Читать книгу Social Media Marketing For Dummies - Shiv Singh - Страница 53

The consideration stage of the marketing funnel is where you make sure that as the prospective customer goes about making a purchasing decision, she considers your product.

To be included in the consideration stage, use tactics such as product comparisons, special promotions, sales discounts, decision tools, and calculators to convince prospects.

The consideration stage is arguably the most important one because this is the point at which you can snag a loyal customer or forever lose one to a competitor.

Social media marketing plays the most important role at this stage. This is because the referent, expert, and positional influencers (which we define in Chapter 1) help a prospect determine whether he should make the purchasing decision. Increasingly, while making choices between different products, prospective customers look to each other for advice and guidance.

People ask their friends for advice, search the web for customer reviews, and read expert opinions from credible third-party sources. In fact, a study titled, “On Brands and Word of Mouth” that appeared in the Journal of Marketing Research in August 2013 showed that people spread the word on brands online for three reasons: social, functional, and emotional. No longer is it enough to know that people share product and brand opinions online; you need to pay attention to what sharing takes place in your product category and the motivations that drive it.

Your role at this stage is primarily connecting that prospective customer with these credible third-party sources of information. Now, you may feel that connecting a prospective customer to a bad review or to another customer who may not have liked the product is a bad idea, but it isn’t necessarily so. Prospective customers are looking for the best information about a product, and they respect companies that help them research the product more thoroughly. This is important because as a Forbes 2018 study pointed out, 71 percent of consumers who have had a positive experience with a brand on social media are likely to recommend the brand to their friends and family. With that in mind, don’t hesitate to use your existing customers to help you market to your prospective customers. It only helps.

You can’t hide bad reviews on the web, and by pointing to all the reviews and not just the good ones, you establish credibility with your prospective customer. (Besides, we would hope that the positive reviews far outweigh the negative ones.) It is critical to note that reviews do make a big difference, and it is better to have some bad reviews than none at all. In fact, the number of reviews and average rating on a product correlate closely with conversion to purchase, according to a March 2014 Bazaarvoice study on Internet Retailers.

Here are some SMM tactics that you can use at the consideration stage:

 Publish customer ratings and reviews on the corporate website.Make sure that ratings and reviews appear for all products and that you do not censor them. Even if a product gets negative reviews, publish them. In all probability, customers will choose other products from your company. You won’t lose the customer completely.

 Point to authoritative third-party reviews.It’s important to point to credible third-party reviews from recognized experts so that you build trust. Doing so can make the consideration stage a shorter one.

 Encourage prospects to discuss the products.When you’re designing your online catalog, encourage prospects to discuss the product with their friends and family. Make it easy for them to take the product into Facebook to solicit opinions from others using services such as ShareThis (www.sharethis.com), pointing users to the brand’s business page on the social networks, and including email links, too.

 Connect prospective customers to each other.By setting up discussion forums, you can create spaces where prospective customers can exchange notes on the potential purchases that they’re considering. Also point them to existing satisfied customers or real-world testimonials that visitors can rate and comment upon.

 Set up a Twitter account and respond to customer queries.It’s important to watch the chatter about your products and brands across the social web. Where appropriate, respond in a thoughtful, helpful manner to the questions raised. Correct misrepresentations of your products in a similar way, especially those on Twitter. Twitter is useful for customer service. Companies such as Comcast have had great success in using it for responding to customer queries and concerns. But the tone you respond with is critical: You always run the risk of sounding defensive. You’ll probably be doing more damage to your brand than good if you allow yourself to get defensive on Twitter.

 Track a list of websites, blogs, and discussion forums where the product’s target customers spend their time.Track activity on these sites, and participate in conversations about the category, competitors, and customer needs in an authentic, productive, and useful manner.