If you want to get the attention of new customers and hold onto current ones, social media and inbound marketing should be at the center of your marketing plan. In the past, the best way to reach a customer was to push advertisements at them, but for some time now, this method is more effective when it works in tandem with other efforts.

We hear all of the time that relationships are key, and that’s not just limited to our personal lives. Potential consumers of products want to feel a connection beyond a simple cash transaction. This is why smart companies are looking at relationship building to develop a personal connection with clients.

Customers Seek Relationships

The Harvard Business Review details the evolution between brands and consumers here. Brands have evolved from being simply an object to an object, idea and experience. Now, brands need to add relationship into the mix. Engagements between brands and consumers are no longer simply one-dimensional or transactional. As you can imagine there is a sense of identity in relationships. In order to better serve customers, brands are using inbound marketing and social media to provide the best experience.

Social Media & Inbound Marketing

We’re always talking about improving aspects of your social media marketing efforts, whether it is writing better copy or improving your social advertising efforts on social platforms such as Facebook. These efforts can also have a substantial benefit on your inbound marketing strategy. Inbound marketing is a term that you may be familiar with. It is a strategy that uses many components of pull marketing – meaning that companies attempt to attract the attention of customers and make sure their businesses are easily accessible. Inbound marketing uses various forms of content marketing like blogs, SEO, and social media.

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Social Media Reach

According to Statista social media users will increase to a whopping 3 billion. With all of these users, there is a wealth of data to be utilized. This data will greatly benefit your other marketing needs, inbound marketing being one of them.

While social media is used by a large amount of businesses for creating awareness, using the medium for client interaction and customer support can have a great impact on relationship building. This can be attained by creating content on your personal website such as a blog, sharing it on social media and then engaging in conversation online. These simple actions help spread the word of your company, build trust and bring more visitors to your website.

Inbound Marketing & Your Goals

Inbound marketing is a great way to help your business achieve its goals of increased revenue, growth and deepened connection with customers. When you are doing inbound marketing right you are creating terrific content that is too good to be ignored. Since content is king and providing interesting content is one of the biggest challenges, social media can assist you with delivering great content.

5 Ways Social Media Help Inbound Marketing

Content Creation

Content is key to inbound marketing and the challenge is providing something that is interesting to the user. This can be done using social media as a listening tool. You can discover what other social media users are discussing and provide useful and relevant content based on topical conversations.

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Via Hootsuite

An example would be to base a blog post on a topic that is being shared frequently or share an interesting article to your online community.

SEO Boost

Content is great but the best content doesn’t matter if your site can’t be found. This is where SEO and social media connect. The idea is that through sharing content and building strong online relationships with bloggers and other influencers, they may share your content with their audience. This type of sharing will help improve your SEO and help you potentially rank better in search engines.

While building online relationships and link building can be difficult, it is worth the investment. An example would be, after you have created your content and shared it with the world, an influencer whom you have built up a relationship with may share it, increasing its visibility and helping to improve your organic search rankings.

Increase Visitors

Square2Marketing explains that 10-15% of your traffic should be coming from social media. Some ways to do this is to consistently publish content to your social platforms. Content can be in the form of posting content from your website or any special promotions that you may be offering, as well as starting a conversation with your audience. Don’t be afraid to ask your audience to share your content as this can help with engagement, relationship building and traffic.

New Opportunities

Providing relevant content and engaging in social conversations can allow you to identify a new audience that you didn’t previously consider.

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Via Under Armour

Marketingland provided an example of Under Armour finding that Yoga enthusiasts were also big fans of their apparel in addition to sports athletes.

Relationships with consumers are essential and the better you connect with them the better it benefits your business. Currently, social and inbound marketing are very effective ways to build great relationships. Don’t hesitate to use social media with your inbound marketing efforts as the benefits will be well worth it.

Article Written by Ray Bennett of Business 2 Community