How To Attract and Retain Customers On Social Media

Intro

Aspiring businessmen may find attracting new clients complex. What social medium will engage more customers? What medium is not worth paying attention at all? And what to do to retain clients? Let’s see how your business can receive more leads from social media and get in good with them.

Are There People On Social Media?

Yes, there are. Here is the global statistics as of October 2023. Currently, 4.95 billion people use social media, a 7.07% increase from 4.62 billion people in 2022. Moreover, an average user engages with 6.7 social media services and spends there 2 hours 24 minutes on an average day.

Among the most popular platforms are:

• Facebook (3.03 billion)
• YouTube (2.5 billion)
• WhatsApp (2 billion)
• Instagram (2 billion)
• WeChat (1.4 billion)
• TikTok (1.3 billion)
• FB Messenger (1 billion)
• Telegram (900 billion)
• Snapchat (700 million)
• Douyin (700 million)

Impressive, ha? It becomes clear why any respectable B2B digital marketing agency suggests advertising on social media. It helps raise awareness and, with it, profits immensely.

How To Engage Customers On Social Media?

Social media can become an efficient tool if used wisely. To utilize all its potential and organize your content, answer these 4 questions:

1. Why do you need social media content?
2. Who is your target audience?
3. What do you want to say?
4. How to say it in a captivating way?

Why Do You Need Social Media Content?

Social media posts attract your people. Every photo, video, or article you share can have a purpose—to tell, engage, or sell. This is the content that can bring in solvent public:

• Informational. Before purchasing, the client needs to know more about you: what products or services you sell, what place you occupy in the market, what values you stick to, and why trust you. Company news, team photos, expert guides, and workflow videos can help convey this message.
• Engaging. The customer knows about you but doesn’t have enough interest, trust, and loyalty to buy from you. Engaging content is for building an emotional connection with your audience. Communicate with your audience: ask for their opinions, and arrange games, quizzes, and polls. This is how you humanize your brand and diminish the distance between you and your client.
• Selling. This content depicts the advantages of your products or services: how much they cost, when and how clients can use them, and why they are better than competitors’. Selling content creates a need for buying and withdraws concerns, if any.

This classification is not strict: an informational post may well make a customer want to purchase something from you, and a selling post may contain an engaging quiz. Separating content by goals simplifies the process of creating it.

Who Is Your Target Audience?

Advertising begins with defining the target audience, a group of people your product or service is designed for. People in a target group are all united by pain, necessity, and problems to solve. With the help of your product or service.

All people cannot be your clients. Each product or service has its target audience with individual characteristics. Before advertising, establish a group of people interested in your offer.

Create a full-fledged portrait of your client. You can’t do with just describing the age, gender, and profession. Elaborate on all the nuances in detail. If you have no experience, look at competitors.

An example: a bachelor, 25–30 years old, with a higher education, white collar, monthly salary of $5,000, wants to open a business, has some initial capital. On weekdays, his only activity is work and home. At weekends, he meets his friends in pubs to chat about football, women, and capitalism. He wants to get rich, travel the world, buy a fancy car and a big house. But his mom is against that and thinks he is better off at home with mommy’s savory desserts.

‘Think like a customer’ should be your motto. It is a good practice to put yourself in your client’s shoes and answer: ‘What are my problems?’, ‘What questions bother me?’, ‘Why do I need this product?’ To answer, you should analyze customers’ reviews and comments. If you have no feedback, collect it from competitors or interrogate your friends.

What Do You Want To Say?

You can’t generate ideas before you answer the above questions: "Why?" and "Who?". And the answers will differ from industry to industry.

Say, you are a new dancing school for kids that wants to attract new clients in the area. In this case, one of your target audiences may be parents of kids before 10, living downtown, who work 9–6 jobs. These parents want their kids to attend some physical activity in the evenings near home because they cannot bring their offspring themselves.

Your strategy here can be to show that your location is easy to find for kids without parents. Also, you can assure parents that your school is a safe place, where teachers take care of each kid and ensure they get out and home safely.

Such scenarios can be many, for different businesses and target groups.

