Going Social? The Growing Importance of Social Media For Today’s Midmarket Company

Less than a decade ago, social media seemed like a fad. MySpace had risen and fallen, seemingly without any impact on businesses and their marketing efforts, and any following network would suffer the same fate.

Facebook was a great way for college students and childhood friends to connect, but little more.A few years later, the social media landscape has changed drastically.

Facebook now reaches almost two billion users around the world, while countless smaller networks like Instagram and Snapchat continue to experience rapid growth. Brands have jumped on, generating more than $7 billion in advertising revenue for Facebook in the third quarter of 2016 alone.

These brands have recognized a crucial truth: given the countless benefits of the channel, marketing your brand on social media has become vital for today’s midmarket company. Here are 5 reasons for your company to embrace the medium.

1) A Low Cost Opportunity

For most mid-size companies, budget and ROI considerations are an understandably crucial part of evaluating any marketing opportunity. In this regard, social media offers a number of significant advantages:

1. Low investment threshold. For as little as $5 per day, you can run ads on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram. Spend $500, and you have the potential to reach 20,000 users. And even without any investment, simply building a brand presence on your network(s) of choice can help you gain organic brand awareness.
2. Low cost per lead. Social media tends to follow the PPC (pay-per-click) methodology of placing ads, which means that you only pay if a user finds your message relevant enough to take action. That, in turn, results in low acquisition costs; in fact, a majority of respondents in a 2014 study considered it the advertising strategy with the lowest cost per lead.
3. High ROI. Given the combination of the above points, it’s no surprise that social media tends to deliver favorable ROI calculations. 92% of marketers report that the channel has helped increase exposure for their business, while more than half can prove it has improved sales.

2) Reaching Your Customers Where They Spend Time

A second major advantage of social media is the degree to which you can specifically reach out to members of your target audience. The various networks available attract very different audiences.

The Pew Research Center has researched the average demographics of all major social media networks, helping you find a channel that works best for your audience. When users create their account, they give their network of choice a range of geographic and demographic information.

Particularly on networks like LinkedIn, they continually update their profile information to keep it updated. Using the various available advertising tool, you target a very specific audience group based on these characteristics.

You can, for example, build your ads to reach only 24 to 30 year-old females who have at least a college degree and live within a 50 mile radius of New York City. The average person now spends almost 2 hours every day on social media.

By establishing a presence on the most relevant networks, you can reach your audience where they spend their time.

3) Keeping Up With Your Competition

If you choose against prioritizing social media within your marketing strategy, you might have a competitive problem. That’s because increasingly, other businesses in your industry are migrating to the medium for a majority of their advertising attention and spend.

The above-mentioned revenue, which continues to grow exponentially, is one indicator of that trend. Another is the fact that social media budgets worldwide have doubled over the past 2 years.

Globally, 90% of businesses use social media as part of their marketing strategy. It’s tempting to dismiss the medium as an option only for small businesses.

After all, we’ve all seen our local mom and pop shops creating a presence to attract customers in your neighborhood. But in reality, the power and cost-effectiveness of the channel make it just as important for midmarket businesses.

4) Establishing Thought Leadership

Increasingly, audiences are responding negatively to promotional ‘push’ ads. They see hundreds of ads every day, and have begun to cut through the clutter by embracing technologies like ad blockers.

For businesses, finding a way to fight through that advertising fatigue has become crucial to raise brand awareness and grow. The answer has been to turn to more informational, thought leadership-based strategies.

If you can offer tangible value to your target audience, you will continue to receive the attention and clicks to your website you need to grow your customer base. Content marketing, in particular, has embraced this type of marketing approach.

Social media can help in that regard. Rather than using the medium to push promotional messages, try informing your audience with helpful, relevant, and educational content.

Creating engaging content will not only help you increase the chance that your audience actually sees your posts, but also helps you build the thought leadership you need to succeed in reaching an increasingly cynical audience.

5) Building a Sustainable Marketing Strategy

Finally, social media can and should play an integral role in your midmarket business because it allows you to build a more sustainable future. Especially younger audiences are moving away from more traditional media channels, becoming more difficult to reach in the process.

You may have heard about cord cutting, adding to the challenges modern marketers face in reaching these audiences. But these audiences don’t just stop consuming media.

Instead, they’re turning to more modern forms, and social media is on the forefront of that movement. As they age, they won’t just stop paying attention to Snapchat, Instagram, and other networks.

Instead, these channels have become a core part of how young audiences communicate. Building a social media strategy, then, allows you to prepare for the increasing importance of the medium.

You can already use professional networks like LinkedIn to reach even sophisticated audiences. Within the next few years, these types of opportunities for every kind of target audience will only increase.

Do you use and prioritize social media to promote your midmarket company?

Given the above reasons, it’s time to embrace the medium. If your goal is to grow and expand your reach and customer base, establishing a presence on Facebook, Twitter, and other networks should not be optional.