Information is important to everyone in today’s world. We spend a great deal of time everyday creating, searching for, or consuming information in various formats – photo, videos, audio, or text. And we do these using different channels.
Some prefer emails; others prefer text messages or instant chats.
But there’s one channel we all use to keep abreast of what’s happening in the world – Social media.
Social media is the most popular channel for creating, exchanging, and consuming information. People use it to stay in touch with families, and friends, in addition to finding sales, offers, and keeping up with their favourite brands.
There are billions of people on social media; and to retailers, social media is the holy grail of finding new leads.
Since social media can help you improve sales dramatically, it is important to learn how to use it.
In this post, I have outlined 6 ways smart retailers are using social media to grow their business.
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To Advertise Special Deals, Offerings, And/Or Coupons
Social media is a great place to get the word out about any special deals or offerings that you may have. You are sure to get a few sales when you post a coupon code on Instagram, Facebook, or twitter.
And you know why?
Because potential customers use social media to search for deals to help them save money. They could also want to share or repost your content to inform their friends and family about your offer. This makes it a no-brainer to post your deals on social media.
Remember to link your post back to your website to get some traffic over there.
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To Let Customers Know Your Opening Hours
When potential customers come across your business online, they may want to know when they can pay you a visit. They will most likely search for this information on one social media platform or the other. This is because social media makes it easy for customers to find such information.
Therefore, you should update your social media account profile to include your opening and closing hours. One platform to keep an eye on is Google. People do search for a business’ store hours on Google, and if this information is outdated or non-existent, you will lose potential customers.
As your business hours change with time or season, you should post it on Facebook or Tweet about it on Twitter. You can use tools like Schema markup to stick it at the top of Google’s search results so that customers get the information quickly.
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To Take Advantage Of Trending Events, Topics, And Holidays
Social media is the home of trending topics and events. Besides cable TV, people scour social media to search for trending news about celebrities, sports, movies, politics, and more.
As a smart retailer, you can take advantage of trending news and events to keep your followers glued to your page. Look for an angle to connect your business to whatever event is trending, just as long as it is in line with your values.
Social media users love pages that always post current events. It could be your page if you would go out there, find what’s trending and post it on your page.
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As A Channel To Promote Contests Or Giveaways
Do you have a contest coming up? Or perhaps, a holiday giveaway? Social media is a great way to spread the word about your contest or giveaway. You could even make it a social media contest where customers provide say, an answer to a question, for a reward.
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To Run Customer Polling Surveys
Do want to know what your customers think of your business? Running a polling survey on social media is an excellent way to collect that data. Since customers take on a more casual mood on social media they can easily provide honest answers to your survey questions.
In the end, your customers feel you value their opinions enough to ask while you get to know the flaws in your business that needs fixing. A sure win-win scenario.
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To Improve Customer Engagement
Social media is the ultimate way to increase engagement with your customers. Customers may rarely reply your mails or text messages. But they most like going to like or comment on your post on social media.
The reason for this is that customers are friendlier on social media than they are on any other platform.
To get the ball rolling on customer engagement, post content about your business. It could be about your staff, new products, a customer’s experience, or anything that will help your customers learn more about you.
The goal here is to make your customers feel like they are part of a family. And to make it more effective, you need to respond to as many comment or tweet from your customers as you can.
In conclusion, social media plays a great role in marketing for many businesses. A lot of business owners have recorded significant increase in sales just by using social media in these 6 ways. You may already have one or two of these 6 methods as part of your everyday routine. But if not, feel free to use all 6 to up the ante on your sales.
POSTED ON November 28, 2019Share:
