In the previous blog of this series, we looked at how customers are increasingly changing the way (searching online) they look for information about a product, service, or business – both in locality or in distant geography. Small and mid-sized businesses are realizing the importance of having an online presence for their brand to reach, attract, convert, and retain more customers. We also saw some easy and effective first steps to quickly build your presence on social media.
In this part let us look at a couple of ways in which you can use social media to effectively build a better brand, and connect with your real customers.
Connect with customers and reach out to global audience with social media
Use social media tools to connect with your existing and prospective customers. You can showcase your offerings, interact with customers, build communities to network with customers, and keep the conversations alive by following up on those conversations. Social media platforms (that have large user base) such as Google+, Facebook, Youtube, Twitter allow you to position your products and services to different audience in different ways based upon the specific audience’s needs.
Branding and marketing
You can use social media to build your brand by delivering consistent message and content across all the social media channels. Publish how-to videos, pictures, etc, about your products and services on your website and link your website to your social media channels. These efforts then clubbed with SEO tactics and improve your web presence and generate more traffic to your website.
You can develop content such as manuals, whitepapers, videos, blogs, etc. that relates to customer’s needs/problems, explaining concepts, innovation in your domain, etc. For example, if you manufacture women accessories that complement their ethnic attire, you can provide videos for how to wear different types of ethnic attire like, how to wear a saree; or content for what to wear on what occasion, etc. If you provide accessories for a specific brand of mobiles or tablets, then you can provide videos related to using different features of this brand’s mobile phone or tablets.
Analytics and Listening
Use social analytics tools that can analyze the interactions that customers have about your brand on the social channels. These tools analyze whether people are talking positive or negative about your business or products and services i.e. sentiment analysis.
By keeping your senses open to such social/sentiment information can give you relevant insights to improve your products, better segment and target customers, and uncover new business opportunities. Tools are also available that can help you to proctor what do people mention about your brand or products and services, and take necessary steps to better manage your brand’s reputation.
Increase sales with quick offers
You can quickly rollout new limited-period or seasonal / daily / hourly offers quickly to attract customers and generate more sales. You can also tie-up with companies like Groupon to provide best-buy deals on your products and services.
Improving employee productivity
Today’s new-generation workforce is technology savvy and always stays connected to their preferred social channels. Thus, if you provide them access to the social tools (for work) which they are familiar and prefer working with, it can help improve collaboration among employees, make them more productive, and help them better connect with customers.
