turn them into loyal customers. Once they have the correct target audience and a well-planned social media strategy, companies put ample effort into creating high-quality content.
The only way to make your content viral is to jump on the trend train. Most mid-market IT companies have got better customers by creating content on viral topics and engaging with the post efficiently.
When a company is small, it cannot start a trend, but it can indeed be a part of one and take a part of followers. Most mid-market IT companies keep spaces on their social media posting calendars to follow the trends as and when they come.
Social media is a time pass for many customers, and they are not actually searching for something business on such platforms. Hence you need to create content that grabs their attention. A social media user goes through his feed at high speed, and to make him stop and engage with your post; you’ll need to create quality content.
Quality content can be in the form of tips, tricks, tutorials, self-help, etc., with high-quality graphics, a great color combination, and correct posting time. You can find out the posting time that gets you the most likes from your analytical tools and starts posting more on that time to gain more leads and visibility. To make your content more accessible, you can also convert MP4 to MP3 versions of your video so that people can listen to them on the go.
Moreover, companies spend ample time creating quality content, and they do a lot of fact-checking to ensure they do not embarrass them once the content is posted. A lot goes behind making content viral, and it just does not end after posting the content once. Many companies engage with the audience constantly by commenting and replying to messages on the post.
The best way to increase revenue is by making sales, and what’s better if you can do it from your social media posts? Well, mid-market IT companies are already using this technique.
Such companies create informational content for their audience and end the posts with a promising CTA. That CTA also has a link to the website where the customer can buy. But some social media platforms also allow companies to make a sale directly from the platform. Wherever such an option is available, it works like a charm for both the customer and the company.
One of the very best social media offerings that allow direct buying from posts is Pinterest. It has a powerful and seamless shopping experience through pins, and that helps companies to make more sales than their websites.
Moreover, posts, where customers can buy things directly often, have a broader and more organic reach. Companies get higher revenue from such simple changes in their posts.
An example of such a post is when a company provides a ‘hire-Indian developer’ service, and it posts some benefits for developers with a CTA and listing that allows viewers to hire developers in India or schedule a free call directly with the team. It is pretty powerful and decreases the user’s efforts. Anything that makes purchasing easier for the user surely helps a company make good money.
Paid advertisement services are available on all social media platforms. It is the primary revenue source of such tech giants, and they’ve polished such services to the maximum levels.
Mid-market IT companies focus on paid ads to get high-quality leads that will indeed become their customers. Paid advertising gives your brand more credibility, and as the platform gets money out of your post, the algorithms try to push it to the maximum number of people.
When the reach starts dropping, companies often turn to paid ads to reignite their audience and leads. Paid ads also help companies redirect traffic to their website, where they can provide a unique experience to the customer, win their trust, and persuade them to buy something.
Summing it up, there are many ways in which social media can be used. There are way too many consumers of content than the producers, and that’s where companies capitalize. They create quality content and promote them with different variations that drive leads and revenue for their business. Try out some of the ways mentioned here that can drive more leads to your IT company today.
