The online market space can feel very overcrowded if you are competing with similar businesses for the same demographic of consumers. Finding a way to stand out and become more noteworthy than your competitors is not just a survival tactic but a way to ensure stability and growth for your company.
Social media offers many opportunities for creative approaches to marketing and branding. But you have to figure out what works best with the company image and product objectives.
If what you need to attract new business and keep brand loyal consumers aware, then you can choose a high tech approach such as employing programmatic advertising to place your products in several key online locations. If your business model relies on retaining a more homey and down-to-earth image, then consider relying more heavily on personalized email marketing and customer service helplines.
Let Exemplary Customer Service be Your Watchword
Because the world is getting more digitized, customers are beginning to want more personalized services from business services. Customers judge a company’s competency on their responsiveness to customer service issues.
Take the time to train your staff, not just the customer service representatives, on how to respectfully deal with clients. Customers expect good service, and when they receive great service instead, they can easily convert them to being brand loyal.
Become Supportive of Others Success
Use your social media accounts to congratulate other businesses or well-known personalities in your area on their accomplishments. Customers will see you being supportive and diversifying your postings from being more business-driven to becoming socially conscious.
This will make them more likely to use your services and provide word-of-mouth recommendations of your business to others. This will also take the form of people sharing your business’s social media posts with their friends and family.
Become a Hub for Questions and Guidance
Dedicate a team to providing information and how-to guides to customers on your website. Drive traffic to this page by utilizing your social media. Even if you provide a FAQ, it cannot predict and answer every consumer’s query.
Therefore, use apps such as Twitter to respond to customers’ queries and websites such as LinkedIn to post articles about the regular maintenance of your products. Consumers will be more likely to purchase your products because they know your business is reliable and dedicated to providing after-sales service.
Talk to Your Customers to Identify Improvement Areas
The best person to tell you where to improve your business dealings is the customer. Most businesses send out surveys in emails to their customers. This is somewhat impersonal and not very engaging.
Instead, send out emails addressed to the customer by their name and offer reward points for doing the survey. Have live chat sessions on Instagram or Facebook where customers can win rewards, points, and products by participating and sharing their experiences with your service or products. This is valuable information that both your marketing and research and development teams can utilize.
Contribute Interesting Content for Passive Viewing
Engage your marketing teams considerable creativity to create interesting content to be shared across your social media platforms. Target important holidays and occasions and create short films or interactive games which engage customers.
People appreciate being entertained and educated via interesting blog articles, video advertisements, and pictorial infographics. You could even run a contest for customers to submit their short films to be judged and shared on your social media and website. This will attract a lot of new attention and create a media buzz that you can employ as free marketing.
Establish an Excellent CSR Policy
Consumers are looking for companies that embody their values. If your company’s corporate social responsibility activities represent the values that the consumers believe in, then you are likely to gain their respect and continued business.
Most people believe that businesses should give back to society and seeing that your company takes this seriously will improve your standing with your customers and with the business community. You may also find that this helps your bottom line to increase as well. This is because being more involved in the community will attract business partners and investors whose views align with your CSR initiatives.
There are several areas where you could polish your company’s current approach to marketing and visibility. The important factor to keep in mind is to choose the tactics that are adaptable to your company’s needs and do not present a deviation from your business’s unique selling point.
Always focus your efforts on furthering the objectives of your company. Because of how many different businesses are out there, consumers prefer businesses that can communicate their individuality through their social media channels. People like to connect, so give them something with which to connect.
