To attract new customers you can’t just rely on referrals. You have to pick one social media platform you enjoy using and where your customers hang out. This will grow your local business.
3 Places To Attract New Customers Using Social Media
1. YouTube
2. Instagram
3. LinkedIn
Even if you don’t personally use social media for business, your customers are buying things and following new brands every week. Social media isn’t going anywhere. Local businesses need to learn how to use it so they can enjoy new website traffic and new customers.
Each of the following sites should be linked to your business website and vice-versa. If you don’t yet have a website, don’t worry. It is possible to grow a customer base using just social media. However, it is most helpful to have one place to funnel potential customers.
RebelFish Local has a ton of SEO tips and pointers for websites, so head over and have a look. Head over to rebelfishlocal for our 5-Step LOCAL Process that helps drive more traffic to your website. We’re affiliated with RebelFish Local and happy to help!
In addition, you want to make sure you’re optimizing each social media site you’re using for business. Use the sites that your consumer demographic is using. Otherwise, you’re wasting time and time is money. Fortunately, the three platforms mentioned below are offer different ways to connect with people so you’ll likely find that you fit into and enjoy at least one of them.
YouTube
This platform has a vast array of options from which to choose. From entertainment to documentaries, how-to videos (aka tutorials), to those videos that, for some reason, film people doing everyday mundane things like eating. Please don’t be that guy. That guy is weird.
It’s important that you know who you’re targeting through any platform. If you know the kind of customer you’re trying to attract then you can create a specific way to draw them toward you. But, you also need to know exactly where to find them. Your particular crowd may not be on YouTube.
According to recent demographics listed by Omnicoreagency, 73% of U.S. adults use YouTube. 78% of U.S. male adults use it while only 68% are female users. Only 51% of people over 75 years old watch videos on this platform. These are important demographics to know. If you’re product or service focuses on those in the over 75 category, YouTube is probably not your best option.
Some great advice from americanexpress.com from former OPEN Forum community member Nicole Beckett, president of Premier Content Source. “Have a crystal clear picture in your head of exactly who you’re targeting, think about what makes those types of people happy, sad, scared, relieved, and then think about how you can make their lives a little easier.”
She says to narrow down the focus of your ideal client and avoid making broad target market statements, such as every woman, every man, or all baby boomers. Few products appeal to that vast of a group of people and overstating your market will prevent you from developing viable targeted strategies for attracting clients.
A great tool for YouTube SEO is Tubebuddy. One helpful feature is that has a research tool designed to help you find the right long-tail keywords which will make targeting your local demographic and easier.
Statistics provided by Hootsuite can be helpful in understanding just how vast a reach Instagram has accomplished. According to them, Instagram reaches 140 million U.S. users, and although 14% of U.S. adults have never heard of it (clearly the Americans that live under rocks), that first number is nothing to scoff at.
Another staggering figure provided by them is that over 1 billion people use Instagram every month (presumably worldwide). This makes them a runner-up to Facebook as the number one social network as far as active users are concerned.
It’s incredibly important you understand how to use IG to reach your target demographic. Insta is the most fun, I think, out of the three networks we’re covering here. You can get as creative as you want with images and how you present your brand.
Instagram provides a great way to interact with your customers. You want to be doing this. Especially for loyal customers. It’s a great way to keep in touch and if you’re good to them and they like your products or service, you may earn yourself an online word-of-mouth ambassador. Helpful tip alert! Consider throwing them a bone if you feel they’ve done you a solid by recommending you.
When people feel valued, they will go to the ends of the earth to help you out. The return on investment for relational strategies like this can be very high. Of course, be sure you’re not just doing it in order to manipulate. People can smell that coming a mile away and nobody likes it.
Who doesn’t like a giveaway? Some great ideas from thrivehive.com include giving away a gift card for subscribing to your email newsletter, holding a photo contest with your custom business hashtag on Instagram, and featuring the funniest video of your customers using your product on your account. Who doesn’t like to be featured? Probably just the 14% rock-dwelling folks we talked about earlier.
Here’s some solid advice from thrivehive.com. Optimizing your social media profiles improves the visibility of your accounts, which gets your business found by more potential customers. Optimize your profile by adding your business’s name, location, contact information, business website, and maybe even a call to action to your profiles. For example, if you’re a restaurant, include your hours, location, and contact info. This will give customers all of the information they want right from your profile!
Here’s a stat for you from Hubspot. A whopping 46% of all Google searches are looking for local information. That’s almost half of ALL searches. So how do you use IG to attract local people? In addition to the info listed above regarding location information being included in your bio, you should be using location-centric hashtags.
Also, following other local businesses and influencers. Be sure to engage with those people and businesses and always reply to your followers. I know I don’t like being ignored and I bet you don’t either. Using these tactics will be helpful if your goal is to attract new customers.
I think we all know that LinkedIn is the more professional platform. Stats from a recent article by Hootsuite list the platform as having 722 million users. While it’s not the largest social media platform, that number is certainly impressive. And with its business-focused purpose, you’re already targeting a specific demographic.
While you can post images and videos on this platform (or link to your other social media platforms with those), business professionals mainly focus on sharing their thoughts using articles and blogs.
While it links to an older article, google provides a snippet from Linkedin, that offers some things to cross off your list in order to make your LinkedIn local reach more successful.
- Fill out your profile completely
- Claim your custom URL
- Use keyword-rich job titles
- Expand your network
- Join relevant groups and participate
- Use keyword-rich titles for your websites
- Upload a picture
- Optimize your job descriptions
- Get recommendations and endorsements and give them to others
- Share more (especially your own content)
- Put your LinkedIn URL everywhere
Using hashtags and local-focused keywords and phrases will help you with targeting your local market here as well.
How To Increase Social Media Presence
Using any and all of these social media platforms is a great way to attract more customers and clients. Posting content that is helpful, valuable, and directly related to your business is the best way to accomplish this. Save your personal opinions about politics, religious beliefs. You can post that to your personal social media account. It’s best to keep them separate and I’m sure I don’t have to explain why this is the case.
Post regularly. You don’t want to overpost. That can be annoying. But, posting valuable content on a regular basis will be, well, seen as valuable. I have a plethora of folders on my Instagram for each category so that when I see something that is helpful to me, I can easily store it away for later.
The point is to grow your customer base so that you’re reaching a wide audience for your particular demographic. That way, you can throw line in and get bites, so to speak.
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