Having your own business is a great achievement and can be a lot of fun, however if you want your business to be successful, you need to take your sales and marketing seriously.
For many years now, I have been working with start-ups and small businesses helping them build a business with strong foundations with a clear unique selling proposition (USP) and a defined customer acquisition journey.
The online and offline marketing can be the most exciting part of growing a business but the key point to remember is that whatever you place online, will stay online regardless of you deleting it. The chances are, someone somewhere would have already seen it.
It’s simple. Social Media standing alone will fall alone. Using Social Media as your ONLY marketing outlet will not work. You need to have a marketing strategy and customer retention strategy for your business. Yes, there are a lot of businesses that spend a lot of time on their Social Media who have been successful because they have a complete marketing mix strategy, as there is only so much Social Media can do for you and your business for your Sales, Marketing and Customer Service.
Having worked in Digital Marketing for over 5 years, I understand the hype and I have proven case studies of how successful social media can be for a business if integrated into a monthly marketing strategy. I think it’s important to address the issue of Social Media as stand-alone marketing. I get a lot of people coming up to me after my seminars at trade shows telling me that they are enjoying using social media for their business. This is great and it does make me smile however, when I ask them if they are doing any other marketing, their answer is usually no, what else can I be doing?
With successful Social Networks like Facebook, Twitter and the new kid on the block, Pinterest; it’s very apparent that using Social Media correctly will convert into sales. Don’t get me wrong, Social Media can be personal however, I still have traditional face-to-face meetings with clients as well as phone calls, as part of my customer acquisition journey. When someone contacts me, they may do it through social media, email, phone call or at a networking event and all of that’s fine however, each on their own is just the part of the sales cycle. All of these combined must be a part of your customer retention strategy.
You will also need to use a slightly different technic for each network. What works on Twitter, might not work on Facebook. Despite the obvious differences, Facebook is not a push platform, so don’t use it like it. The businesses that over populates their Facebook page with regular daily posts are likely to lose followers, rather than gain them. Twitter on the other hand, works differently and I tend to tweet around 5 times a day, with value added content designed for my target audience.
If your business is struggling, don’t turn to social media to save it. You can’t just use social media in the hope of it saving your business because believe me, it won’t.
Social Media can’t fix a broken business. Fix your business first then turn to social media and utilise the amazing free networks and tools out there.