Why You Need to Up Your Social Media Strategy to Grow Your Customer Base

39% of customers assert that they trust brands only if they have interacted with them on social media platforms. That's only one of the reasons why you'll need to up your social media strategy to grow your business.

We'll show you the trends you need to be on the lookout for, and how to respond to them so that customers are lining up at your doorstep.

Introduction

Whether you want to increase your brand awareness, attract more leads or address customer queries, a social media campaign is a great way to go about it.

We'll start with the obvious reason: there are over 3.484 billion social media users. It would be a shame to not take advantage of that.

A lesser known but equally good reason: 78% of salespeople who use social selling do, in fact, sell more than their peers who don't.

For organizations, the social media channels they use the most are, in order, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Youtube, Google+ and Pinterest. However, for social media marketing, B2B organizations prefer LinkedIn, and B2C organizations prefer Facebook.

According to Hootsuite, 49% of companies try to garner leads from social media, but 90% use it to build brand awareness. This is the most popular goal.

The biggest challenges of social media optimization include measuring ROI and lack of time and budget. Fortunately, these can be addressed by hiring a reliable social media management agency.

Here's the lowdown on why you should optimize your social media strategy.

Reason #1: Consumers expect you to have a social media presence

Consumers expect brands to be accessible wherever they choose to spend their time online.

Not having a thought-out social media strategy can lose you potential leads. The brand interactions you do have may be only fraction of what your customers want to see.

Furthermore, 33% of consumers prefer to use social media rather than call to contact brands for customer support.

Here are two tips on how to respond strategically:

Tip #1: Be present.

Find the platforms your customers frequent, and make sure that they can find you on them. The platforms you focus on should meet the following criteria:

• The content comes naturally given your business model or services (eg. Instagram is an ideal platform for a freelance illustrator, but perhaps not for a maths tutor).

• The platforms have a substantial community in terms of social media engagement and not just followers.

• Clients consistently find you (or you consistently find clients) through the platforms.

Tip #2: Integrate quality customer service into your social media marketing strategy.

For example, several companies, like UPS, have created Twitter accounts for customer support to provide service updates, respond to concerns, and address specific customer cases publicly or privately.

Furthermore, keep an eye out for social media features that facilitate good customer service to stay ahead of the curve.

For example, Facebook launched Facebook Messenger for Business, which allows organizations to connect efficiently through the standard app.

Reason #2: Social media works wonders for SEO

Search engine optimization (SEO) is all about content. And one of the best ways for people to discover and digest content is through social media marketing.

Effectively distributing your content through social media platforms will help attract more users to your website and let search crawlers know that your content is a helpful and trustworthy source.

Here are a couple of tips to get you started:

Tip #1: Maintain synergy between your content marketing and social media marketing strategies by setting up schedules that take advantage of both teams' activities.

Think of it as a cycle. Create content, spread awareness for that content through social media advertising, then allow users to engage with the content through social media.

Tip #2: Come up with ways for customers to engage with your content that they will actually want to use.

For example, you might make add a plugin that allows readers to tweet quotable lines from your blog posts straight from the webpage, or set up polls on social media asking your followers what type of content they would like to see next.

Reason #3: Keep your followers close, and your customers closer

Social media and marketing for customer retention go hand-in-hand.

By leveraging your social media strategy through quality customer service, customer base analysis, and targeted social media advertising, you can craft a loyal following of return clients.

One of the biggest advantages of being present on social media is the immediate access to a vast array of insights about your target audience. For example, their demographics, their online habits, the types of content they consistently engage with, and the types of content they tend to ignore.

Here are two ways to incorporate this into your strategy:

Tip #1: Take advantage of real-time analytics of social media to experiment with new ideas, get a quick read of how they perform, and revise your strategy accordingly.

The fast-paced nature of the medium can be a lot to keep up with. However, it gives you freedom to test out marketing strategies without spending much time in development or committing long-term.

This allows you to capitalize on the latest trends in engagement, such as video live streaming, which has become an embedded feature of almost every social media site.

Tip #2: Keep customers engaged, and adapt to the latest technology.

Since the consumer journey is not linear and is interactive across different devices, mobile-friendly content is now all but mandatory.

Conclusion

You're up to speed on the need for a social media strategy!

If you don't have the resources to implement the above-mentioned strategies, well, lucky you, BluEnt's social media management services are just a click away.

We have understood the need for mobile-friendly strategies since the trend first took hold, and we integrate them into all of our services.

Our background in responsive UX & UI has informed our practices to ensure that our plans are optimized regardless of what screens customers view them on.

Ready to increase your brand recognition and get more leads with social media services? Contact us now!

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