We’ve got a question: can you put your phone away and not use it for an entire day? That means no driving directions, no checking the time, no “shoot me a quick text.” Nothing.
Unless you’re on a wild adventure with no wireless service, chances are you can’t. And if you still insist you can, good on you, and please send pictures. We’ll continue while you load your 35mm camera.
We’re all in the same boat — everyone we know, everything we do, everything we buy, and everything we want beckons from our phone screens. The world is digitized and we’re all quite comfortable with it. That addictiveness is built into how cell phones work, and society naturally morphs around new technology.
Now that you’re thinking about what ChatGPT calls “today’s digital marketing landscape” (and swearing to lower your screen time), let’s talk about what this really means for your business.
Doing Business in Our Digitally Connected World
Your customers are almost certainly using their phones, and you’ve realized a robust social presence for your business is no longer optional—it’s CRITICAL.
Social presence is all the representations of your business in the digital media environment. Think of your business’s social presence as an ongoing conversation you have with clients and customers through social media posts, videos, blogs, and more.
This is where it often becomes obvious that whether you’re in the B2C or B2B sector, having just one location for your social presence can cause issues for your business.
For example, your website is fully optimized and gets new content, but most of your customers are on LinkedIn, never visit your site, and you don’t post on your business’s LinkedIn profile. Or you have an established Twitter account (of course we mean “X”), but the massive traffic loss they’ve seen affected your leads. Now you have to start over.
Where should you start?
How Much of a Social Presence Does Your Business Need?
Every business has a different combination of platforms and marketing tactics that offer the highest ROI, and constant testing should be part of your strategy. So, to give you an extremely basic strategy to establish or strengthen your social presence: establish yourself on more than one social channel and assume that changes will happen at any time.
Your audience might “live” anywhere across the internet, and you have to get your digital marketing boots on and get hoofin’ it to those places. Developing a social strategy for your business requires finding your customers, creating social media content to attract them, and posting it in the places they visit.
We keep insisting you should cast a wide net and include various platforms and marketing techniques, but why? Because you’re working to create a strong, consistent presence across as much of the internet as you can.
Let’s talk about some of the details about why you need a robust social presence.
The Strategy Behind a Well-Developed Social Presence
Let’s say you’re starting from Square One with your business. You know you need to set up social media profiles and start posting. But when you sit down to type that first post, you wonder, “What am I actually hoping to achieve?”
We asked our digital marketing team, and these are the top 5 reasons clients need a strong social strategy in today’s digital environment and why:
Top 5 Reasons Your Business Needs a Solid Social Presence
- Visibility & Brand Awareness: Social media platforms amplify your brand’s visibility, making it easier for potential customers and business partners to discover you. You’re not just thinking about current customers: you’ve got to think of the future of your business.
- Engagement & Customer Relationships: Engaging directly with your audience builds trust and loyalty. For B2C, it’s about creating a community; for B2B, it’s about nurturing professional relationships. Customers and clients appreciate fast and personal communications, and they want to know the humans behind your digital face.
- Credibility & Thought Leadership: Scams are everywhere, and you want to be seen as reliable, knowledgeable, and a leader in your field. Sharing valuable content, whether you’re targeting consumers or other businesses, establishes your business as trustworthy and credible. Sharing it far and wide means you hold more ownership of original content and are putting it to good use.
- Targeted Marketing: Social media outlets can provide highly targeted advertising, whereas data tracking has been throttled in recent years. This is due to changes in privacy laws and is known as “3rd-party cookie depreciation” if you want to research it. Social media advertising is quickly becoming The Way to reach the specific demographics and industries that matter to your business.
- Analytics & Insights: Analyzing data across various platforms, and especially combined with your website analytics, lets you draw a full picture of how your customers navigate your content and interact with your business. Data is gold, and the more data you gather, the better you can plan your future strategies.
At this point, any FOMO of not having a robust social presence may be real, but the team at Digital Fusion can take your digital presence to the next level.
We’re not just throwing stuff at a wall and seeing what sticks. We’ve researched audiences, tested campaigns across platforms, and developed processes to build a solid social presence for our clients. Just like your business will be doing.
With a customized comprehensive strategy that flexes with the frequent changes in social media and technology, you can enjoy focusing on your business while we help build a solid foundation for the future.
About Channel Fusion
For more than 20 years, Channel Fusion has been delivering strategy, customer experience and return on investment outcomes for brands and their channel partners with a wide variety of solutions and industry expertise. We continue to invest in the overall ecosystem of our channel marketing offering to ensure our clients can provide their channel partners with an optimal customer experience to drive results. Our core technologies and connected platform are supported by a team of customer-centric “Fusers.” Let us know if you’d like to learn more about how we deliver desired outcomes for brands and their channel partners.