Wondering how to attract and engage prospective customers through social media? Get down the article below to understand few basic concepts
Social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram came to the fore as tools that interconnect and link people across the globe. These tools have brought people across the borders closer, erased the obstacle of distances, and made the world a smaller and more intimate place.
With the evolution of these social media tools, they have also emerged as media of multiple benefits and uses.
One of the areas in which social media platforms are of utility is the digital marketing of products and services. Marketing on social media can be the next best thing to promote or advertise a product in person.
Being on social media is no longer a novelty but is customary for businesses these days. Consequently, the field of marketing on social media is an area of intense and severe competition.
Marketers of products and services are constantly racking their brains to develop innovative ways to convert customers and convince prospects to go in for the purchase.
Problem with Emails
Emails are one of the most effective tools of digital marketing. Yet, they have a few disadvantages when it comes to tackling leads. This is mainly due to…
Poor open rates
Overload of emails
As a result, most of the emails remain unopened and are thus rendered useless and ineffective. Compared to social media tools, the front interface of emails comprises text only and is considerably less appealing than that of a social media page. We can find data sets that demonstrate the non-performance of emails when it comes to nurturing leads.
As shown in the chart below, social media marketing aces email marketing when it comes to lead generation.
Source - hootsuite
It has been found that 75% of B2B buyers and 84% of C-level executives incorporate social media as a key part of their decision-making process.
5 Steps to Convert More Prospects on Social Media
Businesses realize fast the efficacy of social media in generating, nurturing, and converting leads. Naturally, they have begun to focus their marketing strategies on social media with increasing vigor and innovation.
Here are five measures to effectively drive conversion of prospects on social media:
1. Find The Right Market
Identifying the right section of people who form the ideal market for the products and services of your business is a key factor. This is a rather broad and hazy requirement, but you won't be sure how or whom to aim your marketing at without it. To fix up your clientele, you could use demographic information like age, gender, geography, occupation, etc.
Once you have narrowed down your market, you need to decide your USP (Unique Selling Proposition). Your USP will help you formulate the appropriate message highlighting your strengths. It will decide the shape of your marketing campaign and help to make it appealing to the prospects who matter.
Each social media tool has its strong point/s. While Facebook is suited for posts with text and images, Instagram encourages posts with pictures.
Twitter is more for short intimations, while LinkedIn is centered on career-oriented and job-related sharing of information. It has been found that tweets with images receive 18% more clicks and 150% more retweets than tweets without images.
Some of how you could promote your content on social media:
1. Blog Posts
Posting about your products and businesses through blogs is a great way of educating your prospects about yourself. It is also a fantastic way of improving your SEO ranking and reaching out to your customers. Blogs help you connect with your prospects and expand your customer base.
2. Promote Product and Service Launches
Publish information about new products or service launches at your company with text and images. This will take your work and activities closer to your prospects and help build stronger connections with your business.
Such posts can get forwarded and circulated by your prospects among their friends and associates, and this, in turn, can act as a lead generation tactic. More people getting informed of your work can only mean greater chances of you attracting fresh prospects.
3. Host Webinars
Webinars are online events where several individuals at different places can see and talk to each other online. The participative element of webinars is a big plus point, and you could welcome important prospects to be a part of these events.
Such webinars could be recorded and posted on your website and social media pages for consumption by all your prospects. Like it often happens on social media, such content can reach wider audiences and draw in more prospects.
Such measures have shown how to improve conversion rates through marketing automation.
3. Ad Campaigns & Video Marketing
As per Gartner, "CMOs spent more than 21% of their marketing budget on advertising with 66% of that going to paid social media digital channels".
Do your due diligence and observe advertising statistics to properly organize your advertising campaigns and strategies.
Paid social media ads are a great strategy to reach out to your customers and promote your business. It is a step that involves a lot of pre-planning, research, and a fair amount of guesswork. It pays off handsomely since paid ad campaigns help you target the exact customers when sending out your marketing message.
Such ad campaigns save a lot of time and money and result in higher engagement with prospects and a substantial increase in the fan base.
Source ; Gartner
Along with paid ad campaigns, you could also run video marketing campaigns on social media. According to the Web Marketing Video Council's recent study, 60% of brands now use video on social networks.
Videos to be posted could be of various types. They could be,
short snippets of how-to videos
clippings of bytes by experts
demo videos about products
Lengthier videos were showing events organized by your company.
Videos have a possibility of a very high rate of engagement with prospects and are also great at information dissemination and drawing in a new set of customers and clients.
One can find data sets that prove that video marketing campaigns are a sure-shot way of converting more prospects.
4. Remarketing
Any marketer will tell you it is much tougher to find a new customer than to retain an existing one. It has been shown that existing customers bring in 80% of the profits enjoyed by any business. To be mindful of your loyal customers is of paramount importance.
It takes a lot for a customer defection to occur and for a customer to move away from a company and do business with a competitor. Businesses, in turn, shouldn't get complacent and go all out to keep their loyal clients happy.
Companies could stay in touch with their existing customers through email marketing, mobile marketing, and social media marketing. Making existing customers feel needed and wanted is one rudimentary way of ensuring that they continue to do business with you.
Customers who are loyal need to be given preferential treatment. These customers should be the first to be offered discounts, gifts, special offers, and invitations to events. You could also create an exclusive Facebook page for them or give them access to chapters of a yet-to-be-released book or a video series.
On the other hand, these loyal customers can be made the source of referrals and publicity among their family, friends, and associates. This will surely draw in the increased number of prospects since their words are bound to have greater impact and influence.
The database of existing customers can be used to increase conversion rates through marketing automation.
5. Taking Stock
Along with all the steps undertaken to convert more prospects, businesses also need to reassess and re-evaluate their strategies from time to time. They need to make it a point to get back to the basics and remind themselves of the fundamental necessities of marketing.
One of the things which companies need to remember is to qualify their leads. Companies need to find ways in which to segment their leads and assign significance to them accordingly. It would help if you distinguished between a passerby client and one who is seriously thinking of hiring you or buying your products or services.
Companies need to find data sets that will enable you to find ways to check if they are on the right path or in need of corrective measures to convert prospects.
Coda
Social media marketing is now as much of a reality as any other conventional method of marketing. It brings along its own set of needs and challenges.
Among them, converting prospects is perhaps the most important. Businesses have various strategies at their disposal when it comes to converting prospects, and they need to choose wisely to stay ahead of the competition.
Diana Morris is Marketing Professional with over eight years of experience. She is interested in blogging and helps small businesses with innovative ideas that keep pulling in newness and creativity. Currently, she heads the marketing team at BizInfor, a b2b database solution firm providing various services like data cleansing, data appending, lead generation email lists, etc.
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