Rethink Your Advertising Strategy: Use Social Media to Your Advantage
Businesses do well when they keep up with the latest advancements and can get the attention of the public. These days, the trend is to put more effort into social media than into traditional advertising.
By turning to social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and Pinterest, companies are finding fresh and innovative ways to connect with customers and make a solid impression on them. Detroit Internet Marketing’s findings are that promoting goods and services on these social media sites is the surest way to remain relevant in the eyes of the consumer.
Although many businesses have heard about the benefits of getting their name out onto the web, they still drag their feet.
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Do any of these reasons for avoiding social media sound familiar to you?
- I just don’t understand how to use social media. Learning would take up too much time.
- We have been doing fine with traditional advertising. Why fix something that isn’t broken?
- I don’t know how we would integrate social media into a job role at our company?
- I’m sure it’s much more expensive to promote our business on some social media sites than to use tried and true advertising methods.
- There’s no way to gauge our ROI.
What if you knew that you can use social media in a way that print ads and radio spots just can’t reach? Think about the powerful advantage you and your website would have if you could connect directly with your customers.
The top 10 reasons why using social media is right for you
- Gain a solid understanding of what customers are looking for.
- Find out how the public views your brand.
- Growth in new business as awareness of your company’s products and services circulate the web.
- Monitor and take swift action when there are unfavorable views and statements about your company.
- Test ideas by using social media to ask the public about their thoughts on a product or service you are thinking about offering.
- Showcase your company’s personality and create a favorable response toward how the public views you.
- Tremendous amounts of analytic data at your disposal.
- The capability of identifying new business opportunities.
- The ability to stay up to date on what’s trending and cared about by your customers.
- Little or no cost to promote your company vs. the exorbitant fees of traditional advertising.
Now that you can see the benefits of using social media, here are some tips to maximize your sales:
- Create a blog.Write thoughtful articles that showcase your knowledge, experience and demonstrate why a person would be happy to use your product or service.
- Put together a Facebook page. This is a great place to show off your personality. Offer tips that customers can use. Create a contest. Share some inspiration. Post pictures of your staff, awards, a product or your new facility. Facebook is a also a great platform to put a branding campaign in place.
- Try out Twitter. Twitter is a great site for problem solving, chatting with customers, recognizing opportunities and demonstrating you care about customer satisfaction. Twitter is a smart platform to use to gather a group and have a Twitter party.
- Pinterest is a visual wonderland. If you have the type of business that can be showcased in pictures, Pinterest is a good platform to use. You can target a demographic area and connect with people how live in that vicinity. Pinterest is a great site to use to advertise specials, contests and events.
- Google+ is the popular kid on the block. A mash up of article and photo sharing, comments and groups you can join. Google+ is the place to share your blog articles to
get them circulated further onto the web. - If you enjoy videos over articles, use YouTube. YouTube is a great platform for talking about your product or service. It is also a great tool for creating how-to videos for the consumer.
This is just a sample of the most popular social media sites on the web. As you can see, there are tremendous ways to leverage your brand.
Did you know?
- According to HubSpot, 80% of social media users like to connect with brands via Facebook.
- It’s easy and effective to advertise your social media sites with links on your business card, in a store window, below your email signature, on promotional event information, in your marketing
material, on your website and through traditional advertising. That’s a lot of additional ways to advertise for FREE. - You can find out what similar businesses are up to by searching for them on Twitter. You can learn if they are doing anything with customer complaints, have advertised coupon codes, determine if there is a lot of engagement with the people following them and if they do have a large following. Another FREE way to stay on top of the competition.
- You can get key analytic insights on Google+. Find out how many times you’ve been viewed in local searches, how often people have looked up your business listing and how many people are engaging with you. There is no fee for this service, it is FREE.
- Retailers and brands are a big part of the Pinterest landscape. For these companies, using Pinterest has become a way to create a digital catalog that has been proven to drive up sales.
- Video content is a great way to capture attention. With over a billion people viewing YouTube each month, creating instructional videos or inventive ad campaigns can be another powerful way to get the public familiar with your products or services.
As we have demonstrated, social media is a powerful way to stay relevant in the eyes of the consumer. There is no better way to stay in touch with your customers. Any business that can stay in communication with the public by asking and answering questions, solving problems and giving good advice is going to be a business that is thriving in this age of living on the web. So the question is; why aren’t you using social media to your advantage?
