Social Media is a great way to engage strangers and leads to introduce them to your business, products, services, and industry, but it's also a great way to stay in contact with your customers, give them valuable information, and even provide immediate support.
PRO TIP: It's important to respond to messages, comments, tweets, and reviews quickly. Doing so will go a long way in turning customers into promoters. Have several people in your office add your social media pages to their phones and turn on notifications. That way someone can always respond, even after hours.
Not every customer that talks about your business, product, or service is going to make it easy on you. They're not always going to post directly on your page, mention you with a tag, or leave you a review, but you still want to respond to good and bad posts. That's where social monitoring comes in. Setting up monitoring channels for specific hashtags, specific accounts, and even focus keywords will allow you to reach satisfied and unsatisfied customers right away. Here is an example of a great job done by JetBlue (@JetBlue). This customer used #jetblue instead of tagging them or direct messaging them. Had they not been monitoring that hashtag, they never would have been able to reach out to this customer.
Setting up a call-to-action that is static on your website is fine. It's almost expected. But what if you went above and beyond for your leads and customers? Too many businesses are satisfied with the status quo.
Creating smart content and calls-to-action that change based on the individual provides a whole new level of engagement, value, and customer service. When someone fills out a form that corresponds to a specific call-to-action, they don't need to see that CTA again, they should see a new CTA to a content offer, providing new value.
It's common sense that the information that is provided to a visitor or lead should be different from the information that you provide a customer, but are you doing just the opposite?
When you are working off of one contact list for your email marketing campaigns, you're providing everyone with the same information. No customer ever turned into a promoter by being treated as a lead.
Customers don't want to get emails telling them why they should buy your product or service. They already did. They also probably don't need education on what your product does, they already know. That kind of information doesn't provide them any value. Segment your lists so that your visitors, leads, and customers are all receiving the information that matters to them.
PRO TIP: We recommend going a little bit list happy. Really think about how those on your list reached your site, which form(s) they converted on, how long they've been on your list, pages they frequent, stage of the buyer's journey they're in, products/services they've bought, and even amount they've spent with you. You can segment in so many ways, how will you?
Workflows are what some (from the old school) would call "drip campaigns". It's a schedule of emails and content that go out after an initial action enrolls them in the campaign in pursuit of an end goal. For example, when someone fills out a form on landing page X, they'll be automatically enrolled in the workflow. Two days later, they will receive email 1, two days after that they'll receive email 2, one week later they receive email 3 that directs them towards a new content offer. The goal of this example workflow is to get them to claim the next content offer. This is a very simple example, but you can create a workflow to match the needs of your customers. Workflows can provide great value to any lead or customer, but it's imporant to set them up to be valuable to those different groups.
One of the most common mistakes that businesses make is treating their visitors, leads, and customers the same. Each of these groups needs to be treated differently. Are you educating, solving a problem, selling, or providing value? It's important to understand what each of these groups needs and wants from your business.
Thank you for taking the time to check out our Inbound Marketing Services series! Now you're ready to start converting strangers to visitors, visitors to leads, leads to customers, and customers to promoters!
If you have more questions about how inbound marketing works, if it is right for your business, or are ready to get started, click below to schedule a chat with one of our inbound marketing strategists!