Why people contact brands on social media

Increasingly, customers prefer to contact brands via social media over traditional methods:

• Nearly 35% of consumers nominate social media as their preferred method of customer care
• Less than 25% prefer website or live web chat customer care
• Less than 20% prefer email-based customer care
• Call centre customer care comes in last place with just over 16% of consumers preferring phone-based customer care.

They may reach out to:

• Request pre-sale information
• Give feedback
• Complain

Customers also post about their customer care experiences on social media, with 47% of consumers aged 18-34 complaining about a brand’s customer support via social media.

Customer expectations online

Customer care is one of the most important aspects of running a business. Quality customer service leads to greater brand loyalty and higher customer spending, while poor customer service may force customers to abandon a brand.

With more than 60% of customers now expecting brands to offer customer support on social media, it has never been more important to provide social media customer care.

Customer expectations on social media response times are high with:

• 42% of customers expecting a response to their social media complaint within one hour
• 32% expecting a response in under 30 minutes
• 11% expecting an immediate response.

Thirty per cent of customers will switch to a competitor if a brand does not respond to their enquiry or complaint.

Benefits of social media customer care

When done well, social media customer care can have huge benefits for your company.

Social media customer care is highly cost-effective. It costs one dollar to resolve an issue on social media, which is one-sixth the price of resolving an issue via a call centre. Social media customer care agents are more than 160% more efficient than voice agents.

Facebook and Twitter are 48% more accurate and 44% faster methods of delivering customer care responses than email.

High quality social media customer care can yield:

• 92% customer retention
• 81% greater annual increase in revenue from customer referrals
• Increased customer spending of 20%-40%
• Annual return on investment increase of 30.7%
• Improved customer satisfaction rates by a margin of 26.6%

Providing good quality timely customer care via social media reduces call centre and other customer care costs and, most importantly, creates happy customers who will stay loyal to your brand.

Stats and images from Websitebuilder.org. See the full infographic here.

In this three-part guide to business blogging for dummies, you’ll find out how to get your blog off the ground, how to write a great business blog and how to share your blog with the world to build a loyal following and convert leads.

To start you off, here are the key questions you need to ask yourself when making a business blog part of your content marketing strategy.

Why are you writing a business blog?

Like any other undertaking, the ultimate purpose of your blog will be to boost your business. Focussing on the specific aims you want your business blog to achieve will help you achieve success.

Your blog might be an introduction to your business, a content marketing tool, an information resource for your customers, a hub of thought leadership, or all of the above.

Think about what you want your readers to do, not what you want to do. Don’t focus on driving traffic to your website, increasing subscriptions or making sales, but on creating engaging content that will encourage your readers to share, to subscribe and (eventually) to make a purchase.

Who are you writing for?

Your blog is a conversation between you and your readers, so first you need to know who they are.

Carry out research into your target audience and develop a suitable tone of voice to make sure the content you create and the language you use are the right match for those demographics.

What will you write about?

Your blog should cover topics that your target audience is interested in and answers their questions, even before they have them.

You can find out what people are currently searching for using tools such as Google Keyword Planner or by analysing your own site’s search history.

By focussing on a small range of topics that you are an expert in, you can work on establishing yourself as an authority in your industry.

What blogging platform will you use?

The most important practical decision to make when getting started with a business blog is choosing where your blog will live.

If you don’t host your own website, the best free platform to use is WordPress. It’s easy to use, it offers everything a small business needs and it’s easy to customise to match your brand and the rest of your site.

In fact, almost a quarter of all websites make use of WordPress services in some form according to W3Techs.

What will your blog be called?

If you don’t give enough thought to your blog’s title at the onset, you’ll probably regret it later. Simply using your brand name is fine, as long as the title gives readers an idea what to expect.

If you are hosting the blog on your own website, the URL should be straightforward: yourname.com.au/blog or blog.yourname.com.

