Turning Followers Into Customers on Social Media
An impressive number of social media followers is the ultimate goal for any business, right? Well, not quite.
While it certainly looks good to have a strong following on social media, it's not necessary for business growth. In fact, when small or newly founded businesses appear to have a large number of followers, people often question the authenticity of those businesses, particularly given that some organisations pay for followers. Followers are, without a doubt, important for brand awareness, but there’s little value in a large proportion of people knowing what your brand is if they're not your ideal target audience. If you’re looking to grow your social media following organically but as quickly as possible, you’re probably going to be disappointed. For some businesses, overnight virality is easy to achieve - even if it's from a single video that lands well. But even in these instances, the number of followers doesn’t guarantee the same number of qualified buyers. In this article, we will discuss the ultimate social media strategy for turning your followers into customers.
Understand Your Customers’ Journey
A customer journey outlines all the interactions and touchpoints a buyer goes through, from first hearing about your business to purchase and customer loyalty. Every brand or business will have a customer journey that looks different from the next, but understanding it can help businesses create content and messaging that better aligns with the customers' needs at each stage.
To outline what a typical customer journey looks like, let’s use a homeware company as an example. When a prospect searches for ‘cushion covers’ online, they’re known to be in the awareness stage of their journey - where they haven’t yet heard of your business as an option and may come across one of your ads for the first time. Next comes the consideration stage, where prospects are considering their options to find the best option. In this stage, they will likely be exploring your website and looking for previous work. Following the consideration stage comes the decision or purchase, where buyers are typically ready to buy, so they're looking for reassurance that your products or services are exactly what they need. The final two stages of the customer journey are retention and advocacy. Retention represents how the business keeps its customers returning, and advocacy focuses on making satisfied customers your brand ambassadors. For a homeware company, recognising where followers are in their customer journeys can help them personalise their content to individuals in each stage. In the awareness stage, customers benefit most from short-form video content and podcasts that share quick, valuable information. However, in the consideration stage, a homeware company should focus on sharing tutorials and how-to content that educates its followers.
Lead With Conversion Stepping Stones
Compared to prospects that first discover your business from your website, coming across your brand on social media can make their typical buying process much longer and a lot less certain. Instead of expecting every follower to make a purchase or sign up immediately, start by outlining smaller commitments that you can encourage them to make. A popular method in converting your followers to interested prospects is to offer a free guide or valuable resource they can sign up for in exchange for their email. Once you have their email stored in your customer database, they can be added to email marketing or SMS campaigns to further share valuable information and direct them to your website.
Regularly Analyse Social Media Results
Hopefully, analysing your social media analytics is already an important part of your monthly schedule. Unfortunately, it's not enough to simply look at and track the numbers each month. In order to understand how your followers are interacting with your content, you need to dive deeper into your analytics dashboard and be able to confidently analyse what each metric means. Thankfully, there are a number of different social media management tools that combine post scheduling with analytics dashboards, making it more affordable and efficient for businesses to regularly post and monitor their success when sharing content online.
Most businesses look at metrics like impressions, views and engagement to get an idea of how well their content is performing. You can take it one step further. If you share any links on your social media posts, particularly those that lead to your website, set them up with a UTM builder as opposed to a standard URL. Adding a UTM parameter to your link allows you to track which links users are visiting your site from, more specifically, which content. This will allow you to identify content that is successfully encouraging followers to click the link to your website, and also the content that is less successful. Although it's not technically considered to be an SEO technique, sharing links with a strong call-to-action on your social media pages can improve referral traffic to your site. With more users on your website, it is more likely to be discovered by valuable sites and professionals who may decide to backlink to it, which is definitely considered a technique to improve SEO and how your website ranks on Google.
