Talk to Your Customers First Before Starting a Social Media Strategy

Social Media Options

Are you like most every other small business out there wondering how to use Social Media in support of your company’s business objectives? Or perhaps you’re hoping that the whole Social Media buzz will eventually die out so everybody can return to doing business the old tried-and-true way?

Most of what I’ve read, heard and seen over the last couple years indicates Social Media is here to stay. You can blame it on the Internet. As a technology tool, the Internet has had a permanent effect on how we conduct our daily lives, from news gathering and employment searches to entertainment and shopping. Add to that Humanity’s near universal desire for a greater sense of connectedness and idea sharing and you have an unstoppable engine driving Social Media’s growth. This can be seen in the explosive use of Social Media tools like Twitter, which, as of March 2009, had 55 million monthly visits and grew at a staggering 1,382% monthly clip! Facebook added roughly 25 million users in a 5 week time span from January through March 2009, translating out to some 555,556 users signing up for a new Facebook account every day! By October of last year LinkedIn surpassed 50 million users and was adding roughly one new member per second!

If you had any earlier doubts about the sustainability of Social Media, stats like those should go a long way toward silencing them. We’re talking about a gabfest of global proportions showing no signs of slowing down in the near future.

Should you start using Social Media today?

Definitely! The question is how and to what extent? One host of a webinar I attended yesterday on how to use Social Media to generate sales leads recommended we start using various Social Media tools TODAY! Dabble. Experiment. Probe. Test. Do what it takes to figure you where your ideal prospects are hanging out in the “brave, new world” of Social Media. Okay, point taken. You gotta start somewhere, right?

Wrong! If you’re not careful, you could blow your marketing budget trying to find where ideal prospects “hang out” faster than my two brothers smoke a box of their favorite Montecristos! There’s nothing wrong with trying to learn how to USE various Social Media tools, and there are a bunch out there to be sure. I would, however, advise that you not confuse learning how to use those tools with discovering how to find your ideal prospects.

One effective and affordable way for a small business to find out how to reach new prospects is often overlooked: customer surveys. One reason a survey of your existing customers is so important is because some of them are bound to fit the profile of your ideal prospect persona, which is a set of behvioral traits that represent your preferred customer. A survey can shed more light on how future prospects can be found, how best to approach them and what marketing messages to deliver than 6 months of tweets, comments and posts combined!

Is a survey right for a small company trying to learn Social Media?

Benefits abound for businesses who query customers on how they use Social Media in support of their business. Social Media isn’t just a lead generation process. Questions on how your existing customers might want you to contact them with promotions, helpful alerts or technical support are fair game. As for lead generation tips, consider adding a question about what tools they would most likely use – Google search, LinkedIn Answers, Blogs, tweets, online ezines, Craigslist – to research the replacement of your product and / or service if they had to do so tomorrow. Discovering what Social Media tools most of your customers prefer will tell you a lot about what tools you should use to engage an audience of promising prospects.

A survey with no more than 10 questions will generally yield a good response rate, which is what you’re aiming for. Because your customers are busy, short surveys make it much easier for them to fill out and you to receive valuable data. Besides, a larger the response rate improves your chance of receiving a representative set of answers to flesh out how your ideal prospects behave in Social Media. You might also consider adding questions requiring optional add-on comments to give respondents a chance to specify answers you may not have considered when you originally created the survey questions.

If you’ve never created and conducted a survey before, not to worry. With the Internet and a plethora of survey products, doing one is easier than it’s ever been. Gone are the days when you would have to mail a question packet and bubble sheet and hope for the best. Survey tools are both flexible and affordable, a perfect combination for small business! Most survey tools offer a good mix of functionality including an intuitive question design work flow, online response capture, individual response tracking and reports that can often be downloaded into a spreadsheet for further analysis. I personally recommend SurveyMonkey, which has been around for a relatively long time, at least in Internet years! You might also take a look at ConstantContact, which now has a survey tool you can pay for separately from its email service.

Still not sure a survey is right for your company?

Would you consider building a house without a design and set of blue prints in hand? You could try, but the result might be something you’ll have to tear down and rebuild later on. The same goes with using Social Media as a marketing tool and learning where your ideal prospects “hang out.” The universe of Social Media is populated with several hundred different tools, some of which work better than others, some of which are more popular than others. Rather than just banging away with a hammer, wood and nails, doesn’t it make sense to first determine who your ideal prospects are so you can get a good fix on their Social Media habits? 

Remember the old maxim “people don’t plan to fail, they fail to plan?” Well, you can add to that the old carpenter’s maxim that goes something like this: “measure twice, cut once!” A well-designed, executed and analyzed survey will yield results akin to “measuring twice.” The survey results will allow you to devise a plan that maximizes your efforts and ultimately improves your probability of success using Social Media in support of your business objectives.

In the event you’d like to conduct your own Social Media survey, The Sage Closer has a free ready-made survey you can request and use as a template to meet your individual company and industry requirements. If you have any questions or need additional information, call 512-255-7243 for a friendly consultation with one of our New Media Consultants!