Converting Fans to Customers: How to Create a Successful Social Media Marketing Strategy
Social media has become a common, and now required, staple to any successful marketing strategy. Not merely because it exposes a business to a huge audience of potential customers, but it also saves incredible amounts of time and money.
I had the opportunity to chat with Matthieu Chéreau, co-founder and CEO of Tigerlily, who was in Beirut for ArabNet and the first edition of “Coffee, Tea and Social Media” organized by social4ce to help companies gain a better understanding of social media and its impact on their businesses.
Tigerlily is a social media marketing and analytics company based in France, offering tools for social media campaign management and optimization, for over 80 brands including Orange, Yves Saint Laurent, L’Oréal, HTC, Spotify, and Sony and others across more than 60 countries.
Chéreau’s suggestions were focused on how to optimize social marketing actions and campaigns. According to him, “Brands in the Middle East need to have better control of their social media activities by optimizing conversation monitoring, increasing user engagement and creating innovative social campaigns to drive user acquisition.”
Once a business has developed their Facebook page properly, has managed to gain a large number of fans and is regularly engaging with their community, one question naturally pops up: What’s next? How can you become more efficient and effective with social media?
Some brands may need to strengthen their social marketing programs with the use of outside services or training that can help them directly evaluate the performance of their social media actions.
Managing a brand on social media can be tedious and daunting to a lot of companies, but a truly complete social media service should allow brands not only to easily distribute content on social media channels but, according to Chéreau, should also:
1) Gather insights about a business community online, and help them understand how to manage their relationship with this audience in order to increase their level of engagement and therefore the return on that engagement.
2) Collect diverse information depending on the department within the organization using the tool (marketing, communication, customer service, and R&D). Whether maximizing content production, optimizing customer service, increasing ROI, drive traffic or measuring performance, a social media tool or service should allow different departments to find and manage information useful to them.
3) Receive appropriate support and training for a business to optimize their use of the platform with the help of a customer service team or certified partner. Sometimes clients may be overwhelmed or frustrated that their constant posting, or what they see as engagement, isn’t getting them any more customers. A good social media consultant or service will support and educate their clients.
4) Chéreau focused on the necessity of creating social media campaigns around reduction coupons or offers to redeem not only to increase the number of fans, but more importantly to convert them into customers.
These insights can be useful if you manage your social media in-house as well: stay in tune with your business community, empower all of your departments to benefit from social media, and educate your team on how to spread your message.
Do you have suggestions for converting fans into customers? Let us know how your social media strategy is affecting your business in the comments section below.
