4 Tips to Attract New Customers Using Social Media
For a few years now, social media has been a channel for connecting and engaging with existing customers. It has allowed businesses to quickly address any customer concerns, show a more personal side, and prove that they are an expert in their field.
However, these are not the only benefits of social media. It can also be used to drive new leads to your business. And as these leads turn into customers, social media allows you to nurture these relationships leading to conversions.
But where do you start? How can you effectively attract customers through social media? If you want to know how to attract new customers and keep them engaged using social media, then keep reading below:
- Be Socially Active
The most important thing businesses need to do if they want to attract new customers using social media is to be socially active. By making your business more visible on social media, you will be able to stand out from the competition. Businesses can interact with their customers in a range of ways, for example, they can talk to them by private message, on a fan page, or through group pages.
- Use Creative Content
Getting more eyes on your content is the ultimate solution to boost your product or service range. Research has shown that posts that are informative and highly attractive are more likely to be shared on social networks.
- Hire Brand Ambassadors
Evidence has shown that people are more likely to buy products from people that they know. This means that brands need to connect with their customers on a more personal level if they want to be successful. Attending and hosting events is one way in which businesses can do this, but not all businesses have the time in their schedule. Another way businesses can do this is by hiring brand ambassadors to undertake this role for them.
The main role of a brand ambassador is to connect and communicate with customers on a personal level through face-to-face interactions. Through these interactions, brand ambassadors drive brand awareness and help to create relationships that lead to loyal customers. They are the face of your brand.
However, while hiring brand ambassadors may sound like the answer to your prayers, it is important to remember that it is not always easy to manage an ambassador network and keep them motivated to continue. This is where brand ambassador software comes in. Greenfly provides brand ambassador software that allows businesses to track the individual performance of their ambassadors. Not only that but it also allows businesses to intelligently route their content to the right brand ambassadors at the right time. It is the perfect software for any business wanting to build its brand by distributing content at scale.
- Post to YouTube
Although most businesses believe that the biggest benefit of YouTube is free video hosting, this is not the only benefit it has to offer. One of the main benefits of posting on YouTube is that it is a social media platform that allows you to interact with your customers for free. If you want to increase the number of people viewing your YouTube content, simply ask those who watch your videos to subscribe to it.
No matter whether your business is big or small, social media marketing is a godsend. In today's competitive world, social media marketing has become an indispensable medium to attract more customers and increase brand awareness. Whether you want to market your existing products, or you want to launch something brand new, follow our tips above to engage more customers using social media.
How to juggle multiple business social media profiles
Maintaining a strong social media presence is vital for any sized business as this is a digital mark of an actively trading brand committed to interacting with customers and opening the lines of communication. Social media offers your client base access to fresh, up-to-date information and allows for this to be communicated through imagery, video and audio, as easily as through traditional portals. In addition to this, social media can be used to multiply customer touchpoints across a variety of platforms, such as Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn, but not limited to. This not only relieves the pressure from traditional platforms, but it also increases the odds of a customer enquiry due to ease of access.
By offering another platform through which customers, suppliers and other businesses can reach you through, this makes it easier to forge new connections and accelerate brand exposure. In theory, this is easy to enforce, however, in practice – it can become tricky to juggle multiple profiles, several marketing messages and numerous call to actions. Using a social media scheduling tool can simplify the process, uniting the process from start to finish through one easy-to-use portal.
Smooth sailing through social media scheduling software
Scheduling tools for social media such as Zoho, Hootsuite and Sprout Social can pull multiple social media profiles under one umbrella, making it more manageable. A survey conducted by the Global Reporting Index found that social media users typically have 8 social media accounts, jumping from 6.2 in 2015.
This shows an increasing need for businesses to disseminate their brand name across a variety of social media platforms, giving customers buying ability across a wider range of platforms, such as through Google Shopping and Instagram Shopping. As for buying behaviour changes, social media can now be used to promote products through sponsored posts and answer customer enquiries through Facebook’s chatbot.
Research carried out by LinkedIn found that 81 per cent of small to medium-sized businesses use social media to drive company growth, build credibility, gain insights and information on their client base. Social media is also used as a tool to build a wider network of business partners, enabling you to play a proactive role in the industry.
In reality, social media can help multiply your client base and encourage returning customers, however, this will require an individual to regularly manage social media and create unique content. Social media scheduling tools can be used to ease the burden of managing multiple social media profiles. You can bring together the likes of business and personal social media profiles, for example, if you’re managing the personal LinkedIn profile for a company director and the business profiles for multiple stores in different locations, you can schedule posts directly from one source.
The likes of Zoho, Hootsuite, Sprout Social can be used to schedule posts at specific times, so you can make social media work around you – not the other way round.
Zoho
The central publishing calendar can be used to plan your social media activity by scheduling posts, pausing and resuming them as you wish. By allocating a bulk of time during the working week, you can schedule posts in one go, varying them with promotions, insights, inspiration, industry news and internal events. If you come across interesting content during the week, you can use the Zoho browser extension to directly share the page to your selected social media profile. Zoho is also mobile-friendly, so if you’re on the go, you can remotely access the central calendar.
When collating information to include in your marketing report, you can use Zoho to analyse performance by accessing insightful data such as a breakdown of those engaging with your brand and your followers.
Many businesses may operate in multiple ways, from managing multiple sister brands for the company group or working with an agency to provide social media content. Zoho gives you the option to personalise functionality by tailoring the approach to either a business or agency to help you maximise the process.
Sprout Social
The key brand message for Sprout Social is to give you the technological ability to redirect your time to building worthwhile connections through social media, rather than stumbling through multiple hurdles to get to the end goal of connecting with other skilled industry professionals. Through the use of the smart ‘engagement’ inbox feature which delivers comments directly to you, you can strike while the iron is hot and establish professional friendships by connecting with engaged users when they are at the peak of engagement.
If you have multiple intentions behind using social media as a force for business, such as for customer care, data procurement or employee advocacy, Sprout Social allows you to combine such approaches. Sprout Social is essentially a social solution as ‘the journey to purchasing is no longer linear’, it’s through different touchpoints.
Hootsuite
Hootsuite takes a simplistic view, yet a similar approach to Zoho and Sprout Social. The social media scheduling platform personalises your experience based on the user, from small businesses, larger enterprises and agencies. You can dissect information from the platform to support any reports and take advantage of integrations, such as Zendesk, Google My Business and Slack Pro.
The Hootsuite employee advocacy programme allows you to bring your social media coverage in front of employees, encouraging them to share your posts to boost engagement through Hootsuite Amplify. Tools as such as be used to create a sense of unity between employees and boost brand exposure.
What social media platforms should I join?
If you’re in the process of deciding which social media platform to join, this will wholly depend on your industry, best practise, brand identity and the nature of your customer base. It’s vital to scrutinise the approach taken by your business such as the tone of voice, use of graphics, infographics and use of words as this will be on show to the rest of the world.
In addition to this, it’s vital to invest in the individual producing content for your social media accounts as this will be a virtual shopfront for your brand. By finding the platform which suits you to juggle multiple social media profiles, you can engage with a wider array of customers differing in age, interests, daily routines and expand to reach an international client base through the click of a button.
David Tattersall is Head of Client Relations at Handpicked Accountants, an intelligent online platform connecting small-to-medium business owners and self-employed professionals with trusted accountants across the UK. David has a wealth of commercial experience in the SME market and works with an extensive network of accountants to deliver the Handpicked Accountants service.