How To Say In A Captivating Way?

When you finally determine what you will talk about, it’s time to get creative and find catchy ways of transmitting information to your target audience.

Prevalent content types can be determined by the social media you use. Nevertheless, there are many ubiquitous ideas:

• Emotional content. Communicate with your audience and share experiences that resonate with people on a personal level;
• Trends. Move with the time. Use current cultural events and news to post fresh and up-to-date content;
• Informational content. Study the latest industry news and updates. Give expert insights to your audience;
• Interactive content. Try surveys, games, and AR/VR technologies to invite followers. People share catchy interactive content, thus advancing engagement and creating impressions;
• Entertaining content. Memes and funny videos rarely hurt. They rather help your brand reach a wider audience and create positive associations;
• Content that reflects your values. Interviews with founders or employees showcase the brand's personality.
• Behind-the-scene content. Take your audience to your office or beyond to show your company and the people who work for it. Tell about the problems and how you work to address them.

Now you have clients and content for them. How to win their favor and retain them?

4 Tips To Retain Customers

The major factor here is the quality of your product or service. Another key to retaining customers and expanding their loyalty is a customer-centric culture. And this is how you build it.

Use Loyalty Programs

**Special offers **or the benefits customers receive when buying something from you. For example, when ordering 2 big pizzas, all clients get a small pizza for free. This strategy will boost customer loyalty and advertise the range of your products.

Discounts. If used smartly, they work well when retaining customers. You can offer a 10% discount for your website SEO audit services for clients who turn to you for website optimization.

Gifts. Put samples of your other products, send guides, or add a couple of candies to the cake. And 100 loyalty points go to you!

Collect Feedback

**Chat support. **Prompt response increments customer loyalty. People see that their opinions matter and ask for your product or service again.

**Reviews. **Monitor all your reviews on various resources (maps, social media, forums, comments, etc.). Thank customers for positive feedback and work with negative ones. By swiftly solving the problem in a negative comment, you improve your relationship with the commenter and with future clients reading it.

**Surveys. **Get customers' opinions. The level of loyalty will escalate if you show people that you value their opinions. Moreover, they will feel involved in the process and, therefore more connected to your brand.

Educate Your Audience

Checklists. Free training materials show your experience, demonstrate customer care, introduce your company, and teach how to use your products or services, for example, a free SEO checklist to help your clients launch a well-ranking website on their own.

Video tutorials. Clothing stores may release videos like ‘Clothes for different body types,’ ‘Don’t wear it in summer 2024,’ ‘5 tips to organize your closet,’ etc. There are plenty of topics for every business that will interest existing customers and attract new ones.

Knowledge base. For example, in a month, 100 customers informed you they don’t get how to use your service. Based on their questions, create detailed instructions with comments, thereby gaining customer satisfaction.

Improve Your Service

Politeness. Be attentive and motivate your employees to be attentive to client’s problems as well. Polite and friendly communication makes a good impression and has a positive effect on the return rate.

Chatbot. Develop a virtual assistant to help clients with basic info. Plus, this assistant will cut costs since you don’t need to hire employees to track messages 24/7.

‘Gamification is very popular today. Game scenarios quickly catch customers’ attention and spark interest in the product. For instance, a company specializing in fitness courses can create a chatbot that calculates the daily caloric value and suggests a 3-day diet. Chatbots do not require a large development team. Some bots can create chatbots even if you do not have development skills,’ says Pavel Buev, SEO expert at Digital Marketing Agency Ocean Power.

CRM system. With it, you can gather important data about customers to congratulate them on holidays, give discounts, or create other unique offers. Caring and attention definitely upturn loyalty and trust.

Personalization. Having relevant information, you can address clients personally. This is a good way to show respect and send suitable offers.

Loyal customers are invaluable. They enrich profit streams, increase ROI, and help gather useful data about the target audience. Clients who regularly buy goods and services from you, give positive feedback and recommend you to their friends, relatives, and followers. You don’t need to have a huge audience on social media to earn a lot. It’s rather the quality of your audience that matters. And you are in charge of it.