Congratulations on taking the plunge and trying out business ownership. Owning a business of any kind is hard work. First, you have to build your customer base – who want what you’re selling? Who can they pass the message on to? Word of mouth is our best friend, and testimonials sell products. It’s not news that good products with good marketing are the most successful in the market.
And now with the recent social media explosion, sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram have completely revolutionized the way Americans and people around the world shop. Never before has everything been so simple, so easily accessible. All the items we want are at our fingertips before we even know we want them. So, how can we make our product stand out among all the competitors?
Make It Interactive:
I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve scrolled through some social media page and seen a product I never knew I wanted until now. The mere idea of suggestion is so powerful in our human brains that it can work in our favor as marketers. How can we most efficiently use this tool of social media? The key is quality content. Plenty of businesses are slapping together an ad here and there to simply get people to pay attention – that’s the easy part. Flashy, eye-catching ads aren’t hard to create. The ones that really pay off are the pieces that are interactive, that allow viewers to see themselves with your product, the ones that make the experience personal and memorable.
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Keep Track of Changes:
First, you need to keep track of what consumers are really looking for. There’s no reason to keep trying to fix a ladder when a jetpack has been invented. Stay up to date with social media yourself to see what followers are looking for, what becomes popular. How do we keep our brand modern and up to date with all the trends? Know what the trends are in the first place. Know who you’re up against.
Personalize:
For example, if the makeup brand with the most followers on Instagram has videos once a week of YouTube vloggers doing tutorials for the fans, maybe you need something more interactive that viewers can use on a practical level like that. If your past customers have commented that their experience was detached or impersonal, what can you do to create a personalized encounter with the next client? Social media and the technological rush of marketing has changed everything for us as business owners. We cannot rely on getting the customer into the store to create the experience they want. Most of our customers will only push a few buttons to get our product. So it is up to us to make those few clicks memorable and worthwhile.
Impress in Seconds:
Every social media platform is unique, but one thing is the same: time is of the essence. Swiping, scrolling, flipping… your ad will get less than a second’s worth of a glance, so make it count. Quality content means more than just telling the truth about your product. Tell a story. Show us how things could be if we followed you. If something is unpleasant, it will only annoy us if it keeps popping up, not entice us to pursue the product. What can we do to make the experience of encountering an advertisement a pleasant one instead of making us desperate to skip to the real content?
Customer Engagement:
According to Nick Santillo, the CEO of www.frac.tl, “Customer engagement is one of the leading reasons businesses succeed because people enjoy being a part of every part of their transaction.”
Consider the differences between the following experiences. Company A receives an inquiry on a database and responds electronically to the consumer with a standard greeting and a link to the purchasing page. Each consumer receives the same message and the process is over in seconds. Company B, upon inquiry, polls consumers to get to know more about them and creates an environment where each interaction is unique. The system refers to the customer by name, learns what specific elements can be changed about the product to best suit the customer’s needs, has real employees to talk to if the customer is unsure or has questions. The second experience is so much fuller than the first because of the attention to detail.
People want to be seen, they want to be heard. How can we create the atmosphere of an in-person store experience without having our customers physically in front of us?
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Collate All Data and Use Them in Your Social Media Marketing Strategy:
Never forget, as you learn more and more about marketing strategies, that your experiences with merchants in the past have shaped your buying patterns. Think about what makes you more likely to give one company business over another. Talk to people you know about their spending habits, and think through how to make your experience of creating solid content on social media. Each post counts toward the image you are creating of your business.
It is okay to spend a little more effort and money equipping skilled professionals to develop your social media exposure. Because it avoids embarrassing typos and other errors. As with anything, the more you put in at the beginning, the better the product will be. Spend time crafting this image – it takes work to build, but the work will be rewarded by the end.
