Connecting with Your True Prospects: 3 Essential Ways to Build Great Customer Relationship with Social Media Marketing
If you want to create a lasting impression that gets customers to keep coming to transact business with you then treat everything you do online as a marketing activity.
That means, running your business on socials just like you run your physical office or store. From your profile to the content you publish. Let every message you put online sell the idea you want your prospects to have about your business.
To build the perfect relationship with your customers using social media marketing, you need just two things.
1. Communicate the value your prospect is looking for and
2. Position yourself as an authority in your industry
The first step to creating and building a great relationship with your customers is by knowing and understanding who they truly are before throwing yourself at them. It will be hurtful and disappointing throwing yourself at a total stranger because such a person will hardly give you a listening ear.
Imagine this — you are desperately looking to get married before the end of the year. You meet this lady that pulled your heart out of your chest at first sight.
You can’t wait to make your intentions known to her.
What do you do?
Do you walk up straight to her and request her hands in marriage. Oh no!
You sure wouldn’t want to ask a lady out on marriage on the first night of your date or first time of the meeting.
The first thing you want to do is create an opportunity to start a conversation and get her attention. Then you go ahead to keep her attention focused on you by being really and of course truly nice, and making her happy.
You tell her what makes her smile. You say what she loves to hear even if you hate to say it or it goes against your belief or philosophy.
As the first date ends, you don’t want to create the impression that makes you end up looking desperate and looking like a man with ulterior motives.
So what do you do?
You keep whatever request you have inside of you inside, lock it up in a safe. And throw the keys somewhere out of your reach, at least for the next few days you don’t want to lay your hands on the lock.
Doing this alone says just one thing about you.
You’re trustworthy, reliable. And you’re worth engaging with.
It doesn’t just stop there. It also makes her comfortable. It makes her relatable and wants to talk more with you.
By providing the relevant supports she needs, being conversational and personal with her.
You’re definitely going to win her heart over completely within a few periods of days or weeks.
There and then, you are guaranteed a spot to air your intention without getting a “red card” rejection.
The same way it is to ask a lady out and guarantee yourself a positive response is the same way it takes to create and build a lasting and remarkable relationship with customers on socials.
Worldwide, the use of social media is fast increasing.
An average person now spends about 2 hours a day using social media. And this amounts to 5 years and 4 months of his lifetime.
What this means is, you will on average spend five years and some months of your life actively scouring social media. Five good years, that’s enough to build and grow your business to success.
Why You Need To Build a Relationship with Your Customer on Social Media
As of 2018, about 1/3 of the world’s population was recorded to be using social media. While in the previous years, the growth has been reported to increase by 13%
What this means is this, Social media isn’t just a place where people go to connect and make friends anymore. It is already a way of life for us as people. It’s now a home where we can nearly get everything we can ever imagine doing, done.
As a business owner, how does this profit you? You stand to gain more visibility online that will help you grow your business offline as well. You get more traffic and acquire prospects without spending too much.
Gartner reported that in 2019 more than 50% of organizations redirected their investments to customer experience innovations.
The first reason you need to build and sustain a good relationship with your customers online is that it…
1. Serves as a Good Source of Traffic for Your Offline Business
2. Reduces Marketing Expenditure
3. Make More Sales for You
4. Saves Time, you save more time attending to customers online than offline.
5. It Delivers Your Services Faster.
6. Spread Information Quicker and Easily.
How to Build an Unusual and Unforgettable Relationship with Customer on Socials
There’s no secret sauce to success than to provide to your customers the best experience they can ever get.
Want to get generate more leads. Get more prospects turned customers. Want a one-time customer turned loyal and repeated customer. Then give her an experience she will hardly find elsewhere.
According to Zendesk, more than 90% of customers are influenced by a positive experience when making the decision to buy a product.
The distrust online is so much that people don’t give out their credit card to shop online easily without first carrying out some background check on the company.
So building that relationship that will help your customers witness a positive experience doing business with you is important.
How Do You Build That Relationship?
Be the First to Start a Conversation
The first thing to do to create a relationship with your customers on social media platforms is to be the first to initiate a conversation with them. Often times, people don’t want to be seen as the first to speak or make comment on content because they don’t know what outcome may arise afterward.
And naturally, people feel relaxed to take action until they are moved by some external force or see others doing it before they also follow in doing it.
As a business owner, you want to ensure you are the external force that makes them move.
By initiating a conversation first, you give your customers the room to get comfortable with you. People engage with those they feel comfortable with and love. So, one way you can get started with a conversation first is by asking questions and answering the question first by using yourself as an example.
By doing this you give them permission and freedom to trust you and feel home.
The best way to achieve this is through storytelling which must include a strong call to action(s).
Another way to get this done is by asking them to ask you questions over what might be their pains or anything related to your business goals when you published new content. When someone uses your product for the first time you can give a lasting impression by giving the customer a heart-warming welcome note or product guide or tour on your service
Monitor and Listen To Your Audience
The social community is a large village with lots of business churning out thousands of content daily to grab as many people’s attention as possible.