If your blog will be an independent entity, it’s important that you register your own domain name rather than using the free URL provided by your hosting platform. Not only does a default domain name look unprofessional, but you also won’t have as much control or access to support in the event that something goes wrong.

Who will write your blog?

You don’t have to write all your blog content yourself, unless you prefer it that way. Your business blog can have a single author or multiple writers, who can all write anonymously under your brand or use their own identities to keep your content varied and personal.

If you don’t have the resources to write your own blog in-house, you can hire a professional blogging service to keep your blog updated with fresh content on a regular basis. As you become more established, you can invite other bloggers in your industry to write guest posts in exchange for exposure.

What type of content will you create?

Blogs don’t have to be all about words. If you want to discuss a topic that would be more suitable as a slideshow, video or podcast, these can also be published to your blog.

How often will you publish?

Starting a business blog is one thing – keeping it going is another.

The more often you can update your business blog, the more you will be rewarded. However, as a small business you may not have the resources to update your blog every day, not to mention the risks of burnout and running out of fresh topics.

We recommend publishing a new blog post at least once a week.

Now that you’ve got your business blog up and running, next time we’ll look at how to write your first blog post.

But did they explain to you exactly why blogging is such an asset? Or did they fall back on jargon about SEO and dazzle you with impressive statistics about how companies that prioritise blogging have 97% more inbound links and are 13 times more likely to achieve positive marketing ROI than those that don’t? (HubSpot)

While all this is true, it only tells part of the story. We understand that you need something more relatable than that if you’re going to be committing your time and money.

So what are the advantages of business blogging?

Blogging gets you noticed

Everyone wants more people to visit their website. While you can help people to find you by improving your search engine ranking and posting ads, one of the most effective ways to get your site noticed is to make it harder to miss.

Every time you publish a blog post, you grow your site by one page. On average, companies that blog have 434% more indexed pages than those that don’t (HubSpot), which means lots more chances to show up in search results.

If you’re writing about interesting and engaging topics, people are more likely to share your blog posts on social media, which drives more visitors to your site.

Blogging establishes your authority

The focus of your business blog should primarily be on answering your customers’ questions.

When you produce informative blog posts that cover all aspects of the topic at hand (whatever it may be), using language that your readers are able to understand, you’re building your reputation as an authority in your field.

If someone asks you or your sales team a question, and you’re able to direct them to something you wrote that includes all the information they need, you’re showing that your expertise can be trusted. Linking to someone else’s explanation can do quite the opposite.

Blogging makes people like you

Even if your business is already successful and your customers trust you, do they really like you?

Business blogging personalises your brand, making it easier for people to relate to your ideas and values and helping you to develop lasting relationships.

Whether you invite your own experts to publish blog posts using their own names, faces and personalities, or you publish anonymously under your brand’s established identity, your readers will come to know what to expect from your business blog, and – as long as you make the right impression – they’ll keep coming back for more.

Blogging gives you all the content you’ll ever need

Many people starting out in business blogging worry about how to come up with new topics to write about. If you look back over your recent social media updates, newsletters and other promotions, you’ll quickly see that you are already writing content.

Think of your business blog as a central hub where you can inform your customers about what’s happening in your business, as well as other topics they’re interested in reading about. If you commit to publishing on a regular basis (ideally once a week), that means you’ll already have four topics for your next monthly newsletter and more excuses to post updates to your Facebook and Twitter followers.

Business blogs are the ideal testing ground for new ideas too, and sometimes the exercise of coming up with fresh content on a regular basis can lead to you striking gold in unexpected places.

Blogging keeps on giving

Blog posts aren’t a flash in the pan like social media updates, billboards or TV ads. Older entries will stop trending and get pushed off the front page eventually, but they stick around.

While some of your blog posts may be short-term in nature, most will continue to be of interest long after they are published. It doesn’t matter how deep they’re buried in the archive, your informative and authoritative resources are just a quick Google search away for interested readers.

