Your customer’s experience is one of the most important things when it comes to making your business thrive, as one terrible experience is enough to lose a first-time, or even a life-long customer. This is why businesses must leverage every opportunity given to them to enhance the customer experience.
Today there are 3.78 billion users on social media and 54% of users use it to research products. Furthermore, 71% of consumers who have had a positive experience with a brand on social media are likely to recommend the brand to their friends and family.
In the past improving your customer’s experience meant having easy-to-find products, courteous employees, or reliable service. But today, what you post and how you interact with others on social media is a crucial component of their experience with your business.
In this blog post you will learn:
– How Social Media Relates to Your Customer’s Experience
– What to Do Before You Get Started
– How to Use Social Media to Improve the Customer Experience
How Social Media Relates to Your Customer’s Experience
Social media has exploded and users have developed expectations for how brands present themselves and interact with others on the platform. Today, businesses that are worth your time and money are expected to interact with their followers and have great-looking feeds filled with diverse content.
The customer experience begins at first impressions, and for many businesses the first impression they have with customers is them browsing their social media. But, their experience and your opportunity to convert them into customers doesn’t stop there. If they follow you, every post you make can nudge them further along the buyer’s journey into purchasing your products or services.
Social media has created a platform where your customers can experience your brand every day, and failing to utilize this opportunity means that you are missing out on business daily.
What to Do Before You Get Started
Before you begin tackling the beast of social media marketing, there are a few things you need to do in advance:
– Analyze your existing content
– Research your industry
– Create guidelines for FAQs
First, let’s look at what you are already posting on social media. Take note of what has the most and least likes and comments. This will give you an idea of what kind of content your specific audience enjoys seeing.
Then, research what the biggest companies in your industry post on social media. What do they do differently? Is there anything you can do similarly? What do you personally enjoy? Seeing what larger companies in your industry do can give you a great baseline to work from.
Afterwards, you need to create guidelines for FAQs. Brainstorm questions you are most frequently asked, and craft responses that you can copy and paste with some added personalization. This will make it easier for you to answer questions quickly with a response that isn’t completely canned.
How to Use Social Media to Improve the Customer Experience
Now that the prep work is out of the way, let’s get into using social media to improve your customer’s experience.
First, you need to post valuable content. All “valuable” content is either educational or entertaining. But, this doesn’t mean that you need to be posting in-depth guides and big-budget videos. If you’re a realtor, educational content can be a simple post on real estate jargon and their definitions. People scroll through their social media feeds fast, and on this platform people want easily digestible content.
Moreover, use the insight you’ve gained from analyzing your existing content and from researching others in your industry to uncover what your followers actually look for. If you own a gym, your followers may not care about technical tips on how to exercise. But, they may love your posts on personal trainers and their client’s success as it creates the sense of a supportive community. Use your post’s engagement as feedback, and keep posting what works!
Posting engaging content that is educational and entertaining is just one part of creating a positive customer experience with your followers. Next is actually engaging with them! Take the time to respond to everyone engaging with your business, both the good and the bad. How you respond to praise and complaints from your customers shows how much you care about their satisfaction with your business.
Finally, be proactive with your conversations. For example, if there’s a championship game and you run a sports bar, don’t wait for your customers to tell you who they’re betting on to win, just ask them through a poll or post. Don’t wait to be tagged or mentioned either. You can use tools like Google Alerts to automatically notify you if your business is being talked about.
We know we’ve covered A LOT, but that’s because this is important, just like every touchpoint you have with your customers!
What separates businesses that thrive from the rest is that they take advantage of these checkpoints to create a positive customer experience whenever and wherever they can. This includes the daily opportunities they have on social media. If you are looking to take advantage of social media to grow your business, contact us today!
