Engaging your customers via social media is an important part of your business success. To do so takes some work and planning on your part. Here are 3 key ways that are guaranteed to help you engage better with your customers online.
Social Media
Social media a very broad arena. It includes many things such as crowd sourced imagery, simple embedded tweets, social sign-in for comments, incentives against content, trending items, share imperatives and much more.
Social media is a tool that should never be overlooked. Because there are so many social media, networks to choose from you need to know your customer well and then choose what social media avenues would work best for your business. Use as many social media outlets as you feel will be beneficial to engaging with your customers.
How to Build Relationships with Your Prospects Through Social Media
Selling today is all about building relationships. Gone are the days of high-pressure sales tactics. Today, we sell in a much more effortless and natural way by first building a relationship with the prospect. Then, when they need your offer, they’re already primed to buy.
The perfect way to do this is through social media. We use social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter to interact with friends, brands, celebrities, public figures, and organisations we love. You can leverage this tool to build relationships with your audience.
Find Your People on Social Media
The first step is to find your audience on social media. What platforms do they use and what do they do there? You’re much better off meeting your people where they already spend time than trying to get them to follow you.
Start by looking at the most popular sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. If you sell to other business people, you might invest your time in creating a presence on LinkedIn. This is a social media site for professional networking. Talk to your customers and find out what sites they’re most active on and establish a presence there.
Educate Through Content
Your goal on social media is to establish yourself as a helpful expert. You should be the person your audience goes to when they have problems you can solve for them. You can do this by educating through content.
Share content that helps your audience solve specific problems or issues they face. Answer your followers’ questions. Give tips and advice. Use video or other multimedia content wherever appropriate. Keep your audience engaged by giving them free help and you can build a trusting relationship with them.
Give Your Audience Somewhere to Hang Out
The next step to building strong relationships is to provide your audience with a place to hang out based around your brand. Each social media platform has its own way of doing this. For example, on Facebook, you can start a Page or a Group. Invite your customers to sign up and get them talking there.
You will serve as moderator, facilitating conversations and activities within the group. The key to making this work is remembering that the community belongs to its members. Get feedback from your members on what they’d like to see and do. If your group provides value to its members, then they’ll stick around and spend time there.
Build Relationships, Don’t Sell
The key to building strong relationships using social media is that you don’t sell there. People don’t use these sites to shop directly. If you bombard people with promotional messages or posts, they’ll start tuning you out. Focus on just helping and getting to know your audience.
Do you want to know more about selling to your customers in a way that’s more natural and effective? Check out my course, Sell More With Digital Rapport®, which teaches you the A to Z of how to build relationships and get the sales results you desire.
Site search
Make your site search as simple and as useful as possible. For example, ToysRUs has their search setup to auto complete. It also shows the SKUs for each term the user types in. Take this example and use it on your website, even on a smaller scale.
The accuracy of your results is very important so focus on that as your number one priority. Then make things simple for your visitor to use. Make the search as functional as possible and the easier it makes your visitors ability to find what they want the better.
Live chat
The call to action is important on every ecommerce site, and live chat can play an important role in achieving your call to action. It is a valuable feature it has so many uses. You can have live chat to solve customer complaints, answer questions, provide inventory lists, etc. and it can include a call to action. Live chat provides instant gratification for the customer and an excellent way for you to engage your customer online.
However, it is important not to frustrate your customer by claiming you have live chat and then having it seldom actually available, instead answered by a computer. No live chat is better than this method. Clearly state the hours when live chat will be available.
Make use of these 3 key ways to engage your customer online and keep them happy. Your customers are the key to your success, so make sure that you give engaging with them the attention it deserves.
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