It’s common knowledge that social media can be used to create brand awareness and acquire new customers; but how exactly should a company use Facebook or Twitter to find and convert random people into actual customers? Well, that involves creating a conscious and calculated plan.
Every brand has its own unique challenges in acquiring new customers. Where acquisition entails convincing one person for a B2C business, it could mean convincing an entire board of directors for a B2B business. Irrespective of where you lie within the spectrum, there are a few universal ways to acquire new customers using social media. With the support of the right social media management tool and ideas, you can turn your social media pages into customer acquisition funnels.
Begin by defining what constitutes an acquisition for your brand
Customer acquisition could refer to any of the following actions –
- eCommerce purchases
- Offline purchases
- Social media actions
- Website visits
- Email subscriptions
- Content downloads
- Event/app registrations
- Coupon redemptions
For clarity of purpose in your customer acquisition plan, it’s important to also define your target audience and what you expect of them before you move on to execution strategies.
Who do you want to reach? List the characteristics of your target groups – their age range, interests, concerns, browsing and purchase behaviors, etc.
What action do you want your targets to perform? This is based on your definition of customer acquisition. It could be visit your website, follow you on social media, make an online/offline purchase, etc.
How do you intend to get them to act? What content, strategy and platform do you plan to use to get your target audience to perform the action you want them to perform? This post is a quick summary of 7 brilliant tactics that you can use to acquire customers through social media.
7 brilliant tactics to acquire customers through social media
1. Remarket to first-time website visitors
Remarketing is literally staying on the top of your prospects’ minds so they can seek you out when they’re ready for purchase. The internet and social media have opened up a world of possibilities for not only your company but also millions of your competitors’ companies around the world. As a result, your company has both increased opportunities and increased competition. Without remarketing, your content can easily be lost and forgotten by millions of substitutes.
Facebook lets page owners remarket to website visitors by tracking visits via a piece of code that page owners are required to integrate with their website code.
2. Share User Generated Content
People, in general, like being acknowledged in public. What could be a better way to connect with your fans than by allowing them to take the spotlight on your platform? Create campaigns that make your customers feel positive because doing that will help you create a positive brand perception among them.
Starbucks often conduct contests that push customers to get creative, often resulting in the creation of visually appealing content that the brand displays on their social media pages.
3. Curate influencer content
What’s the simplest way to source excellent content for social media while also expanding exposure for that content? It’s content curation. Not just any kind of content curation, but curation of influencer-created content. By curating influencer content, you can deliver the best insights and writing in the industry to your followers and earn the good-will of the influencers whose content you share.
When scheduling curated content, add a few words summarizing, introducing or critiquing it, so your voice is heard as well.
4. Integrate your offline & presence
Every target audience is unique, but today’s audience, in general, has a few characteristics in common. One among them is that they carry devices on their person everywhere they go, and document and broadcast the more interesting details of their lives on a daily basis. This means that your marketing depends not only on what you do online but also on what you do offline. Few brands use this behavior of the general audience to their advantage.
Popular TV shows encourage their viewers to tweet from to time, and that simple act earned one of their episodes over 119,000 tweets! Use other media to activate customers on social media.
5. Tap active communities
Big brands like Habbo Hotel, which generated a revenue of $78.7 million in 2010, heavily rely on their social media communities to get the word out. A substantial portion of the revenue generated by the hotel can be chalked up to its brand ambassadors and their community. Building such a community can take months or years of dedicated effort, but you can easily tap into existing active communities in your niche right now.
LinkedIn and Facebook groups, subReddits, Quora threads and other forums related to your niche are gold when it comes to customer acquisition. Converting them, however, requires building a relationship with members first, before you reveal your marketing propaganda.
6. Trade entertainment for exposure
One of the smartest and oldest ways of selling without selling is entertainment. Advertisers have been encapsulating their messages within entertainment for ages; and the tactics has always worked. In today’s world it’s easy to create and distribute entertaining messages for marketing, because your brand owns all of its social media channels unlike the TV channels that brands used for promotions traditionally.
Brands today use funny memes, GIFs and videos to entertain customers.
7. Use real world photographs
Today’s world maybe hyper-connected, but it’s ironically more isolating than ever. The general audience distrusts brands because it’s also easier now than ever to hide incorrect representations and false promises. Real photographs are a great way to bring authenticity and a value of realness to any brand’s marketing campaign. Real photographs are also extremely easy to use in marketing messages.
All it takes is a simple caption and the right hashtags, just like Dannijo has done in this picture below.
Feature image via Freepik.com
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