How Does Social Media Marketing Influence Consumer Behaviour?

 

the place people come to connect with friends and family, meet new people and simply have conversations. Your business has the opportunity to create a dialogue with your audience, when they comment or message you leave a reply. It helps you with building trust and credibility, as you’ll be able to answer any questions they have, join in on conversations, offer them advice or simply leave a response to a comment that they’ve left you. Showing your brand is authentic, cares about its audience and appreciates their contributions is the first step to influencing their behaviour. 

Social proof is a powerful tool that can have a big impact on whether or not consumers buy from you. Think about when you’ve gone to purchase something online – often, you’ll look for reviews, unboxings, recommendations, and so do many others. In fact, 87% of buying decisions begin with research conducted online before the purchase is made as reported by CXL. You need to consider this when it comes to your business - customers will trust others who have had experiences with your products, as they’re likely to be similar people to them and looking for the same problem to be solved. It can be hard if you haven’t already been selling online and are a new business to get this social proof – which will take time to build up, but if you have a relative digital marketing presence that you’re wanting to shift towards social media, then you can use these reviews in posts, get in touch with niche influencers who’ll promote your products to their audience, and leverage any user-generated content you find to help persuade your audience that your product has worked for others like them, so will for them too if they make a purchase. 

How relevant is your content? Algorithms are highly tailored to the needs and wants of your audience, being created from their online habits, accounts they follow, interactions, even sometimes other sites they’ve visited and what they’ve interacted with over there too – so you must ensure your content is hitting the mark. You need to be reaching the right people at the right time, which can help to increase how impactful your message comes across as. Get on trends as soon as they begin, ensure you have a consistent approach not just on social media but in all digital marketing fields when it comes to your style, tone of voice, posting time and response time. You have to be relevant to you audience, and you must understand their social media activity and interests in order to form your business’. Your content needs to resonate in terms of relevance, but it also needs to be relevant in terms of emotion – create a deeper connection and create emotional narratives that hook your audience in and speak directly to them. 

Social Media is great for building brand awareness – it’s often where consumers discover new businesses and products, but its just the start of their customer journey. They become aware of you, but if you impress them enough for them to make a purchase and this also leaves a great impression, they may keep coming back for more – turning them into a loyal customer. Social media can be their starting point, but it can also be the place they continue to have an ongoing relationship with your brand – they may even turn into advocates and consumers that help to drive your long-term growth. Ensuring you are recognisable, innovative and most importantly, attracting a community of people who want to engage with your business both on social media and through purchasing what you have to sell. 

Making social media a bigger part of your selling strategy can be a great move, and one that you can build on when it comes to paid options further down the line (if it begins to bring you results). By ensuring all of these tips are in line when you approach your social media marketing, you can have a positive impact on your audience and influence them to turn from followers into long-term consumers of your business’ products and services.