Social media has leveled the playing field for all businesses, large and small. Executed properly, any business can reach a large target audience with the help of great content. I want to focus primarily on the smaller type of businesses for this article. Think your typical CI dealer. A seven — ten person company.
As most of you know (but might not be acting on for some reason!), affordable social media marketing is often much more inexpensive than traditional marketing campaigns. DIY social campaigns cost next to nothing – only the small amount of time it takes to blast out your message. Outsourcing your social is still cheaper than most print campaigns – and spending just a little more in targeted ads will get your message out in front of the largest possible target audience.
But here’s another great reason you want to let social be your digital word of mouth – customer service. That’s right, customer service. You might not realize this, but people like messaging and communicating via their social account. And take it one step further – it’s public! So here is this golden opportunity sitting right in front of you. If you can respond in a timely, positive fashion and solve problems (which is just another way of saying, ‘provide great customer service’), you can use social to multiply the love.
Here’s how it works in the real world. Let’s say your social manager (who is always looking after your online reputation) sees a customer with a problem. Your social manager helps to facilitate the solution to the customer’s problem. When you have taken care of your customer, they are happy to promote you on their social accounts. Positive online reviews for excellent customer service is gold. They boost your reputation, which in turn boosts your business profits. But you have to commit to social, or your customer’s questions will go unanswered, and your online reputation is likely to suffer.
Another major factor in deploying social for customer service is to build trust in your brand. And the value you bring to the market vis-à-vis your informative content and timely competitive edge campaigning. Social media has leveled the playing field for all businesses, and those small businesses who are harnessing the power of social are competing mano-a-mano with the big boys. If you aren’t in the game, you’re losing ground to your competition every hour of the day.
This blog post was originally published in the weekly newsletter of Technology Insider Group, a full-service media company in the Consumer Electronics Industry. Sign up to receive their newsletter here to stay informed.