If you do notice that some blog posts are performing exceptionally well, you can promote these to a more noticeable location on your website and re-push them on social media. You should also think about updating older posts to keep them relevant.

Blogging keeps your customers informed

Your business blog shouldn’t just be about self-promotion, but if you do have news that your customers will be interested to hear – whether it’s a sale, product launch or change of address – your blog is the perfect place to mention it.

With a blog, you can also go into much greater detail than a snappy advert or 140-character tweet allows. Those promotional activities will put eyes on your site, but it’s your blog posts that will provide all the information and generate leads.

Blogging makes you money

Of course it does! Otherwise, why bother?

Up to now, we’ve discussed your business blog as a way to establish your brand online and develop relationships with your customers, because this is the attitude you should be writing with.

At the end of the day, every promotional activity you invest in should deliver real rewards for your business. So how does writing a blog help with that?

Your blog posts bring more traffic to your website, which means more chances to convert interested readers into leads. You can make sure this happens by including a call-to-action (CTA) link in every post, which interested readers can follow to take the next step in the buyer’s journey.

Not every CTA should be a direct attempt to make a sale – in fact, this can often be off-putting and make you look a little desperate. Instead, you should provide links to more engaging content that will give your readers even more information about the subject they’re interested in and help them to answer their queries.

So on that note, why not find out more with our five reasons to start a business blog.

When you’re marketing your business, every action you take needs to be done with a clear audience in mind. If you try to write something general that will appeal to everyone, it’s likely you won’t make a connection with anyone.

Who is your target audience?

What does your business do better than the competition? These differentiating factors are the strengths you should be promoting and the reasons your customers choose you.

The car industry is just about the best example there is of similar products being clearly differentiated along brand lines. Many people need to buy a car, but there’s a big difference in the priorities of car buyers who choose a BMW (marketed for luxury and performance) or a Volvo (renowned for safety and reliability).

It’s not just what you’re selling, but who you’re selling it to. If you’re marketing a range of perfumes or cosmetics, are your customers women who want to look and smell great or men buying gifts for their partners who want to make the right impression? These two groups have very different goals, and your content will need to change accordingly.

So how can you find out what your audience wants?

Ask them.

If you are already established and have a customer base, find out what it is about your business that keeps people coming back.

You can call or e-mail representative customers directly, but a less intrusive way to get feedback from a broad range of customers is to invite them to complete a survey.

Sites like SurveyMonkey make it easy to create polls and questionnaires that you can post to your website or social media accounts to find out everything you need to know about your customers’ experiences and expectations.

Aim to keep your surveys as short as possible and show your customers that you value their opinions and the time they’ve taken by offering a discount or freebie upon completion, or entering survey respondents into a prize draw.

Find out what they’re searching for

You can find out what search queries related to your business are most popular right now using Google Keyword Planner. Does your content respond to these types of queries, or are you answering questions no one is asking?

Check how your site is performing

If you already have a website or business blog up and running, your CMS should include the tools you need to learn what search queries brought the most visitors to your site. Compare this to your keyword research: are you ranking for popular search terms?

Even if people are landing on your pages, are they satisfied with what they find there? Using your CMS and other tools such as Google Analytics, you can check factors such as the length of time people stay on pages and their conversion and bounce rates to discover which content is engaging your customers and which needs an overhaul.

Put yourself in their shoes

If you want to get an idea what it’s like for your customers, set yourself a number of basic goals and see how quickly and easily you can accomplish these on your website.

Read your landing pages and blog posts as a customer would. Do they answer your questions? Do they push the right emotional buttons?

If you already know what you’re looking for, how easy is it to reach your destination and make a transaction? Patience is in short supply online, and the longer it takes your customers to find what they’re looking for, the more likely they are to try somewhere else.

Test your main competitors’ websites in the same way. Is their content more or less engaging and user-friendly than yours?

Once you know people are looking for, find out more about the buyer’s journey and how you can use content every step of the way.