Identifying those that are not yet your audience but engage with your content can be very difficult.
To build a great impression and develop an unusual relationship with your customers, you must monitor and listen to those who engage with your brand.
Monitoring and listening to people who mention your brand’s name in such a wide community will help you discover:
Ø New prospects
About 60% of consumers want brands to connect with them. That’s a big validation.
Ø What it is people know about you.
Don’t be surprised what your audience doesn’t know about you. You may be shocked to realize how your audience perceives your organization
Listening to them on socials will help you know what value you hold in the hearts of your audience.
Ø What they want to know about you
Ø The complaints they have against your brand
Monitoring and listening to conversion going around your brand will help you avoid falling into situations that may hurt your company.
For example, a single bad comment by an unsatisfied user of your product may go viral and damage your reputation before the news reaches your table.
Monitoring what’s going on in the community will help you get real-life instant data and activities that are happening. With this, you can prevent unpleasant business developments from happening.
Ø How influential you’re becoming in your industry
Listening to your audience will help you come up with ideas and strategies to help satisfy your customers more and grow your business.
Just as you are after getting the attention of your prospect, they also want to be heard by you. They crave your attention too.
Sprout social media in one of her surveys reported that about 52% of those who call out brands on socials just want to be heard.
Listening to your audience who wants to be heard by you is one of the tips for getting started in your journey to developing a memorable relationship with them.
Ø Provide Instant Response and Support
Attending to customers quickly is a great way to promote your trust and worth before them. People want to get things done as faster as they can.
According to socialHabit 32% of consumers always expect a response within 30 minutes. A little delay in responding to users’ queries may make you lose potential sales.
How do you attend to queries very fast especially when they don’t come to your direct mailing box or inquiry center?
Monitor and listen to the conversations where they mention your name.
Engage
The ultimate recipe to achieve success in social media today depends on engagement. It’s a social community because people connect to each other by engaging with each other content.
The more you engage with your audience the better it is for you to register your name in their heart.
Engaging with your audience tells them that you care about them. It shows them that you’re not only in business to make a profit off then but to help them. Yes, as human we all possess an element of selfishness within us. We always love to receive than to give.
And when we give we tend to give more to those who we have received from. So, you must give as much valuable content as possible to help your audience overcome a problem they wish to solve.
Another way to engage better with your audience is to be more human. Even if you’re a corporate brand is to;
1. Ensure you communicate in a more relatable way with your prospect.
2. Share behind the scene photos of employees and the processes of operation
3. Be emotional. Show your customers you know what and how it feels to be in their shoes.
4. Avoid excessive use of automation tools in your communication if you want to create a community of loyal audiences.
5. Tell stories that are relatable if you want to spark engagement in your community.
6. Be a good storyteller for your brand by telling personal stories that relate and communicate the benefit of using your product or service.
7. Rather than using a more corporate tone in your conversation. Use a relaxed tone.
Practice Inclusive Marketing
People don’t often buy at their first contact because they are yet to trust you as a brand. They still feel they haven’t known the brand enough to make a purchase decision. Customers tend to patronize brands they know well better than the ones they barely know.
In fact, an average person will return to buy from you as soon as they discover that you’re a reliable business.
To develop a relationship that will help you grow your business on socials.
1. Take the time out to include your audience in your business and create opportunities that give them a sense of belonging by;
2. Providing exclusive product or service support
3. Calling out to them in appreciation for being the best customers you could have ever asked for.
4. Sharing and using their content.
5. Giving them access to the CEO or a top executive when they need supports that align with your business objectives once in a while will be a good way to begin.
According to socialsprout, 70% of consumers feel more connected to brands with CEOs that are active on social. Consumers want to know that your top executives care about them as well.
Concluding this piece, I will quickly walk you through some of the tools you can use to foster your relationship with your audience online.
These tools will help you keep up with creating daily awesome content without experiencing any form of burnout. It will allow you to listen and monitor conversations that are being made about your brand.
You will discover the latest and trending topics you can tap into to get things to turn your favor. And if having a real-life data report of your online activities is what you want. These tools will also provide it to you.
Here are the tools.
1. Sprout Social
One of the most popular social media monitoring tools that give you the analytics you need to increase social media engagement.
2. IFTTT
It helps you create your own custom content for socials.
3. CoSchedule
Makes it easy to organize your editorial in one calendar
4. Rival IQ
It provides deep social media stats from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and LinkedIn.
5. Wiselytics
It allows you to easily measure your key social indicators: engagement of your audience and your posts’ performance.
6. Crowdtangle
It shows you how many times a link is shared or who shared it
7. Sociabakers
Discover your audience persona and know who fits into your audience rightly.
So there you have it.
Social media is now a home to attract, build, nurture and convert prospects as well as make family connections.