Social media and how it fits into your business strategy is a big question, isn’t it? What do you do? How do you make the most of your time, especially if you don’t have a marketing team to handle it for you? Follow these quick steps to reach potential customers and start seeing a return on your investment of time.
Know Your Ideal Customer
You can’t begin using social to convert sales if you don’t know who you’re talking to. Get straight on your buyer persona.
Figure Out Where to Reach Potential Customers
Based on your buyer persona figure out what social network they frequent most and when. If your current customers and ideal customers are the same (hopefully they are), you can use your customer information to uncover where potentials are.
Listen Well
Once you know where they are, you need to go into stealth listening mode. You can join in on the conversation as long as you’re not talking about you/your business. Think of a cocktail party or social gathering. When you spot a group you’d like to join, you saunter up and listen. When appropriate, you add to the conversation inline with the topic currently being discussed. You should NEVER barge in and change the topic of conversation. You’ll only alienate the group if you do.
Ask for Their Opinion and Share Their Content
When you locate people who are potential ideal customers, listen to their conversations and ask them to elaborate on the opinions they’re sharing. If they are content creators, share their materials and/or ask them thoughtful questions about it. Be a good social media audience for them.
Note Their Pain. Let It Influence Your Content.
After following them, and getting to know them, listen for their pain. Note the questions they ask. Use this to create your own effective content and then share it with them. “I noticed you were asking about selecting the right promotional product last week. We just wrote a piece on it. Thought you might be interested.”
When you have great content like this that you know speaks to your potential customer’s pain points or needs, you may want to consider running social media ads featuring it. Facebook has gotten very good at its targeting abilities and don’t forget their pixel.
If you created content they’re interested in, and you bring it to their attention, this should get them back to your website. Make sure they have something to do once they’re there. An effective call-to-action is important at this stage.
You will rarely make sales ON social media. You must move prospects through your sales pipeline, but if the pipeline is visible to potential customers it won’t be as effective. Social media sales is a slow process. You must nurture the relationship long before you can begin selling. You’ll see a greater return on investment if you take on a very targeted approach to reach potential customers instead of casting a wide net and shouting into the noise.
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