Rapid technological advancements have made today’s business world quite competitive. Online audience retargeting, automatic advertising, voice search, even offline tools like intelligent card reader POS systems are impacting the daily life as consumers.
Customers have become tech-savvy and to keep up with them,
more and more businesses are creating an online presence to increase their customer base and consequently generate more sales
However, while online marketing has become every business’ go-to strategy today, not many know how to utilize social media to market their businesses effectively.
So, how exactly can you covert your social media following into sales? How can you use social media to improve your sales? Here are a few suggestions…
Set Clear Goals
Before you start posting links, products and discussions on your social media site, you need to have a clear goal of what you intend you achieve afterward.
For instance, are you looking for a way to build customer relationships; are you looking to build brand loyalty;
are you looking to boost the awareness of a new product you just launched, or are you merely looking for a way to improve your customer service delivery?
Regardless of what you expect to gain from your social media endeavors, your objective needs to be precise, clear and attainable to both you and your social media marketing team.
Create a Sales-Focused
Social Media Strategy
With competent sales strategies, social media can benefit the success of your business.
Therefore, while your ultimate objective is to boost sales through social media, you do not want your followers to feel as if selling is more important to you than they are.
You need to make them feel valued and appreciated.
Communicate with your audience frequently on your social media site and equally try to respond to their messages.
The bottom line here is to avoid making customers feel neglected.
Feelings of neglect can make customers choose to distance themselves and even make them want to look for companies that understand and meets their needs better.
Another thing is that when creating posts try to supply as many links as possible back to your main website.
Critical Things to Remember
Although customers already know who you are, you want to make them view what you are currently offering so that they can also make a purchase.
If you are posting a product on your social media site to improve its sales, consider posting multiple photos of that product including backlinks to your website.
This will make it possible for people to gather more information about your products and services.
Remember that an effective selling strategy shouldn’t sound too pitchy. It is okay to be aggressive with your sales moves, but even so, try to be moderate with how you do it.
Establish (and track) Baseline Metrics
Metrics are essential to help drive marketing decisions and to determine where to invest resources and time.
However, it can be difficult if not impossible to determine if you are making progress when you have no idea of where you are coming from, where you are going and what you expect to achieve.
As such, baseline measurement must be obtained before you even begin to track and monitor the progress of your social media endeavors.
You need to know where your business value currently stands to be able to measure future progress.
Most of your social media activities will involve building relationships with customers through conversations sites. Know that measuring such interactions is not easy.
How to Improve Your Sales
The Power of Social Media
As such, you will need to rely on a variety of statistical tools to accumulate your ‘metrics.’ Social media is always a work in progress.
Therefore, for you to realize its marketing effectiveness, you need to be able to analyze and monitor your audience, interactions, brand perception, expenses and sales keeping in mind that the more manipulate it and track its results.
The more effective you will be in leveraging this critical marketing tool.
Build a Winning Team
After you have put up your social media account, you need to learn how to make it work efficiently in your favor.
As such, you will need to assign the essential roles and responsibilities to some of your staff members.
You need to build a competent social media team. It is the one that helps you with the day today engagement of the business’ social media site.
However, for consultative approaches, you can choose to hire a social media expert to advise you of the best strategies and tricks on how to better utilize social media features to increase your visibility and ultimately achieve your bottom-line.
Keep Turning Up Every Day
A common mistake that most business owners make is to set up a social media account, post once and disappear. Okay, if that is how you intend to improve your sales, it won’t work.
You need to be consistent with your efforts to communicate with your audience. You have to keep turning up every single day. The attention spans of customers are quite short, particularly for social media users.
So if you only make brief appearances, your goal won’t turn into reality anytime soon. You need to engage your followers with posts, pictures, advertisements, quotes, jokes and general conversations on a regular basis.
Do It!
One way to ensure that your social media marketing efforts don’t go to the drain is by utilizing viral features.
Facebook, for example, has a like button that creates an avenue for posts to spread like wildfire on the internet.
You can embed your twitter feed and facebook widgets on your business website.
The visitors will see your social media activity and even follow you. Being consistent with your efforts to communicate is quite helpful.
Why? Because when other users notice your efforts, they will also want to be a part of the conversation. It’s very effective to improve your sales.
Conclusion
It is critically important to know and understand the effective ways to use social media to improve your sales.
Many businesses have realized a decrease in revenue after implementing their social media strategies.
But this is only because they didn’t implement their approach the right way.
You don’t want the same to happen. Instead, you want your profits to increase. In order to achieve this, you have to come up with strategies that are effective enough to help you achieve your bottom line.
Improving product sales is not easy, but with the help of social media, everything can be made smooth.
Author: Mel Devent is a passionate blogger who enjoys writing about all things digital marketing. She is currently working as a Marketing Associate at Blogger Sidekick, helping small businesses build authority brands with content marketing. In her spare time, she loves scuba diving, watching movies and catching up with friends.