Social media enables brands and businesses to extend their marketing reach, thereby achieving new opportunities for interaction with followers, fans, prospects, and customers.
The challenge is converting that activity into new business.
This is accomplished by distinguishing the brand from the business – understanding how the dynamic of reach and interaction, and how they work together to respectively achieve practical results.
Brands Attract Attention
Your brand represents many things. It can project playfulness and fun, stability and security, a knack for innovation, or a combination of all of these – and more.
The characteristics or qualities of a brand can sometimes be difficult to define. Nevertheless, your brand is a powerful asset for attracting the attention of consumers.
Consumers can be very loyal to a brand, despite not fully understanding it well. Why?
Brands are largely symbolic – something that creates alignment.
This explains why many consumer brands have been hugely successful with Facebook marketing. If your friends like a brand, and you like your friends, then there is an excellent chance you will also align yourself with that brand.
What’s really happening is you are really aligning yourself with your friends via the brand.
And Facebook and the large consumer brands are loving all of this.
As a small business, you can make this work for you too.
Businesses Engage and Interact
Relationships with brands can be fleeting. For one thing, one can be a fan of brand without actually being a customer.
And how well can you know a brand if you have not had direct experience with the products and services it represents?
Thus, if even one thing goes wrong with that tenuous relationship – the brand is likely to lose a loyal follower. This is one reason why the reach of a brand is essential. Attract as many followers as possible because you are sure to lose some along the way.
Businesses, on the other hand, have deep and often personal relationships with their customers. The nature of business is that there are ups and downs. Why else would you even need to concern yourself with customer service?
When a business works with customers to resolve problems and otherwise exceed expectations, it solidifies relationships – and builds true loyalty.
The key for businesses is to move beyond attraction and engage with followers, fans, and prospects – such that they become become customers.
This requires personal interaction. It’s not a numbers game – but one of focus. Thankfully, there are means for accomplishing this with social media, such as Facebook Smart Lists, Twitter Lists, and LinkedIn notes, tags, and messaging.
The Future of Business is Personal
Attraction is accomplished online with content marketing – providing free solutions that solve problems. Your blog and Facebook page serve this purpose, along with others.
Unless you are an online marketer, if you expect to convert brand attraction into new business, you have to develop relationships by interacting with your communities. You may be able to accomplish this online via tweets and comments, or you may have to resort to emails, and yes, even that old-fashioned method we know as a telephone call.
Regardless of your industry, you can only score new business if your prospects believe you understand and care about them.
While this may be possible with online marketing, there is no substitute for personal human interaction.
This means getting prospects into your store, or otherwise managing their experience with your company. Even if you don’t have a store, you can effectively engage prospects with experiential marketing – anything that gives them confidence.
The answer to the aforementioned question is that you are both a brand and a business. The key is understanding the distinction – and taking appropriate actions to make the most of each of them to sustain your profitability and success.
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Until tomorrow, Jeff
