Social media can help a business earn attention, build trust and create routes towards an enquiry or purchase. If you’re new to it, these seven ideas provide a useful starting point.
You’ll learn about…
- Knowing your ideal customers
- Encouraging recommendations
- Running contests
- Directing followers to your website
- Offering freebies
- Building a mailing list
- And utilising influencers
Check out the full infographic below:
Seven ways social media can support customer acquisition
Social media rarely creates customers through a single post. Its role is usually to reach the right people, give them reasons to trust the brand and make the next useful step clear.
Know your ideal customers
Define the people the business is best placed to help, including their priorities, questions and decision-making context. Use customer evidence and platform insight to refine this picture rather than inventing a purely fictional persona.
Encourage genuine recommendations
Satisfied customers can provide valuable social proof. Make it easy for them to share an honest experience, and be transparent about any incentive or commercial relationship connected to a recommendation.
Use contests with a clear purpose
A competition can create participation, but entries are not automatically qualified demand. Set an objective, choose a prize relevant to the intended audience and check the platform rules and promotional requirements before launch.
Create a useful website journey
Give interested people a clear route to learn more, enquire or buy. The destination should continue the promise made in the social post, work well on mobile and make the next action easy to understand.
Offer a genuinely useful resource
A guide, tool, sample or other resource can demonstrate value before someone is ready to purchase. Choose something that helps the intended customer with a real problem rather than using an unrelated freebie simply to inflate response numbers.
Build a permission-based email audience
Where email supports the journey, invite people to subscribe with a clear explanation of what they will receive. Collect and use personal information responsibly, and focus on earning continued attention rather than treating an address as an immediate sale.
Work with relevant influencers
A creator can introduce the brand through an established relationship with an audience. Select partners for subject relevance, credibility, audience fit and creative suitability, then agree transparent deliverables and measures of success.
The most useful mix depends on the offer and buying journey. A clear social media strategy connects these activities to the outcomes the business actually needs.
