When rifling through your marketing toolkit, there is one gizmo in particular that can be a huge benefit for any business in today’s world. Yes, everyone’s favourite – social media.
But, before using it, it’s important to know how to use this tricky little tool. Let me explain how to do it right and try and help you understand how it has changed over the years.
Social media marketing, how to describe it? Well, let’s imagine… you are at a networking event; you meet many people there, all chatting away. Then someone comes up to you and starts hitting you with the hard sale of their product. You have never even met this person and don’t know much or anything about their business, and because of their approach, you are actually put off and won’t be looking to buy anything from them, no matter how good their product is.
Another person you meet is very friendly, asking questions on more than just your business and telling you about what their business does. They also offer you advice on areas you may not be so familiar with. Over time you see this person at networking events and build a long-lasting relationship with them, maybe even a friendship. It turns out this person sells car insurance, and guess what, yours is up for renewal. Many companies are telling you they have the best deal, but you decide to speak to your friend/connection about what he could offer. It turns out he also offers a great deal, and like most, you trust your friend/connection and buy the product from him.
The two examples above demonstrate how to build an audience on social media in the right way and also the wrong way for your social media business pages.
Do you always post your products telling people how good they are and hope they buy them? And take your word for it? Or do you offer value to your followers, build trust and then introduce your products to them after building a relationship. The first might be how things used to work, but these days the second approach makes much more sense and will be far more effective.
In Conclusion
We hope that this blog post has highlighted how social media can work for your business and that this is something all businesses must keep in mind when using social media to market their products… don’t hard sell all the time… make sure you are adding value to your followers. If you can understand that there is more to it than just posting to sell, then you already have a much better chance of selling your products.