Introduction to Social Media
With 39 million people, active on social media in the UK, it’s now one of the quickest and most cost-effective ways to market and sell your product or service.
Whilst one of the major uses of social media is keeping in touch with friends and family, it is also a platform for you to communicate with your potential customers and for your potential customers to communicate with each other (i.e. spreading the word) and this is where the ever-growing industry of social media marketing comes in to the marketing mix.
Whatever product or service you sell, your customers are online ready to buy. Your customers are mobile, they all have mobile devices and they are interacting in social channels with their friends and other brands in search of information and recommendations, 24hrs a day, 7 days a week.
You and your product or service need to be active on the key social media channels so when your ideal customer is ready to buy, they will buy from you. If you do not have a social presence and you are not keeping front of mind they will simply not buy from you. Your competitors will be there and they will be taking away your customers and anyone else who is reading and listening.
Social media is a platform for building relationships, it’s about taking the time to understand your potential customer, talking, building confidence, showing them that you are an expert in your field – all the time encouraging them to buy from you without them realising that you are selling to them. They probably won’t even realise that they want and need what you are making/selling until they see it.
• Integrating social media into the marketing mix
Social media is not something you can simply “add on” to the rest of your marketing, and advertising activity; it needs to be a fully integrated part of the mix. It’s not a stand-a-alone activity. By integrating everything you do, you will create a better experience for your customers and it will make your marketing efforts work twice as hard.
Social media should take your existing brand and position it on-line. It should be added to your marketing activity as soon as possible and should be used as an additional tool and extension to support your overall marketing activity. If a social presence is clear from the start, your branding will benefit from additional channels to reach your potential customers.
Social media should mirror everything you do and talk about:
• If you attend a networking event, you talk about it on social media
• If you produce a flyer or any marketing material, you talk about it on social media
• If you launch a new product or add it to your online shop, you talk about it on social media
• If you launch a sale on certain products or services, you talk about it on social media
• If you can add value to your audience with industry-specific information, you talk about it on social media
If you remember to mirror all your off-line activity on the social channels, it’s more content to give your potential customers and will grow your brand.
• Building relationships
To get the most out of your social media activity, building relationships needs to be your main objective. You need to take a step back from selling your product and service and look at the bigger picture. The relationships and trust you build with your potential customers are the foundations upon which your business will grow.
Relationships grow when you nurture them, and no other technique offers you the opportunity to do this as well as social media, apart from networking. Social channels have broken down the walls between individuals at an unprecedented rate. The rate at which we can ‘spread the word’ immediately is a huge benefit to business owners.
• Building and engaging a community
The greatest value of social media marketing is your ability to engage with a community of other people, other people that you would struggle to reach. You have the opportunity to interact with customers from all over the UK, all over the world—including those who live on your street —on a huge scale. You can basically reach whoever you want to reach.
You have the opportunity to continue building relationships with your current customers. These relationships are what keep customers coming back, increasing both loyalty and retention. If those customers become advocates and increase your word-of-mouth presence, you’ll start seeing amazing returns.
To summarise:
By providing a great place of engagement for your community and helping build valuable, authentic resources for your product, and trust, you’re also building up authority for your product within your industry. You’ll find your customers start to trust you, they will come to you for advice and the take the next step – buying.
