Social Media Is the Heart of Digital Marketing | Social Joey
By now you probably know that digital marketing is an essential in today’s world. We can now instantaneously access information about anything and everything online—and for many of us, if we can’t get information about a business online, we’re less likely to purchase from them.
But let’s dig a little deeper…straight to the heart of digital marketing—social media marketing. That’s right, your customers are on social media, so if you aren’t, you’re missing a valuable advertising and marketing space.
That said, though, you don’t want to post just to post! You want to be creating content that drives audience emotion and makes them loyal to your brand. Our Social Joey team wants to share the love with a few tips on how to do just that:
Show Your Customers Why They Should Care
Yes, the bottom line even in social media marketing is that you want to close a deal—whether that’s gaining a client or selling a customer a product.
But your customers are not going to want to be sold to. They obviously know you’re trying to sell to them, but they don’t want it to feel that way!
Instead, they want to feel valued by your business or franchise. You need to set up your social media strategy in a way that hits on your customers’ needs and wants—you’re looking for emotional satisfaction.
But how?
In order to give customers (and potential customers) emotional satisfaction, you need to differentiate between their wants and their needs. Then you aim to give them both whenever possible.
How Do You Know What Your Customers Really Want?
There are four main ways to discover what your customers want:
1. Take time to listen.
Did you know that businesses that meet both a customer’s needs and wants are three times more likely to make a sale? That’s a pretty significant success rate.
Finding out what your customers want can really be as simple as asking them—and actually listening for the answer.
Ask your audience for insight by:
- Starting a conversation on various social media platforms
- Sending out feedback forms to Top Fans on your social media page
- Starting a survey online
- Conducting social media polls
Asking the right questions in the right format is important, but it’s just as important to make certain that you’re hearing the feedback and using it to drive your business decisions. Without that step, customers will not trust that you have their interests at heart.
2. Build audience personas.
A great way to understand why customers buy what they do is to build buyer personas.
The first step is to really flesh out who your ideal audience is—this includes basics like demographics, including age, gender, marital status and even the community you’re targeting.
From there, you need to do some research into their habits. What type of content do they read or watch? What social media platform are they most likely to spend time on? Where do they spend their free time?
Then get granular by researching your actual customers. Reach out to customers about a product or service they purchased and what made them come to the decision to buy—from start to finish. You want to know what had them thinking about the product and service from the very beginning and ultimately what led them to make the purchase.
This can help you in a couple ways—you are learning more about your audience in order to fully create a buyer persona and you are learning about where there are potential hiccups in the buying process. The latter can help determine part of your content strategy moving forward, allowing you to create content that helps potential buyers through those challenges.
3. Don’t ignore buyers who went elsewhere.
When customers end up going somewhere other than your business for a product or service, that doesn’t mean their feedback isn’t valuable. In fact, it may be even more valuable!
Talk with this audience about what drove them to purchase elsewhere. You may gain insight about missteps in your marketing strategy or about ways that your product or service needs to be improved to stand out in the market.
Never underestimate the information you can gather from a competitor’s customer. You could eventually use it to turn them into a lifelong customer of your business in the future.
4. Nail Down Why They Buy
Determining why a customer buys can really provide your business with information about how you can use social media to drive those purchases.
Think about it—when you’re looking to make a purchase, you likely investigate the product or service online. You look at a company’s website and their social media presence to gain as much information as possible.
Now, is your business or franchise putting out the right information to fuel those purchases? If you were the customer, would you be able to gain useful and helpful information on your social media pages?
Think through it from that perspective—that’s the insight you’re looking for here and what you should use to determine future strategy.
Hit the ❤️ Button
Social media is always changing. There’s no doubt about that. But what customers want from it is not, at least not in an incredibly meaningful way.
Customers and potential customers still want the experience and will make most of their decisions based on emotion. Therefore, if you truly want to establish lifelong customers, you need to go after the heart! That means:
- Making customers feel as though they belong
- Making your beliefs and views align with your customers’ beliefs and views.
- Continuing to be a part of the customers’ lives even after the sale is made
Part of this is personalizing your brand. Use your social media account to give your franchise or business life! Share a wide range of resources in your posts.
Don’t just focus on calls-to-action—that can and will backfire. Instead, also include helpful and relevant information from your readers, such as tips and interesting external articles, along with images and videos.
Entertain and engage your audience. That will have them hitting the heart button!
Ready to journey to the heart of digital marketing? Let our Social Joey team go to work for you!