Social Media for Businesses - What's the offer?

In the video I made the other day How to sell social media consultancy to businesses, I talked about the three key benefits to them:

• Getting Incremental business
• Retaining more existing business
• “Tuning in” to the conversation about their company

Image: FreeDigitalPhotos.net

So let’s look at each of those in some detail:

Getting Incremental Business

Most successful companies have developed good strategies to capture enquiries from people looking for their product or service. What many are weak at is attracting people who don’t know they need their product or service. Let me explain that with an example – let’s talk about a real estate company which rents and sells properties in London. They have a well search optimized site, so if a prospective customer decides to look at property first, chances are they will find it. But what about all the people who are thinking of moving to London who don’t search on property first? They might search for jobs, maybe schools for the kids, or it might be information about the various areas of London they want. So how do we capture those people? Simple:

We create a blog for the real estate business, which talks about all of those things and any others which might be relevant. We pack it full of useful information which we give away free to anybody who searches for it. We make sure the blog has lots of links back to the property site, and is closely identified with it. When the time is right for our people to look at property, where do you think they’ll go first?

Retaining More Existing Business

We’ve all read that the easiest business to get is with your existing customers, but so many companies fail to capitalize on this. Social media can help to do so by creating a community around the business. With blog commenting, and better still, a forum, customers remain in touch with the company and each other. As soon as anyone feels a part of a community, they have a loyalty to consider that company first for any future purchases.

“Tuning in” to the conversation about their company

With the huge growth in sites like Twitter and Facebook, hundreds of millions of people are chatting away on the net, sharing their experiences, complaining about and praising businesses. It’s so important that for a company to tune in to this chatter – for sure it can lead to new business, but much more importantly, it can help you to “hear” people with a problem, and to deal with it appropriately. It’s easy to set up searches on the relevant sites and to make sure you have Google alerts running with the company or products’ names.

Summary

Developing a social media strategy for almost any business, based on achieving these three objectives is relatively easy if you’re already a successful blogger – because we do these things every day as as part of our work anyway. All you need to do is develop an effective pitch to explain how you can help other organizations to do the same.

Can I help more on this? Would you like any other points covered?

Have you got a copy of The Beginner's Guide to Twitter yet?

Please also have a look at:

1/ Why every business needs a social media presence

2/ Brilliant! Ford shows the way for large companies to use social media

3/ I am Web 2.0