How Effective is Social Media Marketing for Businesses?

Social Media is everywhere. Anyone that has an internet enabled smartphone, laptop or tablet can access social media for free, whenever and wherever they want to. Currently in 2017 there is an estimated 2.8 billion people across the world using social media. That’s a lot of prospects. But how effective is social media for business?

Social Media – The Business Side

There are currently over 50 million business pages on Facebook alone, with two million of these utilising Facebook advertising. According to Hootsuite, 40% of British people find it important that companies they are purchasing a service or product from have a strong social media presence. With a further 34% saying they prefer to make contact with a company via social media rather than at a chosen location. Not only has social media made businesses more approachable, it has also vastly improved customer service, with 56% of people living in the UK saying that social media has made it easier to resolve problems and answer questions. So, in short Social Media is improving the “social” side of business, but is it getting companies new customers/clients?

Can Social Media be used for Lead Generation?

In terms of website traffic, 81% of businesses found that their website

traffic increased after spending around 6 hours per week planning and implementing social media marketing. According to Marketo, companies that use twitter to market their products or services bring in 2x the amount of leads per month compared to a company that doesn’t use twitter. 64% of current marketers have expressed that they feel social media is the second most important lead generation channel. Social Media is an exciting and relatively new marketing channel that has the potential to seriously increase your marketing results. If you are not utilising it now, its time you started.

Social Media Test.

Equinox Marketing did a Facebook Social Media marketing 5-day test to show you how effective it can be for your business.

The test included the promotion of our website services and a content marketing blog post.

Over the course of the 5 days, Equinox reached an additional 1,382 people, with website traffic increasing by 15%. Over this period the sponsored blog post received an additional 15 engagements (likes and shares) with the average cost per engagement coming in at 90p. Over the course of the 5 days Equinox received 1 hot lead and 3 warm leads thanks to the campaign. We consider this to be a very successful test as it drove traffic to our website and social media page, helping to get us noticed, whist bringing in a strong lead and some potential business.

Social media marketing can be extremely effective if planned and implemented correctly. We understand that you may not have the time, skills or expertise to implement a social media campaign or manage your own social media accounts. That’s why here at Equinox we do it for you, across all social media platforms.