SMO Tips India: Tips To Make Social Media Marketing Strategy
This process is good and effective, but it puts channels, content and messages first and assumes the target audience’s needs are always the same.
The key to engaging with your audience on social media is more personal level is to focus on the right customer, at the right time and with the right employees.
Do you want to make personal connections with your customers on social media?
Interested in better ways to address their wants and needs?
The reality is that your target audience has different communication needs depending on which stage of the buying cycle they’re in.
A customer-centric approach flips content creation from brand first to customer first. Start with the customer’s need and then build the social media process, content and resources around the customer.
Customizing content to your audience’s changing needs increases engagement.
#1: Understand the Stages of the Buying Cycle :- Marketing consultants believes the buyer’s journey begins before buyers think of themselves as buyers and extends beyond the purchase. The buyer’s goals and behaviors change throughout the purchase cycle, even among the same target market. Consultants has expressed this thinking in terms of B2B, but it applies to social media as well.
Consumers’ needs and behaviors are different when they’re not in the market to buy, when they become engaged in buying and when they become customers. For these reasons, it’s a good idea to make sure your prepurchase, purchase and postpurchase interactions with the consumer are different.
#2: Get the Right Employees Involved :-Few marketing consultants believes different employees are best suited for communicating with customers in different stages of the buying cycle. These employees can come from various departments throughout your company.
When you include employees outside the marketing department, one-on-one engagement with your customers becomes more scalable. You can distribute social responsibilities across departments to the most relevant people.
Once you identify departments and employees, establish goals for them and customize social feeds or open new social accounts to connect the right employees to the right customers. Setting up a social care team enables you to generate customer engagement throughout the buying cycle to gain new customers, repeat purchases, loyalty and brand advocates.
#3: Tailor Your Social Messages to Buyer Personas :-You can customize your social messages and divide social responses with these consumer personas.
Pre-purchase Persona
In this stage of the buying cycle, you want to find consumers who are in the market to buy, but haven’t purchased from you. The goal is to find and attract prospects.
Here you’re looking for people using the right keywords, such as mentions of your company, competitors, industry or specific products and services. Create social media campaigns to grow fans and followers and monitor conversations to engage with those responding.
If your company has a public relations or corporate communications department, they may play a role looking for larger industry or corporate issues and identifying journalists or bloggers for media outreach.
Purchase Persona
For this stage, find consumers actively seeking purchase information. Here your marketing team can help these people along with their purchases. However, sales representatives are best suited for more relevant engagement.
If you have a retail business, you might empower the sales team to interact with customers on social media. Or if you’re a B2B company, you could activate sales representatives to address the needs of leads. Connecting the sales team’s contacts list or CRM makes this easier. The goal here is conversion.
Post-purchase Persona
This stage is where you focus on keeping customers happy, resolving any issues they may have and further assisting them.
Customer service representatives are ideal for providing what they may already do via the phone, email or online chat. The goal is to delight customers, minimize negative comments and promote the positive.
This stage is where customers can become brand advocates. Automation could also play a role such as for scheduling follow-ups in a week or two to find out if customers are still happy.
Empower Employees to Get Involved
Five Guys’ approach to social media begins with service and is driven by a process that empowers employees to connect with the right customers at the right time. Connecting individual customers with front-line employees via social media has enabled Five Guys to be a more customer-centric company, which is a challenge with over 1,200 locations across the globe.
Employee involvement in social media has also made Five Guys’ content more personal, sincere and local.
Communicate Locally With Franchise Accounts
Individual Five Guys locations in the United States and around the world have their own social media accounts to communicate locally on promotions, new flavors or products and events that resonate with the community.
Five Guys consumer-centric approach enables individual locations to uncover customer feedback, respond directly and make changes that improve the customer experience. Monitoring this type of feedback on a local level is much more efficient, making one-on-one engagement more scalable.
Generate Consumer Content With Social Campaigns
Customer-centric social media produces satisfied customers who often become brand ambassadors, generating buzz and sharable content. With Five Guys’ #SayCheeseSweeps campaign, customers hashtagged photos of themselves with Five Guys cheeseburgers for a chance to win prizes. It resulted in more than 1,000 mentions on Twitter and Instagram. The consumer-generated content was shared across all of Five Guys’ social networks.