January 26, 2012
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The New Year is here and it’s time to excute on your resolutions for how to bring in more business. For most companies, these plans are heavy on finding new customers rather than retaining and selling more to the customers they already have.
Do yourself a favor this year and avoid the mistake of thinking that the only important customers are new customers. Remember to treat current customers well and manage your company reputation so you can watch your revenue and customer base grow.
A powerful tool for taking these steps is social media. It appears that social media works best for small and medium-sized businesses when it is deployed for retention and reputation strengthening, rather than prospecting.
As of now, fewer than 20 percent of small business owners using social media report that it is paying off, according to AT&T’s recent survey of 300 small and medium businesses.* For these numbers to rise, and your company fortunes with them, you may need to redefine your goals. Rather than asking for “likes” and engaging in acts of random blogging, conduct a focused social media retention and reputation-building effort.
The following four objectives are good ones to put against your social media marketing efforts. Redefine success using social media—Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube and others—and you may find social media resulting in more business from both current and new customers this year.
1. See what people are saying about you
Social media is a tremendous way to keep track of what customers are saying about you. Monitoring Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms can help you to ensure it stays positive. It can also provide you with a chance to learn what customers value most about you, or whether they don’t know what your company does best. All of this information should affect the messages you put in your marketing. Make the tracking of social media part of your daily routine, the same way that you check the mail or read the news. It will pay off in strengthened relationships and a more focused and positive reputation. Managing this source of information is critical: 41 percent of business owners surveyed said their customers look to the opinion of others and online reviews before making a purchase.
2. Engage with current customers
If social media isn’t paying off by closing deals with new customers, refocus your efforts on your current customers. It works well as a means of treating them to special deals or up-to-the-minute information you know they want. For example, if you have contact information for current customers interested in a certain product, you can tweet to let them know it has arrived before publicizing it to the broader universe. Use social media on an ongoing basis to provide discounts or specials that help keep them loyal. Savvy businesses locked down their current customer base by focusing on service during the holiday season. I expect more of the same this year. If you aren’t tending to your customers, they may become someone else’s.
3. Segment your customer base
Use Facebook to create a community of customers who are particularly interested in your offerings. You may want to ask them about their interests and preferences. Once you capture their interests, you can start to define important segments. For example, if you own a wine store, you could create a community of wine lovers of a certain region or grape. You can connect to meet up and arrange offline meetings for people who are like-minded to stop by your store.
4. Build your brand
I advise against random blogging, but I strongly encourage brand-building plans executed through YouTube. Short videos—1 or 2 minutes—can be a great way to demonstrate your expertise or show the power of your offering. A key success factor is a professional presentation. The temptation with social media is to confuse the ease of distribution with it being OK to do a slipshod production. Just because you can share information easily, it doesn’t mean you can shortchange the creation process. Apply the same standards of professionalism to your social media work as a traditional marketing piece.
With any effort this year, be sure your outreach and posts are mobile friendly—either by retooling them for mobile devices or by creating a mobile-friendly version of whatever you send out. AT&T’s Messaging Toolkit can help with your social networking, mobile marketing and other communications needs.
*The AT&T SMB eCommerce Survey was conducted online among a representative sample of 302 principals of companies with 1 to 500 employees in the United States by Bredin Inc. between September 6 and 12, 2011. The survey had a margin of error of +/-5 percentage points at the 90% level of confidence.
Alice Bredin is an internationally renowned small business expert. She is founder and president of Bredin Inc., a marketing consultancy that helps Fortune 500 firms develop profitable, long-term relationships with small and medium businesses. She has advised millions of business owners over the last 20 years through her books, syndicated newspaper column, radio commentary and forums.
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BusinessVibes 3 months ago
Good article. Following the opinion of your client is one of the most important things to be done. It helps to quickly react on customers' needs an improve product in the way they actually need it.