When it’s done badly, you’ll have wasted time and money producing content that no one wants to read or share.

There are many common traps that businesses fall into when starting out in content marketing. Find out how you can avoid them with our guide to content marketing dos and don’ts.

1. Don’t make it all about you

The most common content marketing mistake is making your content too self-promotional. Whether it’s boasting about your achievements or relentlessly plugging your new product, self-serving content turns off readers and can even damage your existing customer relationships.

Quality content answers your users’ questions and helps to solve their problems. Sometimes this might involve your new product launch, but your customers’ needs should be the focus of the conversation, not yours.

2. Don’t guess what your audience wants

What are your customers’ needs? Assuming that you have the answer before you even know the question won’t get you very far if no one is searching for what you’re offering.

There’s no excuse for not knowing what your site visitors are looking for when you have the tools to tell you precisely that. Google Trends and Google Keyword Planner are great ways to find out what search terms are currently trending, and you can find out what search queries are bringing people to your site through your CMS.

3. Don’t ignore analytics

Delving deeper into what brings people to your site can offer invaluable insights into the type of content that’s most likely to engage your readers are convert them into leads and sales. Analytics is about more than counting page views, and by finding out what content is driving traffic to your site and what’s being shared on social media, you can refine your content marketing strategy.

4. Don’t be boring

If you only think about your content as a sales tool, you’re never going to resonate with customers. Content should be relevant to your target audience, covering topics they are interested in and actually want to read about. If you can keep on top of the latest developments in your field, you could even become a trusted source for news.

5. Don’t just rely on text and images

Business blogging is a powerful tool, but you shouldn’t limit your story to words and pictures. Facebook recently announced that more than 500 million users watch videos every day on that platform alone, so if your short blog post would work better as a video, it could enjoy more views and shares that way.

A step-by-step guide might be ideally suited to a slide presentation, while an in-depth discussion could be a better fit for a podcast. You can get more value out of existing content by retooling it for different media.

6. Don’t stuff keywords

When it comes to writing your content, don’t make the mistake of stuffing it with keywords to improve your search ranking. Google and other search engines have long been wise to this practice, and a high proportion of repetitive keywords is more likely to see your site penalised rather than benefit.

Keywords are still important for helping users find your content, as long as they are used sparingly for the greatest effect. For advice on how to choose keywords, see our content strategies for different search queries.

7. Don’t underestimate titles

The headline is the first thing people see when they look at your content. If it fails to grab their attention, it will also be the last. You should have an idea of what the title will be before you start writing a piece of content, and you should spend as long as you need tweaking it afterwards to make sure it’s just right.

8. Don’t forget calls to action

You don’t want your buyers’ journey to end at the first step. Including a call to action (CTA) encourages interested customers to read more and advance towards your goal, whether that’s making a purchase, giving your staff a call or signing up to your newsletter.

9. Don’t be irregular

Regular updates to your business blog can lead to a significant increase in traffic and leads, and losing that momentum will cost you. At the minimum, you should aim to publish fresh content at least once a month, but the more often you’re able to provide, the better. Read more about how often you should publish blog posts.

10. Don’t forget to share

You might be publishing impressive content on a regular basis, but if you don’t actively promote this content, it won’t reach its potential audience. On the other hand, over-saturation by sharing too broadly can also dilute the impact of your content, so it’s important to find out which social platforms are the best fit to make the most of your quality content.

If you’re still sceptical about the benefits of content marketing for your business, check out these five reasons to start a business blog.

Using tools such as Google Analytics and features offered by your Content Management System (CMS) and social media, you can get a clear picture of how content marketing helps SEO, generates leads and drives sales.

Why are these insights important?

Analysing the impact of all the marketing content you put out, from blogs to videos and podcasts, will reveal what type of content is working for you and what isn’t.

Don’t forget that content marketing is all about helping you achieve your business goals. Finding out which content is most successful enables you to focus your marketing strategy on what works, producing more valuable content and avoiding wasting time and money on less successful content.

