I know a lot of people struggle with social media marketing, so Ben Fewtrell from Smash Social has joined with us to share his knowledge and experience and help some of those that are thinking about using social media, or maybe they’re using social media, but haven’t quite got the results that they want to get yet.
What are the 11 benefits for you and your business if you use social media.
- Increase Brand Awareness.
82% of the population uses social media. they’re using Facebook, using Instagram, they’re using LinkedIn, they’re using Google so it’s a natural place to be able to target potential customers, and let people know that you exist. This saying I learned once is people can’t buy from you if they don’t know that you are in existence, right? They can’t ring you; they can’t contact you; they can’t make an inquiry.
You can do a lot of different things to increase your awareness, but the easiest way is to run what’s called a light campaign on something like Facebook or Instagram. That is where you’re promoting your business to a local geographic area and letting people know that you exist. It could be some helpful content, maybe if you do sponsor the local sports team, you could also do a Facebook campaign promoting that you are their sponsor, and maybe help them recruit new children into that sports team.
Marketing on Facebook, or any of the social media platforms is very cost effective, so you can reach people in a local geographic area for a much lower amount than what you used to be able to do things like newspaper advertising or leaflet drops
- Humanize your Brand
We must humanize things; people don’t buy from social media. People still buy from people, and you can use your social media to really humanize your brand. We have a client up in far north Queensland that has a collision repair shop, and they bring their dogs into work and quite often they’ll post what the dog is up to each day and that gets more engagement and interaction than pretty much any other posts that they put on their social media. What it is doing is it is building this human connection, maybe some of their customers have dogs, maybe some of their customers love animals, it builds that human connection and makes them real.
The other thing is you can showcase things like team members, social media gives you the opportunity to get your phone out, grab a photo of that person and celebrate their birthday, or just celebrate their anniversary of the company, or just celebrate some good work that they’ve done. Introduce them to your social media followers, and that allows your followers to connect with the people within your business.
- Become the Authority in your Industry
That means is that you can use social media to reach your target market and let them know that you know what you are talking about. A great example of this is we have a repairer down in Tasmania, who I’ve seen them doing a lot of their social media posts, like demonstrations of how to do things. So, if you’re a car owner, things like using a Polish that you can buy it from the local Super Cheap Auto. Helpful things like how to make sure your car battery stays charged when you’re on holidays, or how to change a tyre or polishing your headlights, if you’ve got an older car.
What this does is, as you’re doing these Facebook Lives, or even these prerecorded videos, or even can be blog posts that are just shared on your social media, is that your followers are starting to learn from you. As they learn from you, they’re starting to see you as the authority in your industry. If they do have a collision in six months’ time, they’ll be saying to their insurance provider, I want to go there, because I’ve got a connection with them
- Stay Top of Mind.
As you can see there 70% of social media users log into their accounts at least once per day. What that means is, is that I’m more likely to see your business which means you’ll stay top of mind and one of the things with the collision repair industry is it is not something that we need very often. When we do need it, then you want to make sure you are top of mind. One of the benefits of being consistent with your social media is that you will stay top of mind for local community. This is a tool for you to be able to continually imprint your brand on their brain, and make sure that they think of you when they need something.
- Increases Website Traffic
If you have a website, have a look at how many visitors you’re getting to that website, and you’ll probably be surprised at how low a number it is. I always challenge people to have a guess first and then actually go and look at Google Analytics, or whatever analytics you’ve got, and see if you can get the actual number. One of the things that social media does is it allows you to be able to link back to your website and encourage visitors to go to your website and that does a few things. It tells Google and other search engines that your business is a reputable, valuable resource for a potential customer. If potential customers are willing to click through from your social media to your website that sends a signal to the search engines to Google and Yahoo and Bing saying this person is reputable and someone was willing enough to visit their online store.
Now once you get people to your website, then you can give them another experience. Maybe they can opt in for something maybe a newsletter they could download something but at the very least now you can track them around the internet with your retargeting or remarketing. Getting people to your website is probably the end game because that’s where you’re going to convert people into a quote or to contact you or for them to really learn more about your business and feel that they’ve got a real connection.
- Generate Leads
Social media is a great way for you to generate leads. It’s surprising how many leads a collision repairer can generate on social media, if you have a good strategy, if you understand how to use it, it’s a very low commitment place for a consumer to make that commitment, whether it be opting in for something like this for a webinar or training, it could be to go to the website and just express some interest, very low commitment.
