Mastering Social Networking: A Guide to Connecting with Prospects and Integrating it into Your Marketing Strategy
When you want to connect with your prospects, using social media to do it is very important and best of all, easy to do. Let’s explore how you can use social networking to connect with prospects. Mastering social networking is key to effectively reaching and engaging with your audience.
What Is a Prospect?
First, it’s imperative to understand the terms that we are using here. A prospect is a lead that you’ve had first contact with. This means they had some interaction with you already. More likely, they are already on your email list. Now you want to connect with them on a more intimate basis through social media.
Know Who They Are
If you have an email list, everyone on it is already a prospect. If you have customers who have purchased from you, they are also prospects that you can target for other products and services you want to offer. You can use the data you collect about these people to craft a prospect persona or avatar that will help you target your audience even better.
Know Where They Are
You have prospects on your email list. Sure, but where do they hang out to get their information? What forums, groups, and gurus do they like to listen to and participate with? This information can help you know where to place ads to get their attention.
Cross-Promote
When you email your prospects, invite them to different social media platforms to engage with them on a new level. Send out an email for each social media platform separately so that they don’t miss out.
Capture Their Email Addresses
Remember that a prospect is a lead that you’ve already determined is someone who will want to use your product or service, and who has dealt with you already in some way. However, depending on how this happened, you may not have their email address. It’s important to get them onto your list so you can remarket to them using email.
Display Remarketing Techniques and Technology
When you’ve already had contact with someone and interaction in some way, and you’re sure they are really part of your audience and should be your customer, you can use remarketing techniques and technology to get them to connect with you on social media. For instance, you can upload their email address to Facebook to deliver special ads just to them or to the entire group. You can also install the Facebook pixel to your site so that anyone who visits your site gets remarketed to via a special advertisement.
Engage with Them Consistently
Once you have them on your social media platforms, it’s imperative that you engage with them consistently and regularly. Post updates, answer questions and provide value, and they’ll be more likely to want to connect with you.
Listen to What They Say
Once you do have a way to connect to your prospects on a deeper level, it’s important that you use this advantage to get to know them better by listening to what they say. What do they dream about? What keeps them up at night? What other problems do they have that you can solve?
Pay Attention to Their Actions
When you do get them on social media, pay attention to how your audience acts. What is their behavior? Do your prospects engage with you easily, or do they need to be encouraged and incentivized? This is information that can help you get more from the relationship.
Include a CTA
When you do anything, it’s important to know why you’re doing it. Is your blog post designed to get more email sign-ups, or is it designed to inform and engage, or something else? What do you want the prospect to do?
Networking with prospects is the best way to create a dedicated audience who will become not only customers but your advocates. When you build a solid social media community full of your prospects, suddenly, social media marketing doesn’t seem so difficult.
Integrating social networking into marketing campaigns for success
The plain truth of the matter today is that you can’t even have an effective marketing strategy that does not include social networking. Using social networking is key to the success of most business owners, online and off. Thankfully, the tools available today make it a no-brainer to integrate social networking into your marketing strategy.
Social Networking Engagement
Social networking is interacting with your market online or in-person via dedicated websites, applications, and groups. Most of the time it starts with creating a profile on a platform like Facebook, Twitter, or Meetup.com, then connecting with like- minded individuals through the platform. This can also develop into meeting in real life outside of the platform.
Set SMART Goals
Whether you want to increase brand awareness, generate leads, make sales, or do something else entirely, it’s imperative that you know what your goals are and to set them in a way that leads to success. Understanding how to set SMART goals is an ongoing lesson you’ll need to perfect through time.
Research Your Audience
Using social platforms and other means, research your audience enough to be able to create an ideal audience or customer avatar or persona. That way you know who you’re targeting with the information you post.
Know Your KPIs
It really doesn’t matter what you are selling or where you are selling; knowing the metrics that you need to keep track of and measure will help you succeed. Some KPIs to pay attention to our reach, clicks, engagement, hashtag performance, organic likes, paid likes, sentiment, and more.
Know What Your Competition Is Doing
Observing and following what your competitors are doing with social networking is essential to ensuring that you can compete with them. You will soon be able to point out what is going right and wrong for them so that you do better.
Create, Curate, and Post Relevant and Engaging Social Media
ContentThe content that you post is so important and should be relevant and engaging for your ideal audience. Don’t be tempted to go wide when it comes to sharing the best social media content for them. Keep it targeted and narrow.
Know When to Post and Engage
Each audience has a time of day that they’re most likely to be on a social networking platform. Knowing when they are there is a good way of knowing when you should post. Always seek to post while your audience is engaged and active.
Track and Measure Progress
Using the KPIs that you determined, it’s a good idea to keep tracking and measuring those metrics. The data is what will drive your actions. That way you don’t do more or less than you need to in order to reach success. Integrating social networking into your marketing strategy is a no-brainer today. With all the platforms and tools available, there is no reason you cannot make social media networking work for you to boost your business connections as well as your bottom line.
Using Social Media to Boost Your Business Credibility
You know that most people prefer to do business with those they feel that they “know, like, and trust.” For this reason, all online and offline business owners need to find ways to developthe story of their credibility as a business owner and business.Using social media to boost your business creditably is an effective way to accomplish it.
- Be Who You Are and Share Your Values – This is the easiest thing you can do. Via the content you share, the things youdo, and the people you surround yourself with, your audience will know that you are who you say you are, due toconsistently being who you say you are.
- Stay Consistent – The smallest thing can point to inconsistencies. Even if someone doesn’t notice it consciously right away, it will bother them and erode your trust. For example, if you are not a proponent of soy, don’t promote anything with soy. If you say you’re a vegan,you need to be one in real life. The internet finds out things and it will get out.
- Share High-Quality Content – Any content you curate, create, or buy should be accurate, well-written, and relevant to your audience. If you post fillers that aren’t good, your audience will notice.
- Engage and Interact on Social Media Platforms – Don’t just post as if the engagement is one-way on social platforms. Instead, automate posting but get down and dirty with engagement by doing it yourself or hiring real-life people to engage with your audience in real time and in real life.
- Go Live More Often – One way to build credibility is not to be so perfect. Go live occasionally to share some information with your audience, even if your hair is not perfect and even if you don’t have it all worked out. Youraudience will feel closer to you for it and see you as genuine.
- Incentivize and Encourage User-Generated Content – When your users are active, it makes other people see you differently. Host contests, do challenges, and conduct polls, all designed to get more user-generated content. When others like you, it gives even more permission to.
- Get More Customer Reviews and Testimonials – Make it a habit by putting this into your marketing funnel. Send a testimonial or review request to your buyers automatically after enough time to experience your product or service. All you have to do to accomplish this is add it to your autoresponder to deliver after a certain number of days from purchase.
- Only Link Out to Trustworthy Sites and Products – When you do curate content or link to another person’s site or product, always.
- Give Your Audience a Behind-the-Scenes Peek – Show your audience inside the madness by bringing them behind the scenes. Give them a peek of what you do all day long to bring them incredible products, services, and content. The truth is, if you want to be perceived as being credible, you need to be credible. Don’t think for one moment that you can be one thing and present another online. You will be found out and it won’t be pretty. But, it’s so simple to just be who you are, share your values, and add value for your audience on social media in a credible way to help people trust you more.
