When you open up a business, there’s reason to celebrate. But even if you already have a good, steady stream of customers, this is just the beginning of everything. In order to ensure the future of your business, your next step should be growing and developing your business. To grow and develop your business, you’ll have to start bringing in more customers besides the usual clientele.
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| grow your customer base. Image from euroCarribean.com |
While bigger businesses usually hire the intelligence of a marketing or PR staff, start up companies are probably too financially-conscious to even think of hiring an expert. The good thing, however, is that nowadays; anyone can start marketing their business with the simple, but smart use of an essential internet marketing service: social media.
1. Be sincere in helping people out
Just by using Twitter, which provides businesses with a huge market, you can build a trusting community by simply answering the questions of other Twitter users. According to the co-founder of Buffer, Leo Widrich, who focused on Twitter, he began helping some people out on Twitter and offering them solutions to their problems. While sometimes, he mentions Buffer as a form of advertisement, there are also times he won’t mention it at all. This relays to his community that he is not just advertising his business, but is truly sincere in helping people. As a result, people he once helped continue to read his blog or retweet him, even after he offers his help.
The priority is to help people out and build relationships. This priority will result in a longer and more fruitful form of advertising compared to straight out mentions of blogs and businesses.
2. Try guest blogging for the blogs of others
Since there are some blog owners who may be too busy to write content for their own blogs, guest blogging has become a popular form of publicity and experience. For those who truly want to do some guest blogging, it may be advisable to have your own website, to allow the owner of the well-trafficked site to see that you can write and you know how to make a successful post. If you inter-link your content with your product, there’s a big possibility that you’ll get to open more doors for your business.
3. Bank on customer service
The thing is, people love to recommend services that they love. If you make people believe that they are cared for by a business, they will recommend you to the people they know. For example, KLM Royal Dutch Airlines used social media marketing as a way to connect to their customers. They made sure that they will reply to every customer comment within 90 minutes. They also made sure to solve every problem within 24 hours, resulting in a huge improvement of their customer service.
Today, good customer service can be easily provided with the use of a variety of social media platforms. If your business focuses on customer service, they might just be able to pull in more than their usual amount of customers and clientele.