- Boost Sales
Generating leads is going to boost sales and of course your profitability. Social media is a is a critical part of your sales process. People are using social media to look for products and services and get recommendations so being on social media, should be part of your marketing plan and your sales process.
- Reputation Management.
Your customers are already talking about you on social media, so you want to make sure that you and your team can respond quickly. Regardless of what the social media post is about, or whether it’s a review, you want to make sure you respond. If you’ve had a negative review from a customer, and you recognize the name, get on the phone, and just ring them and solve it.
When you get positive feedback, you want to be there to thank whoever it is for that positive feedback. If there’s just a general post on your local community group or on your Facebook page, or somebody put something on Instagram and tagged you in it, you want to be there to make sure that you respond quickly. This is one of the things that we see a lot of businesses struggle with, is making sure that they’re monitoring their social media, and being able to manage the reputation. Maybe offer an incentive for a review, movie tickets, a bottle of wine to encourage people to leave positive review and build up review base for Facebook and Google Pages which is important.
- Customer Engagement
Unlike traditional marketing, social media allows your customers to actually converse with you, to have a conversation with you. A collision repairer might be posting up something like a before and after photo, or even doing some custom work on something like a performance vehicle. You might get car enthusiasts jumping on and commenting. That’s awesome. What paint did you use? How did you do that? How long does it take? How much did it cost? Now you can see the customers can easily jump on their phone, and they can make comments and they can have a conversation with you.
Customer engagement is just such a powerful tool. If people are engaging with your social media posts, they’re more likely to see the next one, because that’s how the algorithm works, it is a set of rules that the social media platforms use to decide who sees your posts without you having to pay for them to see it. One of the things you would have noticed is with especially with Facebook, and Instagram, which is owned by meta, is that they made an announcement saying that they were going to prioritize people seeing their friends and families post not business posts and if businesses want to see or get in front of people, they’re going to have to pay, Do you think is it really worth it?
I think that it is, if you’re going to get in front of people, you’re going to have to invest some money and like all marketing, it does cost whether it’s time or money. You’ll get customer engagement and once you get people engaging with you, through your paid posts, they will start to see your organic posts as well.
- Customer Service
This is something that a lot of people don’t think about but, especially with the younger generation they are using their social media to contact businesses for customer service. For example, I come and get my car repaired with you, even if it’s through work provider, I get home and my door won’t lock, the door that you just repaired, there’s a good chance that I’m going to message you on social media and say, hey, my door lock, what can I do about it? Now, if you’ve got nobody monitoring that, then that person is going to get annoyed quickly.
People are expecting an almost instant response when somebody sends you a message through your Facebook, Instagram, or whatever social media LinkedIn platform. You need to make sure that you’re monitoring that and it’s a great way to provide customer service in another way that is instant and is much more leveraged. I would recommend installing the Facebook Messenger chat on your website, because it’s a great way for people to be able to get through to your business that you know they see it as an everyday way of communicating. We need to understand that times are changing, we need to communicate with their customers in a different way.
- Targeted Advertising
A lot of people don’t realize this, but you can use social media to target people in lots of different ways. You don’t just put an ad up and just anybody see it, you can tell Facebook, who you want to see your marketing. For example, you can take all your customers that you have repaired cars for, you can upload their details into Facebook, and Facebook will create a custom audience of just those people. You can then retarget those people that have been into your business before and had a car repaired or you can exclude those people from your marketing.
You can also do targeted based on what’s called a look alike audience. You can do targeting based on their interests. And the way that Facebook does that it allows you to be able to pick who you want to see your ads. And those ads can be really customized.
The other thing is that with social media marketing, you can do things for just a few dollars a day, you don’t have to spend a lot of money, you can spend $5 a day and get a huge impact of local marketing. The other good thing about it is that if it’s not working, you can change it, you can just change some words and pictures, all sorts of different aspects of that marketing, day by day.
If you’re not sure about whether your business is right for social media, or whether we’re right to help you with it, Scan the QR code and book in and have a chat to the team at Smash Social. It’s a 15-minute call, no obligation. Ben has developed a product specifically for the collision repair industry They will make sure that you’re consistent. Consistency rewards.