The explosion of transactions on social media has created a bustling digital economy, especially since several consumers now do most of their shopping online. This has somehow intensified competition among businesses.
With the rising importance of social media in marketing and sales, numerous companies from various sectors and industries are now forced to promote their products to a wider customer base. And perhaps, many have turned to market strategies involving social media ads. If your lending company, for instance, has been spending considerable sums of money on digital advertising for your mortgage loan products, you might want to think about Facebook ad alternatives that can deliver as much punch minus the ad costs.
More so, here are some social media marketing strategies to increase your company’s customer reach.
1. Work up your profile
One of the essential elements of your social media marketing strategy is your business’s social media profile. Your efforts to extend your customer reach start with having a professional profile that allows you to connect with your target market.
That said, make sure that customers know how to reach you when they see your profile from all of your social media marketing efforts. Here are a few ways to do this.
- Put your contact details: You should put your contact details on your profile where customers can easily see them. But ensure that your team is able to reply to each message or inquiry received through these contact channels.
- Place call-to-action (CTA) buttons: The Call-to-Action (CTA) button could be one of the ways to convert your leads into buyers or customers. To do this, consider placing a CTA button on your profile page. This could help visitors and lead them to act on their curiosity and move closer to buying.
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2. Boost your social media posts
When you’ve already prepped your business social media profile, the next part of your social media marketing strategy should be to work on your social media posts. These posts are considered crucial in attracting and driving more online traffic to your social media page or website.
The reason behind this is your social media posts have a direct impact on your social media presence. They contribute significantly to your image, reputation, and branding. And if you’re a purely online business, your target audience’s idea of how you do business will generally be affected by your social media posts. In fact, your posts may be their only direct source of business information about your company and your products.
And as such, one of the ways to increase your visibility and enhance your social media presence is by publishing relevant and relatable social media posts frequently. The more often you post content, the more it could solidify your presence on the digital platform. And this is what search engine crawlers will find and fetch when people type in keywords that match those in your posts.
Keep in mind that your posts are the base resource of your social media marketing outreach. It’s what search engines and sharing apps can spread around. And aside from the frequency of posting, you should also aim to enhance the creativity of your content while still staying consistent with your messaging.
3. Drive your content distribution
After you’ve worked up the frequency and quality of your social media posts, you shouldn’t let your posts hang there and wait for people to find them and pick them up. Part of the publishing game and marketing outreach is to spread out your posts to as many people as possible.
You can even proactively spread your social media posts. You can do this by forming a team among your staff; they will spend some time sharing and reposting your posts on sites that allow content to be shared. However, it doesn’t have to be the full text of a long blog or article. You can create teasers or excerpts that your team can share with social media groups, channels, pages, and group chats.
Try to make the most of existing social media sites and platforms to drive your content distribution. The goal is to drive traffic to your social media pages and website by backlinking your teasers to your social posts and website pages. Doing this is considered better than spending on paid ads, which most people tend to skip anyway.
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4. Engage well on social media
Your social media page is merely the touchstone of your business presence on the internet. It’s like the wall of your business place that people stumble upon the first time they click the link to your page or site. But people on social media often want to know more about what’s behind the wall. They want to know how you make your products, for instance, and the people who run your business.
For that reason, it makes it very important for any business to engage well with its visitors, commenters, and followers. So, try to answer questions posted on your social media page as promptly as you can. Keep in mind that there might be more people who have that same question in mind other than the user who voiced it out.
You could also consider engaging with users who post comments on your social media page whenever appropriate. Some users and consumers now refer to these comments as part of their customer feedback and product review research. Also, an open question or comment can be a unique opportunity for you to respond well and create a good impression of your business and products.
For your visitors and followers, it could also feel reassuring when someone ‘behind the wall’ engages with their questions and comments. It helps assure them that it’s not one of those troll pages. They’re likely to feel better knowing they have found the right social media page they were looking for. The people behind it really engage and try to address their concerns and answer their questions.
5. Share customer testimonies
One of the differences between traditional media such as TV and digital media is that online media is generally interactive by nature.
With traditional media, you simply stream the advertisement content and view it. But when a business’s social media page posts a video of its product on its social media page or website, the viewer is usually given the option to react to what they saw, read, or heard through the comments box. This means social media users can be activated as instant endorsers of business products.
In addition, social media is generally big on customer testimonies. And in some cases, the social media community puts more credence on the accounts of customers who actually bought and used the product than on general endorsements. This can be to your advantage; statistics indicate that 2 out of 3 people are more likely to purchase a product after hearing testimonies from satisfied customers who already bought and used the product.
And as such, tapping into this interactive nature of social media and channeling your clients’ voices can be in your favor.
Here are some of the practical strategies that you can implement:
- Reach out to your past clients who left glowing comments or rave reviews about your company or products. Ask if you could interview them and feature them as stories of happy customers.
- You can come up with a Story section on your social media page or website. Feature short clips of how your products helped your happy customers.
- You can collate all the screenshots of positive comments, rave reviews, and even the short clips in a single place where leads going over your social media page or website can see and access the entire collection.
6. Automate your chatbots
When your marketing strategies start to gain traction, you’ll be able to reach customers in places and segments which you never imagined could be attracted to your social media page or website. And usually, it can be a good indication when you start getting a lot of chat messages from leads and prospective customers who are asking for more details about your product. However, you may find it more challenging to handle this if the interest turns into a tsunami of chat inquiries.
A solution you can explore is to deploy automated chatbots and instant messaging replies to some of the stock questions that are generally asked by your prospective leads and customers. By automating your chatbots, you can pre-set the answers to your customer’s questions.
For instance, you can deploy AI-powered bots. These bots can answer typical customer queries using pre-defined answers. This can enable you to respond to chat inquiries 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Smart AI bots can also make sense of previous chat interactions. They can use previous chats to personalize their messages and predict suggestions and recommendations.
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The bottom line
An effective social media marketing strategy won’t just aim to spread out the word about your company and promote brand awareness. Rather, it would try to reach customers who fall within their target persona. You can do this by implementing practical marketing strategies that can help make the most of a company’s social media page and posts.
With the marketing strategies discussed in this article, your business can be off to a good start in boosting customer reach on social media.
