7 Benefits of Boosting ROI of Social Media for Small Business

Social media presents a compelling marketing opportunity for small businesses to reach customers, build brand awareness, and drive growth. However, devoting resources to social media requires carefully evaluating the return on investment (ROI).

When planned strategically, small businesses can realize tangible benefits and strong ROI from social media marketing in a number of ways.

Grow Reach & Brand Awareness

With billions of active users across platforms like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and TikTok, social media grants access to massive audiences. This enables small businesses to cost-effectively increase brand visibility and recognition far beyond just their local markets.

Creating shareable content that engages followers leads to exponential growth as customers expose their networks to your brand through likes, comments, and re-shares. The ROI comes from converting impressions into website traffic, leads, and sales.

Drive Website Traffic

An active social media presence will directly increase traffic to your website and online properties. Optimizing profiles with links, cross-promoting new content across channels, and utilizing lead gen features like Facebook Lead Ads translate to more visitors.

This incoming traffic can then be converted via calls-to-action placed across your website. Measure website visits driven by social and track conversions to calculate incremental ROI.

Generate Qualified Leads

The targeting capabilities available on social platforms allow businesses to reach highly specific audiences aligned with their ideal customer profiles. Serving relevant and valuable content to these prospective customers and nurturing them via social engagement leads to lead generation.

For example, running a Facebook Lead Ad targeted to people who like and follow similar brands generates inbound sales leads to call or email. Social provides the platform while content and offers create ROI.

Retain & Grow Customers

Beyond attracting new customers, social media is invaluable for retaining and growing your existing customer base.

• Interacting via social channels builds and strengthens relationships through ongoing communication.
• Satisfied customers can leave positive reviews that attract new business.
• Providing special offers or exclusive content to followers incentivizes repeat purchases.

The ROI comes from higher customer lifetime value.

Lower Marketing Costs

Compared to paid advertising channels like print, radio, and TV, social media marketing is extremely cost-effective in terms of audience size reached. Businesses can promote content and engage followers at little to no cost on many social platforms. Smaller ad campaigns can amplify key content and offers for a reasonable investment. The ROI stems from reaching more people for less compared to traditional media.

Boost SEO & Findability

An active social media presence improves your search engine optimization and findability. Social signals and engagement help boost domain authority in Google’s eyes, improving search rankings.

Links back to your website from social profiles also increase referrals. This makes you more discoverable to nearby customers searching for businesses like yours. Higher organic search visibility provides tangible ROI in the form of website traffic and conversions.

Data & Performance Tracking

Robust analytics and reporting provide the hard data to calculate ROI across social channels. Key metrics like follower growth, content reach/engagement, website referrals, lead numbers, and sales activity linked to social channels quantify performance.

Platforms like Facebook even allow conversion tracking on ads to optimize towards key goals. This metrics-driven approach proves the true ROI of social.

While social media marketing does require dedicated time and effort, the tangible benefits make it a worthwhile investment for small businesses. Defining specific ROI-focused goals and consistently tracking performance data provides the business case. As social platforms and features evolve, the potential to generate sales, website traffic, leads, and brand awareness cost-effectively continues to grow for business users. Improving ROI will stretch marketing and advertising budgets further.