In addition to generating new leads, social media provides you with the unique opportunity to get to know your customers. Here's how to use social media marketing to stay connected with existing clients, post news, and encourage people to share what they love about your business.
With the Social Media Age in full-swing, you owe it to yourself to take advantage of the industry's helpful tools. From building interpersonal relationships with clients to showing off your brand’s personality, there are many ways that social media helps grow your customer base and expand your business. Here are a few of the most important ones:
Learn About Your Audience
Observing your customers in their natural habitat is essential to understanding how they think, and how they shop. Once you have this information, you can tailor-fit your marketing approach to convert like crazy.
It’s actually pretty hard not to do this on social media, to some extent. Your social media news feeds are constantly feeding you updates on what your customers are thinking, what they’re doing, and what they’ll do next. Using this data to create an effective marketing strategy is easy after you learn what makes your client base ‘tick.’
Stay Connected with Previous Clients
Social media helps grow your customer base, but it also helps you maintain it. If you’re part of a business that’s been around the block a few times, you should know how to use social media marketing to generate repeat customers. Repeat customers are essential to your success, which is why it's so useful to find a way to help convince your audience to keep coming back to you. Case in point, did you know repeat customers are 5 times more profitable to your business than a typical shopper?
They also cost you the least in terms of marketing.
It’s easy to see how much influence these customers carry on your business. So, it follows that you’ll want to seize every opportunity you get to keep them around. There’s no better way to do this than maintaining your social media presence across platforms and actively engaging your audience.
Even if you’re not advertising, you’ll be building rapport with the customers who matter most.
A word of advice: your message will carry much farther if you commit to soft-sells rather than all-out, no-holds-barred marketing. Generally speaking, social media users don’t log on to watch advertisements and consume marketing content. They open Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other SM sites to connect with peers and maybe watch a viral video or two.
If you approach your marketing goals in a similar fashion, you’ll have a much higher conversion rate from your efforts.
Build Your Brand More Quickly
When a customer decides who deserves their business, they focus on one thing: trust.
As you continue to learn how to use social media marketing to engage with your social media audience, you might want to commit to keeping a pulse on your influence. The more you invest into your social media presence, the more it'll grow.
While a new product or company is exciting, it’s also an undeniable gamble for the customer. Besides, you can't announce a shiny new product every time you want to see your social media engagement improve. Instead, try staying socially active and approachable with your target audience and watch how it establishes brand awareness faster than any marketing push ever could.
Show your client base that your company is more than a faceless corporation. Don't just post about products and services. Post things that inspire you. It'll help you counter people's us and them mentality. When there’s suddenly a personality at the forefront of a brand, you become more relatable. This makes you more trustworthy as well
Plan Events and Promotions More Effectively
If plastering fliers around your town hasn’t been bringing the crowd it used to, it’s probably because everyone is already attending events they were invited to on Facebook. With 90% of adults under 30 using social media platforms and older demographics only slightly behind, larger sites like Facebook have made event planning drop-dead easy.
It’s time your business benefits from it.
With a free Facebook business profile, just about anyone can learn how to use social media marketing to host events and share them with your followers instantly. Create unique, engaging promotions with contests or share digital coupons. If you feel like giving your Facebook presence a push, you can use Facebook ads to put it in front of an even larger audience.
Ads are just one of the ways social media helps grow your customer base.
On the tweetier side of the aisle, spreading event awareness through Twitter chats and similar live social media interactions will engage your audience in a completely different way. You may not even have to host a physical event!
You could accomplish the same social storm by doing a Q and A segment on your brand, a panel-type discussion with widely-known influencers in your field, or whatever else you’d like. This is a great proxy for an in-person event, especially if you don’t have a physical business location.
Find Your Dream Client
Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other platforms have excellent tools that help you zero-in on your market’s niche. While it’s great to put your message out in front of as many people as you can, it doesn’t count for much if they’re not interested in your message from the beginning. It’s a much safer, reliable method to target your efforts in terms of demographics and location.
Grow Your Domain Traffic
When your social media presence is bolstered, the effects stretch far beyond. With a strong following on all your platforms, you’ll have the opportunity to redirect interested users to your own website. Learning everything you can about how to use social media marketing will help you grow your customer base and open the door for more sales or blog subscriptions, email opt-ins, and other vital parts to your online business’s success.
Automate Your Outreach in Advance
Creating, growing and maintaining a high profile in social media spheres sounds like a pain, right? With as much effort as it takes to garner brand awareness, it sounds like a full-time job in itself. Well, here’s the great thing:
It only takes as much time as you have.
If you’re a busy professional with only an hour or two to spare per week, essentially all major platforms include a post scheduling feature. That means you can prep your outreach days or even weeks before you need it, and it’ll deploy exactly when you want it to.
Social Media Helps Grow Your Customer Base
But it doesn't stop there. Marketing companies like Hootsuite, Salesforce, and Tweetdeck are finding new, creative ways of using the information users post on social media. If you’re running a little low on inspiration and have a few bucks of marketing funds to use, why not give one of these tools a try? You’ll gain valuable insights and make more informed decisions with less work.