The Top 6 Digital Marketing Tools For Local Businesses
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Digital Tool #1: Your facebook business page; more specifically:
How To Use Your Facebook Business Page To Engage Your Customers
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Facebook has become THE online tool for businesses to spread their message to the world, in the fastest and most effective way possible.
No longer is it just a place to “hang out” and check out what your friends have been up to…
Facebook is a public company now and wants to topple Google to be the go-to place for business advertisers which means it has made some big changes to make it a much better platform for local businesses trying to get noticed online.
Most of the world is spending a lot of time on Facebook (in case you hadn’t noticed), which means it is the perfect medium for telling people what you and your business are about.
When people like or follow you their friends see that and are much more likely to gravitate to your business as well.
The right way to market your business on Facebook involves a little bit of selling (25%) and a lot of writing things that people interested in your business niche will find helpful, informative or entertaining (75%).
It is important to know what your “niche” is (for example flower arranging) and if you post interesting attractive content people who are interested in your niche can then find your business. Then you can turn them into customers!
Facebook makes it easy to shout your message from the rooftops!
These days using the internet to help your offline sales is all about “social proof”; 75% of people are influenced to purchase by what people say on social media.
When you learn the easy system to get people liking and following you this is the first step to moving them toward becoming your loyal, repeat customer.
All this means that if your business is not well represented on Facebook you are missing out on a lot of new customers and leaving profits on the table!
The aim of Facebook for your business should be to attract likes, then turn likes into clients.
How To Really Connect With Your Customer:
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You need to find out what keeps your customer awake at night.
Come up with some solutions to this and after you have a decent fan-base you will see your fans turn into your customers, there are some simple, effective ways to build your fan-base quickly.
1. Contact other page owners in the same niche as you. If they are active page owners and have a similar number of likes as you do, usually they will be receptive to mentioning you or your offer on their page, in return for you doing the same for them.
2. Run a facebook like ad campaign targeted to people who are interested in your niche. Details on how to do this are in our members area, but it is pretty straightforward to set up a basic like campaign following the instructions inside facebook.
3. Like and comment other people’s posts in the same niche as you. This means people start to see your business page popping up as someone who comments with helpful contributions to questions or engages in conversations within the niche. If someone sees your page regularly commenting on your niche, they will often click through to your page and check you out, and like your page too.
4. When you post, use images with text and encourage your fans to share or comment on your post.
5. Share popular content in your niche. If someone else in your niche does a post that gets a lot of comments or shares, by sharing this yourself you again get exposure for your page as the people who have already shared or commented will see your page as a business who has shared the content and may click through to your page and like it.
14 Ways To Optimise Your Business Page To Engage Customers
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1. Regular, interesting posts that encourage likes, comments and shares. You don’t want hype, just natural enthusiasm. Be yourself and tell them in an easy-going way why your business is so great!
2. Use lots of photos and attractive images. Learn to use the “Insights” function to see which of your posts is performing the best so you can do more like it.
3. Who is your competition? Research this looking for other businesses in your niche with the most likes and engagement (people talking about this), what are they doing or saying?
4. You need to differentiate yourself but you can get ideas by reading their page and seeing what is working for that audience, will will be your target audience too.
5. Know your audience, what are their passions, frustrations, needs and wants. Can you address them?
6. The biggest key to your business success as any good business author will tell you is what is troubling your client? How can you let your client know that your product or service can solve this problem?
7. In the “About” section of your page tell people about your business and what it can do for them. Talk all about the features and benefits of doing business with you.
8. Use regular links to your website in your posts, so interested fans can learn more. Put the link high up the page so it can be seen in the newsfeed without clicking “read more”.
9. Mix your posts up: use photos, videos, share content. Variation is interesting.
10. Use the Facebook offer function to make “no brainer” offers to your likes.
11. Don’t be afraid to tell people who you are and what you do.
12. Be yourself, show people who you are, why you are different and why they should do business with you.
13. Use testimonials on your business page. This is an awesome way to show people how good you are.
14. Hashtag your post with the city you live in and other tags that people might be searching for. Hashtags are the use of # before a keyword or phrase, for example #amplifybusinessprofit or #flowersauckland. This makes it easy for customers searching for your product or service to find you.
So you can see that there are many ways to use your facebook business page to engage your fans and encourage them to become customers. We cover the steps in detail in our members area.
Stay tuned for your next digital tool, which will be send to your inbox shortly.