Are you using Social Media Marketing to drive more sales for your business?
I’ve spoken to quite a few business owners who are not sure what the value is of tools like Facebook or LinkedIn but might have a sense that they should be doing something with them. Your clients are using social media every day and so are many of your competitors. If you’re doing it right, you can build stronger relationships with your clients, attract new prospects to your business, and increase sales.
Here are the 4 main ways to use of social media marketing for business:
- Social Listening
- Creating Awareness and Influencing
- Social Networking
- Social Selling
Social Listening
Social listening is a cornerstone to social media marketing that can help increase client retention, reduce refunds, identify product opportunities for your business, and in general help to manage your online reputation.
Some of the things you can listen for include:
- Potential clients looking for your products/services. If you use social media yourself, you’ve probably seen posts like “Does anyone know a plumber/accountant/real estate agent?”. If you’re monitoring social media for posts related to your products/services you can respond to them.
- Clients talking about your products or services. You may hear about opportunities to add or improve products, or even just to add more information about them to your website. Search Twitter for something like “does anyone know how long” and you’ll see people asking all kinds of questions. Add your company or product name to the search and you might find people talking about you.
- Clients talking about your business. People don’t always express how the feel – good or bad – through reviews (although its great when they do). They’ll often just post updates on their personal channels. Responding to these posts is a great way to connect further with your clients – and their networks of friends and contacts, or to head off/resolve potential issues.
A good listening tool will monitor social media continuously, alerting you to mentions of your brand, products and services so that you can be responding right away to build trust and new business with new and existing clients.
Need a hand with your social media marketing? Contact us – we can help with or implement a program for your business.
Want a demo of the tool we use to monitor social media (and you can too)? Click here.
Social Awareness and Influencing
Social Awareness and Influencing is where you post to your social media channels with the goals being to:
- Increase traffic to your website (or other desired location).
- Increase awareness of you products and services.
- Increase client engagement.
- Grow your targeted marketing audiences.
What to Post?
- Meaningful content. Interesting and informative content, particularly if it is relevant to your followers, will be liked and shared by them, increasing the posts exposure and your authority. Ideally your posts will have a link back to your website. Once they come back to your website they can learn more about your company, sign up to your mailing list, and very importantly be identified for retargeting (more on this later).
- Content related to your range of products and services. Has a client ever said to you “I didn’t know you did that?”. By posting regularly you can increase your clients knowledge of your business so that they think about and refer you to their friends and families.
- Topic related posts: what are the different topics that your audience might be interested in? For example, if you are a travel agent, you might want to establish a list of topics that might include: language learning, culture (food, music, etc), architecture, etc. Posting to these topics will expose your business to many people who may not have otherwise known about you.
Don’t limit yourself to just text based posts. Your social media posting strategy can and should include text, videos, graphics, and all media that are available in your social media channels.
A good tool that allows you to schedule social media posts across channels is invaluable. You can organize your time and set up your posts on a weekly or monthly basis.
Want a demo of the tool we use for social media posting and scheduling (and you can too)? Click here.
Social Networking
Social networking in social media involves to primary goals:
- Getting mentioned by other brands and companies that have their own audiences. Having your product or service mentioned in other company’s youtube videos, blogs, podcasts, even on their facebook pages is great exposure for your businesses. You can seek out people or companies to develop networking relationships, and you can also implement an influencer program, where you essentially hire people to promote your products or services to their audience.
- Developing strategic partnerships with other companies whose products or services complement (but do not compete with) your own. By each brand mentioning the other through their posts each is lending authority to the other and exposing them to each others audiences.
There are some great tools available to help find people and organizations who it would be excellent to network with.
Social Selling
The goal of social selling is to generate leads and sales from existing customers and prospects. This may take the form of:
- Initial customer acquisition through contact forms/links/phone numbers
- Growing your email list
- Increasing buyer frequency
- Cross sells/Upsells
Generally speaking, you’re not going to create posts that say “BUY THIS PRODUCT”, rather it is more effective to lead with value. People are unlikely to buy from you until they know, like, and trust your brand.
For example, a post in facebook or twitter could lead a visitor back to your website, where they find more information. Think of a financial planner posting an article like “Top 10 tips for tax planning”. They share a link to it on social media, drawing interested people back to the website to read the article. Once they’ve been to your site you can use retargeting to make them a relevant offer through the facebook or google networks.
If they signed up for your newsletter you are able to continuously provide them with valuable content – articles and posts in which they may be interested – that may also have deals or offers attached (there are strategies to get people to sign up to your email list if it isn’t happening now).
What is remarketing?
Remarketing is a very powerful tool that allows you to show ads or send emails to only people who have visited your website – or more importantly who visited have specific pages on your website.
When people visit particular pages, they are likely to be indicating subject areas that are of interest to them. They are essentially segmenting themselves for you. You can now make relevant offers to them through email, facebook or google. A relevant offer will have a much greater chance of being acted upon then if you were advertising your general product/service catalog to everyone.
For example: if you are a financial planner you may be posting 2-3 times a week about the different aspects of financial planning and related topics. Some of those posts may be about children’s education savings plans.
The people who click on the links in those posts are likely parents thinking about saving for their children’s education.
Once they visit that page on your website they get “cookied” and you can now create custom email messaging and ads that will appear only to them.
Essentially remarketing allows you to deliver the right message, to the right person, at the right time.
Need a hand with your social media marketing? Contact us – we can help with or implement a program for your business.
Conclusion
Social media is a powerful business tool that can help you increase business by listening to and connecting more deeply with your clients and prospects, and delivering the right messaging at the right time.
Need a hand with your social media marketing? Contact us – we can help with or implement a program for your business.