Website vs Social Media: How to Reach Your Audience Online?
Today, the Internet and technologies constitute an immense part of the everyday life of ordinary people. For businesses, it means that they can reach their audience through this fantastically promising channel of acquisition.
Many entrepreneurs face a dilemma: should I get a social media account or a full website? The answer, to a large extent, will depend on your business niche. However, there are common patterns that all the business owners should mind.
In this article, our friends from Weblium helped us figure out what entrepreneurs should consider when going online.
The easy way: benefits of social media for business
Business accounts on social media are an affordable marketing tool
Social media is a direct way to reach a new audience because it is vastly popular among internet users. In 2018, the number of people using social media reached 2.62 billion people, you can reach over one-third of the planet. There are several ways to promote your product or service there, and the best result, evidently, comes from the combination of the two.
Timeline posts on social media
You can create a unique tone of voice and a certain identity for your product, depending on your audience. It can be space both for your updates and posts that will entertain your audience or remind them about you. But remember that it will work best if it is part of a complex and well-balanced SMM strategy spanning different kinds of content.
Targeted ads on social media
This kind of content is simply to sell. With its targeting set correctly, the ad will hunt down people that might need your help. It is a good way to boost the number of your customers or people who know you.
There is always help for you in running social media for business
The modern social media sites and applications are designed for people to understand the mechanics with zero effort. In contrasts, running business pages on social media sites may be challenging because of the complex advertising mechanics and monitoring the page.
However, there are multiple tools available on the internet that simplify the process of running a business page on social media. You can start with tutorials and acquire the mechanics by yourself or use online tools like PublBox that will do the job for you.
Such automated services will help you to come up with the content plan for your social media, schedule the publications, build the content strategy, and find visualizers for posts. It will need your participation, but you don’t need any specific skills to figure out how to work with it. You can create an image of your business on social media after a simple trial of the functions that it suggests. Moreover, the major social media platforms like Instagram or Facebook are the best social media for business marketing for they have business functions, so you can adjust all the functions of interaction with the customer without leaving your social media page.
A personalized approach to customers
All the benefits of social media for business are even more relevant for local small businesses. You can become a part of social life in your community react to the events happening around, report on your events, and estimate the activity of your competitors. A social media account will increase the credibility of your business and attract people to you.
User-generated content: the good, the bad, the priceless
User-generated content is everything people post about your business without being asked.
People like to brag. They are also into complaining. If you want to learn the true attitude of the customers to your product or service, the review section on your website isn’t the magic mirror to tell you that. Social media is, though.
TIP: Add reviews from social networks to your website to boost your credibility and show visitors your real self (if you’re not afraid, of course).
Positive feedback
Your product or your service can make one’s day, so make sure they know what to refer to when sharing their experience on social media, for it will give your social media account the precious and the priceless USG.
Negative feedback
If someone had any bad experiences with your business, it may result in an angry post about you. Such a reaction is rather an opportunity than a disaster. It is a chance for you:
- Approach the dissatisfied customer personally and fix the service problem
- Learn the overall problem with the service and prevent it once and for all.
Not that hard either: benefits of a website for business
All about you: adjust your website to your business niche
If you want to stand out among your competitors, you should make a website. Although social media suggests plenty of tools for marketing, it is mostly the brand of the wavy social platform that they will remember.
Besides, the opportunities in making memorable content are limited there, including the social media policy restrictions that, if broken, can put you on the block list.
The difference between a website and social media is that a website is fully about you and your business. You can design the identity of your brand through the visual structure of the website, its content and navigation. When on your website, the user will better remember your identity and get a clear marketing communication that you make, while your post in their newsfeed is a 3-second-attention-worth scroll.
A website for business is a runway for your product or service
After all, social media initially exists for communication rather than sells. However versatile and adjustable social media can be, it cannot substitute a webpage craved solely for your product.
Here are the features that only a website can have:
- If you have a website, you decide in which format the images of your products or services appear and how many of those a user can view.
- If you have a long list of products or services, you can categorize those.
- You can adjust the supplementary sold products or services to increase your sales.
- You can add demonstration videos and instruction about using your product.
- Nothing will distract the customer from your products or services.
Moreover, it is not only the appearance of items that differ from the one on social media. It is the very format of representation that is up to you. You can arrange the content of the website starting with the problem that your prospects face and ending with a solution that you provide.
A website allows you to present both trust factors and calls-to-action logically, as well as collect the contact information from your customers in exchange for something valuable, like a guide or an ebook. Finally, if you have a complex business, you can use the website content to nurture leads into clients.
You can create a website yourself
Social media is not the only way you can promote your business yourself. You do not need specific technical or coding skills to create a website for your business.
Today, there are numerous website building tools, in which it takes even less effort to present your business, demonstrate yourself, and encourage the user to buy your product.
The DIY site builders require time and dedication to create something cohesive (or extra money if you hire a designer to help you with it). Yet, there are also do-it-for-me website builders, such as Weblium, where you can have a website made by a professional and take control of it when it’s ready.
A website boosts the credibility of your business
Apart from your opportunities as an owner of the business, there is a strong reason to have a website from the customer’s standpoint.
A website that provides a detailed description of everything that might concern the customer, such as prices, characteristics, location, and reviews gathered in a single spot demonstrates the credibility of your business and impacts customer decision making.
For the sake of time and energy economy, the majority of people in 2018 prefer to shop online. Even if you don’t sell directly from your website, they may want to visit it to learn more about you.
So what?
Both a website and social media are powerful platforms for promoting your business and controlling your online presence. Therefore, a perfect option is to have them both in your business toolkit, increasing each other’s effectiveness.
The importance of social media in business is hard to ignore, but you can get the most of only if it works together with the website.
After all, if a social media profile is a guiding star for visitors, a website is their final destination where they can find answers to any questions of interest. Basically, the former lets them know about you, while the latter makes actual sales.
Our partners from Weblium now have a special offer: you can save up to $300 on website creation. Plus, they don’t just make a website, they provide you with everything needed for a successful launch. Hosting, domain name, and SSL-certificate included.
