Social Media has emerged as one of the most potent and effective tools that plays a major role in customer acquisition for brands and businesses. Companies and brands are using these tools to its fullest extent to build and maintain a long term relationship with their existing customers or to tap new potential customers.
According to various surveys almost 70 percent brands are leveraging these tools to promote their brands and 7 out of each 10 companies get customers through these channels only.
Let’s see how Social Media helps brand get more customers.
Through Awareness: Brand Awareness is something which is at the heart of marketing. Due to its prevalence and large customer reach Social Media has emerged as one of the most effective tool for brand awareness. You might have invested a lot in the quality of your product but if people don’t know about you and your brand they may not buy your product. The goal of brand promotion is to remain at the top of customer’s mind. The moment they intend to buy that product their mind should give them your brand name.
Applications and programs like Facebook fan-page, Squidoo lens, Hub-page, are doing a great job in creating awareness among people about their brands.
For example American Express had launched an open forum allowing small business owners and customers to get useful insights and expertise of their products and services. With this approach it is creating awareness among people about their products. To see the forum live you want to follow this link.
Through Consideration: Consideration is another factor which assists a lot in brand awareness and customer acquisition. It is just like people voting for you. It’s about letting customers advocate for you. In fact people want to get opinion of their friends or someone else before purchasing a particular product.
There are many review sites like CNet.com, Consumer search.com, TestFreaks.com these days which are packed with reviews of various products. According to surveys Visitors who interacted with reviews were 60% more likely to convert. Besides more number of likes in Facebook fan page shows that people are voting your product and are considering it worth discussing. Please find some important product review sites with this link.
Customer acquisition through contest and poll: Creating contests and polls is a very effective tool to promote your brands and acquire customers. Many social media sites like Facebook and Orkut gives marketer a readymade platform to create contest and polls. In these contests brands ask certain interesting question about their brand to public and publish it through their social media channels.
Besides, winners are awarded either with discounts or free goodies. Many brands like Skechers and Nike create multiple contests on their Facebook-fanpage and reward the winner. This contest not only keeps customers engaged but your product can be promoted through word-of-mouth.
Tapping customers at point of purchase: It is really very important that your brand should target customers at the time when they plan to purchase something. It can be achieved through mobile marketing platforms. With mobile platforms brand can send text message to the customers when they are searching for a particular brand in a particular locality. It can either be push or pull. But it is very useful in tapping customers at their point of purchase. Besides, now a Facebook and Twitter can be accessed via mobiles and it is the best friend and remains with a customer round the clock.
Customer acquisition through Pull Marketing: Most of the conventional modes of marketing are push marketing where we use to blast our message even to those who may not be interested in that product at all. With search engines and social media the case is just opposite in which customers put the keyword in search engine or in search test box of Facebook and find you. It is but natural that these customers are landing to your page because they are interested someway or other-way around in the products you are offering. Thus it makes marketing more targeted and specific.
Customer acquisition needs certain rules to be followed and these are Awareness, Consideration, Intent, Purchase, Support, Loyalty, and Advocacy with social media applications we can achieve all these milestones in the journey of marketing and customer acquisition.
Customer support: Customer support is very important for customer retention and loyalty. It is really very important for brands to respond to customers if they faced any bad experience or any other problem with your brand. Brands are using Twitter to its fullest extent to give their customers quick response. Survey reveals that most of the customers seek quick response about their problem and it creates a psychological attachment towards your brand. Twitter is helping customers satisfy their customers with appropriate and quick solution. Such kind of quick response and customer satisfaction would have not possible with conventional mode of branding.
In a nutshell Social media has really changed the way brands are being promoted and potential customers are converted. Brands have always been looking for cost-effective and quick method of customer retention and acquisition and Social media is helping them a lot in this.
