Social media is probably one of the most powerful tools available to marketing professionals. With the average person reputedly spending 2 hours and 23 minutes every day on social networks, and with power users spending considerably more, a marketer simply can’t ignore social media because, in the words of Charlie Munger, you need to ‘fish where the fish are.’ And with social commerce claimed to be worth more than US$21bn in 2023 and with influencer marketing worth US$23bn in 2023, it’s too just valuable not to get involved.
While you’ll see below, that there are many things a brand can get from social media, from branding, to better understanding its customers and getting feedback on, and involvement in, the development of products and services, the main benefit a brand will be looking for is a sale from social, or social commerce, or a referral, whereby a recommendation from one participant on social media encourages another to try, buy or subcribe to a new product or service.
In the context of referral marketing, social media marketing can play a key role in promoting your referral program to potential brand advocates or brand ambassadors,like past and present customers, employees and brand fans, whether through paid or organic posts and messages. And, of course, social media posts and messages are one of the main ways in which your referrers can refer your brand to friends, family and even looser social contacts by sharing referral codes and links.
We’ve written in-depth guides about how you can pull together an Organic Discovery Strategy so you can get traffic for free like Airbnb, but in this blog we’ll just set out the benefits of social referral marketing:
Expand your brand awareness
Social can be your window to the World, where you can express your brand identity and values and communicate with your followers and fans. As well as being a brand awareness or reinforcement channel, you can also use it to promote the fact that you have a referral program and the rewards that you offer. In our Referral Codebreakers research, we found that customers expect to be told you have a referral program and would like to be reminded about it, on average, once every two months. And the thing that they’re most interested in hearing about are the rewards on offer with your referral program. So you should be using social media marketing as to keep up awareness, not only of your brand, but also your referral program.
Grow customer loyalty towards your brand
Social media is great environment for you to promote your brand values and showcase new products and services to the people who love and respect your brand. You can increase their commitment and loyalty towards your brand by making them feel that their contributions and comments are valued and that they are listened to. This can include getting ideas for new products, feeback on beta versions and letting your fans get early access to new releases. This can be part of a Customer Led Growth Strategy, where you fully involve brand advocates in your product or service development, and of course social networks are a great place to identify and recruit brand advocates.
Increase your conversion rate
Given that more than 40% of consumers reportedly use their social media feeds to find new products and services, having an established presence in social, with plenty of posts and an army of advocates willing to vouch for you, can not only help more prospective customers hear about you and your referral program, but social proof can help improve conversion rates by increasing trust and credibility.
Appear more human
A social media presence can help make your brand appear more human, approachable and trustworthy. Whether you’re a local family owned business with a story to tell, or a larger business that wants to showcase the way your team bonds, the CSR work you do in the community or how you deal with diversity and inclusion and other hot political topics. Having a more human presence can convince customers that they want to do business with you.
Conversations and Virality
The more people that talk about your brand on social, at least in a positive way, the more likely that your will have strong brand recognition and that brand recall will be higher when potential customers are looking to buy. So encouraging conversations by making your product or service something people want to talk about, like Airbnb did with its Organic Discovery Strategy, or encouraging conversations by holding competitions or setting challenges in social, or simply by diligently responding to and answering customers questions in social, can increase the number of conversations about your brand. To understand the level of conversations about your brand online, you might want to get a social listening tool like those available from Salesforce, Cision or Meltwater.
Significantly increase inbound traffic
Of course, people can click directly through to your website from social posts using shared links, but also given that much of what is publicly available in social networks is indexed by search engines, getting posts on social networks can increase your organic search traffic as well.
Spend less money on traditional marketing
We’ve long advocated that brands should stop pouring more and more money into the coffers of Google (Alphabet), Facebook (Meta), X and other paid search and social providers given the ever increasing costs of clicks, impressions and actions. Getting your brand talked about about on social is a key part of avoiding the GAFA tax similar what Airbnb did, enabling it to get 91% of all traffic without paying a penny to the tech giants.
Improve your site ranking
Although despite recent reported leaks, the details of the search algorithms used by Google and other search engines are kept secret, to make it harder for brands and their agencies to manipulate search rankings, it’s believed by many SEOs that Google and others do take social media presence into account when determining search rankings.
Deepen relationships with your customers
Social referral marketing is all about the relationships you build with your customers. Through social media, you can thank customers for their positive feedback and respond to customer complaints, if necessary. It’s all about showing that you and your employees care about your customers.
Getting to know your customers better
Social media can provide important insights into your customers’ preferences, as to what they like, and don’t like, what they care about or how they behave. This can help you produce engaging content that speaks to them in their language and is more convincing, and can help your refine your products and services. This can be done at several levels, from simple monitoring and responding to involving customers in a full Customer Led Growth Strategy,
By using the appropriate tools and strategies, social referral marketing leads to more customers, more traffic and more chances of conversions. For more information about social referral marketing and how your company can benefit from it, contact us today.