You can use Social Media as an important part of marketing and sales efforts in your business to produce new leads and higher conversions. Or you can spend a lot of time on it for no result.
How do you make sure you do the former? The first thing to consider is how can you integrate Social Media into your overall sales and marketing plan. It should tie in well with your other sales and marketing activities.
Consider these 3 main uses of Social Media to help grow your business and plan to implement these:
- You can bring in new leads via your posts and tweets reaching your prospects via both viral and paid “reach” on Social Media.
- Increase conversions of prospects to customers by marketing to them in ways that build trust and credibility, increase their knowledge of how your product can help them, and removing objections to purchasing.
- Ensure repeat business by staying in touch with all your customers and making them aware of other products and services that can help solve their problems or fulfill their desires.
Here is how to do each step:
Bring in new leads
When using Social Media platforms your message can be shared, liked or favourited and often this means your fans’ friends can also see your content. This helps to spread your brand and content to a new market that can be very highly targeted as friends often have the same interests and problems.
Huge opportunities lie in Social Media to reach larger numbers of your target market in a highly cost effective way by using the paid advertising available on Social Media. On Facebook, for example, it is possible to reach thousands of people with your marketing message for under 10 dollars!
Your call to action can be to ask for the sale immediately with that message or put them into your marketing funnel for future contact via email and/or Social Media.
Increase conversions of prospects to customers
By regularly sharing updates with your prospects via Social Media, you continue to build trust and credibility as well as share valuable info others can use and learn from. This can also help to move potential clients down the sales funnel and make the sale.
Consider using these methods and posting up:
- Free advice that adds value for your customer – this builds your credibility and their appreciation of you.
- Answers to the 10 most Frequently Asked Questions that people ask you. This can help to remove any objections or queries people have about your products or services.
- Personal, local or industry news. This again builds familiarity between your prospect and yourself. People enjoy buying off someone they know, like and trust.
- Ask your clients to leave recommendations or positive feedback on their Social Media platform of choice. This is fantastic social proof for new visitors to your page which builds trust and credibility and also looks impressive!
Ensure Repeat Business
It can be time consuming keeping in touch with your past customers, but Social Media allows you to automate this somewhat by keeping in touch with all your past clients at once on Social Media. Post up helpful information that leads on from the product or service they have purchased from you. Share success stories of customers that have purchased additional products and services off you and encourage these customers to get in touch and discuss their current problems and needs to see if you can help.
Systematise, Automate and Outsource
The final step is to ensure you are achieving this with the least input of your time and effort via automation and outsourcing. In the same way you use a CRM to simplify your relationship management or an accountant keep track of your financials – the same options are available to you with your Social Media.
From your strategy you should create a “content plan” that details each week what types of content need to be posted. For example Monday could be a short piece of advice, Tuesday could be a success story, Wednesday some industry news, and so on.
Facebook has its own in-built scheduling tool and tools like Hootsuite allow you to post to all your Social Media channels at once.
You can also hire a Social Media marketing agency to do any part of the steps explained above including strategy creation, account creation, advertising management, marketing and content creation.
Dan Willersdorf – Wide Reach Social Media
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