If you are in business the chances are you will be running some form of social media campaign. Social media can be a fantastic tool for your marketing, but, as with everything, it is what you do with it that counts. Take Facebook, for example. Many people spend hours on Facebook, trying to increase their page likes. This, while useful, is not as important as it once was. Reports on organic reach show a declining reach in relation to number of likes and only a small number of your fans will actually see the content that you post.
The key is to engage with your potential customers. We know that people react emotionally in their purchasing decisions, they love a good story, they want solutions to their problems, not products. The trick is to present what you are trying to sell in that way. So, if you sell IT services, don’t just try and sell IT. Try and connect with your customers. Do they know they need new software? Probably not. Do they know it is better to keep their systems updated rather than panic when they crash? Probably, but they might not have got around to it?
So, engage emotionally with them, show them what this new software could do for them, maybe using a short video, or a link to an article on your website. Show them the peace of mind a regularly checked IT system could bring them. Only once they are engaging with you, can you then begin to sell to them. The customer will not buy when we want them to buy, they will buy when they want to buy. Our job is to make sure that when they are ready , we are the person that they think of. So, when their IT systems are playing up are they going to call the person with the advert, or the person who engaged with them and gave them good advice?
Engagement is the beginning of building trust, and trust increases the probability of sales. We will buy from the person who gave us advice, as we then trust them, rather than another faceless advert. Therefore, it is not the number of likes that are crucial, but your engagement with people that is so vital. If you have 10,000 fans but never engage, you have not built any form of relationship, but if you have 100 fans who you regularly engage with, they have the potential to become your customers.
Don’t get fooled by the numbers, human interaction is built on trust, and trust has a value far beyond any number of Facebook likes.
To help you build a marketing strategy that helps you to engage with your followers, why not consider our Marketing Manager service?