When it comes to lead funnels, customer acquisition, and profit-making, many startups forget just how important social media can be to achieving their goals. But with virtually a guarantee of reaching your customer base directly and the ability to interact with them on your own terms, why would any startup ignore social media?
To answer that, I’ve listed 5 strategies any startup can use to gain more customers:
See Also: How To Win Back Lost Customers And Keep Them For Good
1). Brand Awareness
Let’s start with the most obvious strategy for social media: Increasing Brand awareness.
Though this may seem a little cliche, it’s a must-have. Increasing and maximising your brand awareness is the bread and butter of social media strategies; at all points in your social media strategy, you should be aiming to maximise your reach, attempting at all times to increase the number of people who are aware of your business, what you do and why they should care.
This is particularly important for a startup where people may not know of your products or services. Social media provides you the opportunity to explain what exactly you’re offering and most importantly, why they need it! This is a simple way to gain more customers, by connecting with those who already have a need and want, but are just not aware of your startup as a provider.
It’s said that it takes a person up to 11 interactions with a brand to become a customer, why not use social media to up the number of interactions you’re currently constructing?
2). Promotion of Targeted Deals
As a standard practice, you should regularly promote your services through social media; after all what’s the point of gaining thousands of followers if you don’t at least attempt to convert them into customers?
Even better, you can increase the visibility of these posts by adding a little budget to boost their reach, increasing the visibility; and as an added benefit, you can target this to your ideal audience in a bid to get the right eyes viewing your content.
A more fruitful use of your social media and a better means of promotion is to create special offers that are only available on these channels. This can be a great incentive; making it more likely your followers will take the next step and become paying customers.
As a side note, creating social media specific deals can have the added benefit of helping you to effectively measure your Return on investment, in this case, the man-hours spent on social media and budget spent compared to the customer value you gain from it in terms of sales and growth.
To take this strategy to the next level, set a social media budget and create different tailored deals to each demographic your targeting. You can then create custom audiences and only show these offers to that intended audience.
See Also: 7 Reasons Every Small Business Should Hire A Social Media Manager
3). Tracking And Analytics
It’s important with social media, much like any other medium, to track the value it provides in comparison to the costs you put in—your Return On Investment (ROI).
Deciding what user interactions are meaningful, and the value associated with each of them will allow you to determine which social media channel provides the best returns, and therefore, which one you should focus resources on.
By making use of tracking pixels and the inbuilt analytics social media channels provide, you’ll quickly be able to build an idea of customer personas and the values associated with them. This not only helps with further targeting these persona types on social media but also across all other channels.
4). Literally, Sell:
Social Media platforms like Facebook and Instagram give you the option to sell directly on the platform, via Facebook’s ‘Marketplace’ or ‘Shop’ and Instagrams ‘Shop Now’ options. Offering your services and products on these channels directly, provided the format fits, is a clear route to increasing your number of customers.
In this case, social media channels become an extension of your shopping window and can help to get more eyeballs on your key service/product offerings and minimise the steps in the conversion process.
See Also: 5 Highly Effective Ways To Sell More Products Online With Social Media
5). Gain and Use Customer Insights & Spotlight on Your Customers:
The point of social media is to be social, displaying that you use your social media channels as a two-way means of communication and not just a megaphone for selling.
Take note of comments and suggestions you receive from customers, this is highly valuable data that can help you to improve your products/services and the overall customer experience. Brands like ASOS are extremely good at doing this, using social media as an extension of their customer service department.
It is a chance not only to fix issues when customers have had a troubling experience with your business but to showcase how great you are at fixing it. Being active and responsive on social media channels can encourage customers to openly leave good reviews and comments, which of course will help influence other prospects in their buying decisions.
Another tactic that can be used here is shining the spotlight on your customers. Regardless of your industry and whether or not you’re a B2B or B2C, showing appreciation for your customers online can help in gaining you more. Showcasing the variety of customer types can help to show those who may not have previously seen themselves using your services, that they should.
This method can work well with B2B businesses, as a business of any size needs more promotions, and this could be the extra benefit that pushes prospects into becoming one of your customers.
See Also: How To Sell Your Products With Written Words
About The Writer
This is a guest blog post written by Tosin, a marketing specialist and founder of Marketbl. A former web and application developer, when she’s not helping startups grow, she’s tinkering with tech.
Note: This article has been edited for style and substance.
If you’ll like to submit guest blog posts like this to startuptipsdaily.com, please read the guidelines listed here.
What are your thoughts on these 5 ways social media can help you gain more customers? Let me know by leaving a comment below.
