Finding the winning needle in the haystack
You know your business, you know who your target audience is and where they are based, what products or services you can offer them and how you differentiate yourselves from your competition. The key question is how do you find those all important leads to generate business for your company?
Social media is a great way of finding those leads and for a small business with a limited marketing budget available, social media platforms are a great way of growing your customer base and increasing your chance of potential leads, without the costly expense of the more traditional printed material or advertising in magazines or trade publications.
LinkedIn enables you to search through hundreds of potential contacts due to its search function allowing you to really hone in on your target audience via searching by location, job function and industry. Similarly, with Facebook and Twitter you can select your friends and followers depending on who you would like to target. It is a good idea to cross link between your LinkedIn connections, Facebook friends and Twitter followers to have synergy across all platforms.
Once you have connected to your connections on LinkedIn, dependent on the target audience you have selected, now is the time to start a long term dialogue, whether that be starting your own group, setting up a company page, sharing updates of case studies or writing articles. Articles can provide information that can really help your connections, whether you are writing about your key products and services, a topic you have a particular interest in or feel strongly about, topics trending in the news or information concerning yourself. The key here is to really show your expertise in your chosen field to promote your company to potential customers.
If you do decide to invest time and effort into social media, whatever the channels, they must work in tandem using the same company design and similar complementary content. Social media calendars are also useful tools to plan monthly content across all platforms, that way you know exactly what you are doing and when. If you are considering linking content from social media channels to your website, also ensure your website looks as professional, is up to date and as easy to navigate as possible.
In conclusion, in order to find the winning needle in the haystack, i.e. the lead to generate business for your company, be prepared to take time to search for the correct connections. Once those connections are found, I would recommend taking a long-term approach of building a relationship with each connection, friend or follower to earn their trust and ultimately build up your credibility as a company.
Therefore, if you are a business looking for that winning needle in the haystack to have more free time to work on other areas of your business, then by all means please get in touch.
Tel: 07557 040 830 or e-mail: [email protected]
Many thanks for reading.
Clare Mitchell