Social media have been used to increase brand engagement and sales for quite some years. Facebook has rolled out new features for paid advertisements for a reason: it works. In fact, Facebook Business is a feature launched exclusively to help businesses “sell and increase” their online sales through social media.

Forbes rightly called for social media to gain recognition as the marketing marvel that it has turned out to be. According to Forbes, social media should be the “pulse” of your company—and we’re inclined to agree.

Using Social Media as a Catalyst for Growth

Well thought-out social media marketing campaigns are a one-way jet propulsion into brand awareness and sales success. You’re looking at everything from doubling your ROI and reaching out to a new customer base to scalable engagement with potential customers.

Incorporating social media marketing and paid advertisements into your overarching business model can take your business places in a matter of months. We’re guessing you already have your pages on all major social media channels—but having pages is not enough.

Are you reaching out to enough people? Are you reaching out to the right people? Are you engaging with the right people the right way?

Finding Your Audience

One of the reasons why we in the SEO world don’t focus all faculties on organic searches and results is because they aren’t the be all and end all of digital marketing. The end goal of any marketing and advertising campaign is to ensure, at the end of the day, sales. Whether or not you’re driving droves of traffic to your website and pages matters only in the context of SERP rankings—which is only a part of what SEO is, at large, about.

Sales can only pour in if you target the right audience—not just all the possible audience in the world. Even if you reach out to half the world’s population and none of them is remotely interested in what you’re selling—it’s futile.

Social media is an ideal platform to expand your customer base and potential customer pool. But you have to find them.

Social media analytics are one way of getting this right. Determine what social media platform your target audience is most likely to use. If you’re looking for millennials, you’ll find them on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Gen Z is more Snapchat and TikTok. If you’re targeting a geeky audience, you might want to check out Quora and Reddit. If you deal with something that has to do with “aesthetics”—such as rustic furniture or home décor—you might have to turn to Tumblr or Pinterest. If it’s a more professional audience you’re targeting, LinkedIn is where you’ll find them.

Understanding your audience is the key.

Next: Use the Right Content

Simply knowing which social media platform your prospective audience is frequenting won’t cut it. Next up, you must devise a long-term content strategy that will rope in their attention. This is where you make use of all the keyword optimization and other SEO techniques you’ve come to associate with the industry.

What Social Media will Help You Do

For a lot of people, social media is no more than a channel where you can put up nice pictures and quirky posts for your audiences. We digress. Social media marketing campaigns can help you:

Grow Brand Awareness

On your website, you cannot risk showing a more genial side. You can’t respond to people leaving reviews. Those websites are more professional and need to be such. Social media platforms, however, give you an opportunity to build your brand further. If you care about the environment or stand behind a particular political candidate, social media gives you a platform to voice your opinion and be heard.

It also allows you to be seen by your audience in a whole different light. Your brand builds gradually—through your responses to customer queries, your posts, your ingenuity.

Get Higher Web Traffic

3.6 billion people are currently using social media. In many places, surfing the web isn’t exactly an option—especially for boomers, who don’t fully grasp the concept of “online shopping.” Social media, however, is something they are comfortable with—something they’re cognizant of. If they find your page on social media, they might find it intriguing enough to check your page out.

That means higher web traffic and potential increase in conversions.

Engage with Customers

Through social media, you get a chance to portray how responsive you are—which hints at your transparency and sincerity as a customer-oriented brand.

Leave the reviews open—let other potential customers see that you don’t shrink from complains and queries.

Respond to these queries to show potential customers that they can always reach out to you—that you’re a reliable brand open to suggestions.

Be polite in your responses and let potential customers see your customer-friendly attitude, which will doubtless arrest their attention.

Social media is an opportunity to present yourself as the best, politest, friendliest brand out there—use it.

Drive New Leads

One of the things that you get for free with Facebook and other such social media forums is the “Groups” feature. On Facebook, usually, you’ll find various people convening in digital “groups” and discussing everything from politics to science. There are similar groups for discussing and comparing products, services, brands, and businesses.

If you make a good deal or sell to even one person who happens to be in one of these groups, you’ve driven a new lead. You can depend on your online audience to spread the word free of cost—they will discuss it, mention it, even recommend it if they liked your service.

Driving new leads has never been this easy.

Ensure Sales

Finally, if a person is coming to your website through your social media page, chances are they’re really interested in what you have to offer. Facebook is also known to provide customized ads to people based on the users’ earlier search history and interests. People have been known to report talking about something in their messages, and ending up seeing an ad for the exact same thing on Facebook seconds later. It’s creepy—not for you, though.

Its clever algorithm will target every prospective book lover and show them ads (let’s say if you sell books) that promote your brand. You will end up making, not just conversions, but sales—because Facebook’s algorithm is near-accurate in its deduction of what people “want” and what people are interested in spending their money on.

Let’s admit it—that whole election scandal kind of gave it away. Time to use Facebook and other social media channels for your benefit. If Facebook could convince people to elect a President, it can definitely convince them to buy your product.

Guest article written by: The author is an SEO expert Dallas at Search Berg who has closely followed Facebook’s updates, featured ads, and other marketing features. He believes that social media channels, when used properly, can be as good as PPC ad campaigns for small businesses.