Social Media: Think Of It As The Modern-Day “Shopping Mall”
Congratulations on a beautiful website.
You have great copy… compelling offers… attractive graphics… iron-clad testimonials from happy clients… even a cool entertaining video describing exactly what your business does.
Hey, any prospective customer who sees that website is bound to take an interest in doing business with you!
So… is any prospective customer likely to see it?
How do you drive traffic to your site? Particularly, how do you get your ideal prospects to find your superb website… and, by extension, your superb business?
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If all you do is put up a website – even a great one – it’s like putting an expensive storefront out in the middle of the desert. No one will see it. The entire “TEAM” of resources you invested in your site (Time, Energy, Attention, and, yes, Money) will be wasted.
These days, what’s the best way to move your store into the “mall,” where shoppers are actually milling about, looking for fabulous offers like yours?
Social media.
Twitter, Instagram, Youtube, Pinterest… and, especially, Facebook… these are the online equivalent of that busy shopping mall.
These social media platforms are the best tools at your disposal for attracting a specific “niche” demographic, building your brand authority, building trust with clients… in short, for building your business.
Get Your Shop Out Of The Desert
(And Into The Mall)
Here’s the bad news, Desert Rat: there’s a great chance that people who really need what your business has to offer – and who are in a position to pay top dollar for your products or services – will never know you exist.
Because they’ll never stumble upon your website.
Especially if you’re in a competitive industry, where it’s unlikely your site will make the top page or two of internet search results.
By now, you’ve probably heard the joke: What’s the best place to hide a dead body? That’s right: second page of Google.
If your business doesn’t show up on an internet search until the second or third page (or later), after the listings for your deep-pocket competitors, your business is like a dead body.
The authorities (and your prospective customers) will never look for it there.
Your ideal client is not hanging out on the third page of her internet search results.
She’s hanging out in “the mall” – social media.
She’s hanging out on Facebook.
It’s a bookmarked tab on her laptop… it’s an app on her mobile phone.
If you have a dynamic presence on Facebook – a sharp logo, a good tag line, a compelling offer, a cool video on your Facebook business page – it’s like being in THE mall where shoppers are looking for precisely the thing your business offers.
Isn’t that where your great business should be?
Start With A Facebook Business Page
You probably already have a personal profile on Facebook.
At last count, there were approximately eleven people in the English-speaking world who didn’t have a Facebook personal profile page… so, odds are, you aren’t one of those.
(NOTE: This may have been an exaggeration for effect. But you get the point.)
But if you’re in business, you can’t (and shouldn’t) try to do business with nothing more than a personal profile.
That page is about you as a person, and it’s a place to connect with friends and family (it’s “social” media, after all). You have a group of people who’ve elected to join your collection of “friends,” and that’s where you swap recipes, the latest photos from your vacation, kitty videos, tasteful side-splitting jokes, and the like.
Your Facebook business page, by contrast, is all about your business. You’re not swapping cat videos with your cousins there… on your business page, you’re connecting with prospects and customers.
Your personal profile gathers “friends.” Your business page collects “likes.”
When someone “likes” your business page, they’re sending you a definite message. They liked the article or explainer-video you posted… they liked your half-price offer… they liked your new logo… in short, they like your business.
That’s just what you’re looking for in “the mall.”
You’re looking for qualified customers who like your business… who want to connect with you, who are interested in what you offer, and who want to hear from you.
We’ll talk about how you reach out to those folks in other posts… stay tuned.
But for now, it’s sufficient to say that you need to start your social media campaign with a Facebook business page, and you need to do it now.
Who Has Time (Or Money) For All This?
Let me ask you this…
If you could pay a dollar for an introduction to an ideal prospect – someone who really needs or wants what you offer, and can pay top fees for it – how many of those dollars would you like to spend?
Let’s say your marketing budget is a hundred dollars… and, for that princely sum, you’d expect to connect with a hundred qualified prospects.
Okay… how much time would you be willing to spend to reach out and make that handshake… with each ideal prospect?
Would you be willing to spend an hour with each? A half hour?
Do you feel like fifteen quality minutes with a hundred qualified prospects each would lead to, say, ten sales? Twenty? Fifty?
What would the lifetime value be to your business of, say, ten new customers? People who’d previously never heard of you, but have now become customers… repeat customers… even writers of those glowing testimonials of which you’re so proud?
And what if I said you could reach out and start the conversation with those hundred ideal prospects – all of them – in seconds?
That’s the power of targeted social media advertising.
Once you have a Facebook business presence, for instance, you can reach out to a very targeted audience of ideal prospects who might otherwise never hear about you.
You can experiment on a cost-effective basis with Facebook advertising, which gives you the opportunity to target your message to a very granularly-targeted audience.
Say you’ve determined your ideal prospects are females, 40-50 years of age, who work at home. And say you want to reach out to everyone who fits that “profile” within a 50-mile radius.
You can do that with Facebook ads.
You might find that the group you’re looking for only includes about 500 people (or fewer)… but they are precisely the people to whom you want to introduce your business.
And with social media advertising like this, you only pay to advertise to the exact people who are likely to be your ideal prospects.
It’s a powerful tool. Perhaps the most powerful marketing tool available today.
You can do this. And it isn’t as costly, or time-consuming, as you might have thought. Max Height Web Solutions can manage the whole thing for you through our Facebook business page management service. We’ll create a dynamic presence for you in this powerful “mall,” and we’ll maintain it, posting fresh new content and advertising to your ideal prospects at whatever budget level you determine. Five dollars a month? No problem! Five thousand? Better hire more help! Contact us today, and get out of the wilderness. You may not have realized it… but you could be hiding your business from the very people you need to reach!