Kshitij Jain
March, 2014
People are increasingly being empowered by technology and information that are easily accessible to them today. Customers, both geographically dispersed or in your locality would learn about any product or service from the internet first. Thus, the sellers have to be present there, where their customers are i.e. online. Customers are also increasingly expecting companies to come up with new and innovative features, products, and services that can excite them.
SMEs are continually looking for new ways to be at the forefront of competition. The key imperatives for them are to listen to their customers, build meaningful relationships with them, expand across current geographies (both current locality and worldwide), build a better brand, and enhance business growth. It is also important for some SMEs to improve collaboration within the organization. Thus, technology-led innovation has been a vital aspect for SMEs to gain a competitive advantage over others.
However, there are certain challenges in the way. SMEs run on strict budgets, and limited resources. Thus, they have to rationally plan their investments. Social media can help SMEs to achieve the aforesaid imperatives without spending extravagantly. Social media provides a convenient platform to continually listen to your audience, connect with the mat their (customer's) comfort, collaborate in familiar ways, and grow your business.
The concept of social media is not new and many of us use social media in some way or the other every day. We have our own profiles or the profile of our business on Facebook, Linkedin, Google+, etc, that we may have created at some point in the past. What's important is to continually manage your social media profile across all social channels to increase your web presence.
Here are few things that you can do right away to start managing your profile. Establish presence of your business for customers that are in or near your locality by registering your business on websites like Google Places for Business, Blurrp.com, Zomato, Foursquare, Google+, etc.
Doing this would be a first simple step towards considerably improving the web presence of your business. For example, if someone searches online for a yoga classes in your locality, the likelihood of your business showing up increase.
There are many examples where SMEs in various industries have adopted and managed their social media presence to gain many advantages - better servicing the customers, quickly rolling out new offerings that the customers want, etc. Internally too, social media plays an important role in empowering the new generation workforce to better engage with each other and accomplish their work. Few ways in which SMEs can use social media for their business:
Connecting with customers: You can use social media tools to connect with your existing and prospective customers. You can showcase your offerings, interact with customers, build communities to network with customers, and keep the conversations alive by following up on those conversations.
Reaching to global customers with leading social media platforms. Make use of the already existing social media platforms and tools such as Google+, Pinterest, Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, etc, that have large audience (globally). Using these platforms, you can target large audience at the same time. You can also position your products and services to multiple audience in different ways based upon the specific audience's needs.
Branding and marketing: You can use social media to build your brand and promote/market your offerings. Deliver consistent messaging for your brand across all the social media channels. Publish how-to videos, pictures, etc, about your products and services on your website and link your website to your social media profiles. These branding and marketing efforts then clubbed with SEO tactics an improve the web presence of your and generate more traffic to your website.
Providing content that is useful: Provide content such as manuals, white papers, videos, blogs, etc. that is useful for the customers. This content may be related to the customer's needs/problems, explaining concepts, innovation in your domain, etc. For example, if you manufacture women accessories that complement their ethnic attire, you can provide videos for how to wear different types of ethnic attire like, how to wear a saree; or content for what to wear on what occasion, etc. If you provide accessories for a specific brand of mobiles or tablets, then you can provide videos related to using different features of this brand's mobile phone or tablets.
Analytics and Listening: There are many social analytics tools that can analyze the interactions that customers have about your brand on the social channels. These tools analyze whether people are talking positive or negative about your business or products and services i.e. sentiment analysis.
By keeping your senses open to such social/sentiment information can give you relevant insights to improve your products, better segment and target customers, and uncover new business opportunities. Tools are also available that can help you to proctor what do people mention about your brand or products and services, and take necessary steps to better manage your brand's reputation.
Improving employee productivity: Today's new-generation workforce is technology savvy and they always stay connected to their preferred social channels for various purposes - connecting with friends and family, for subscribing to information and news from multiple sources, to build a professional network, and so. Thus if you provide this workforce with the social tools which they are familiar and prefer working with, it will help improve collaboration among employees, make them more productive, and better connect them with customers. Social tools can also be used to create learning courses, trainings, and learning groups for your employees to help develop their skills in a self-paced and collaborative manner.
Increase sales with quick offers: You can quickly rollout new limited-period or seasonal / daily / hourly offers quickly to attract customers and generate more sales. You can also tie-up with companies like Group on to provide best-buy deals on your products and services.
Social media can have a positive impact on your business if you carefully and skillfully turn-on your social channels. Going social on the internet without proper planning can either waste your investments or backfire by tarnishing your brand. Therefore, you should take care that your social media investments (time, resource, money) align to the purposes that your business wants to meet - for example - create online presence for their brand, or generate more leads, or sell online. A couple of recommendations here would be:
- Be selective. Identify those social channels where your audience spends most of their time, or the channels that can benefit your kind of industry. Put your efforts in building your brand's presence on those channels first.
- Most companies who have been successful on the social media regularly post relevant information/content on their social channels. You can reap ongoing benefits out of social media only if you continually invest time in it. Regularly feed your social media customers with relevant content related to your brand and offerings.
- Your experts should timely respond to customer queries and engage them in ongoing conversations on the social media. You can also define a process for the same. For example a junior employee monitors customer comments on your social channels, consolidates the feedback / comments / queries and passes on to the experts, and then the experts respond to them.
- Make your website SEO friendly, and simple and intuitive to use.
- Provide clear call to actions both on your website and on social media. When you provide a piece of content to a customer in which she gets interested, she should know the next step - e.g. where to go for more information, whom to contact, where to leave her information for someone from your organization to connect back, etc.
I would like to hear how do you make use of social media for your business?