If you’re not already using Google Analytics, that’s the best place to start to gain insights about how content marketing is working for you. But it shouldn’t be the only tool you use.

What are the most important metrics?

Analytical tools let you measure your content’s success from so many different angles, it can be overwhelming at first. Not all of these metrics are equally important however, and narrowing your focus to what is important will give you a clearer picture of how your content is performing where it matters.

These essential metrics can be broken down into four categories, answering the questions:

• who is consuming your content?
• who is sharing your content?
• how does content marketing generate leads?
• how does content marketing drive sales?

1. Consumption metrics

These are the simplest metrics to measure, because it usually comes down to a number – how many people clicked on your blog post, watched your video or downloaded your file.

If you are publishing content to your own site, your CMS will inform you how many people viewed each piece of content. Many popular CMS platforms like WordPress also provide a more detailed breakdown of your audience, such as their location and the search terms that brought them to your site.

If you are publishing content to other sites, these often provide tools that can give you similarly detailed information on who is consuming your content, like YouTube Analytics for videos and Slideshare and Scribd for documents.

2. Sharing metrics

Measuring the success of content marketing doesn’t end at counting page views. You also need to know if people are sharing your content, as this will help it to reach a much wider audience and bring more traffic to your site.

Google Analytics is still the best tool for monitoring how your content is performing in the wider world, but you can gain more specific insights into the behaviour of your users by signing up to the social media sites where they are most likely to share your content.

If you’re not sure where your content is being shared, you can track inbound links through your CMS to find out how people are arriving at your site. If you’re new to social media, see our guide to Australia’s most popular social media sites for ideas where to focus your attention.

All the major social media platforms have tools that allow you to see how many times your content has been Liked, Retweeted, Pinned or +1’d, and you can encourage users to share your content by adding these social buttons wherever it’s published.

Of course, when it comes to encouraging people to share your content, the most important thing is to make sure you’re producing quality content that people will actually want to share.

3. Lead generation metrics

Content marketing isn’t a popularity contest, and it doesn’t matter how often your content is being shared and consumed if it doesn’t produce leads for your business.

Your CMS should include lead generation metrics that let you see how many people took further action after consuming your content, such as completing a web form, signing up to your newsletter, downloading an eBook, leaving a comment, subscribing to updates and other trackable activities. Google Analytics can provide further insights into less obvious ways your users’ behaviour can lead to conversion.

Comparing the conversion rates of your content marketing to your overall conversion rate will make it clear which types of content are the most successful and which are not performing.

4. Sales metrics

Finally, metrics can also tell you how content marketing is driving sales and making you money. Your ecommerce platform should make it simple to track the origin of online sales, and your CMS could also reveal what content users consumed before completing offline sales.

An effective way to trace sales back to individual content pieces is to include a unique Call to Action (CTA) and URL for each piece you publish. If you want to know whether more of your sales come from new or existing customers, you can offer your existing customer base exclusive or first access to content and monitor how it performs compared to public content.

Is content marketing helping you achieve your business goals?

Success is relative, and even if you are seeing leads and sales as a result of content marketing, you can evaluate whether this strategy is achieving the level of success you need by measuring its ROI.

This will tell you whether the investment you’re making to produce regular content is delivering as you hoped, or if your content marketing strategy needs an overhaul to help you reach a wider audience and convert more customers.

Read our crash course in content marketing to find out how to write winning content that will benefit your bottom line.

1. Attracting

The first stage of selling to many customers is attracting them to you. Also known as building awareness, potential customers often don’t know about your company, your product/service or even what it is that they really want. By providing relevant information through blogs, and other pages that can be found through search engines, you can turn strangers into visitors.

Content for this stage is often educational, something that solves a pain point and rarely anything too salesy or promotional. Think about the questions someone might have about their current situation that you can help solve.

2. Converting

If your potential customer knows about your company or its offering – or you’ve taught them in the previous stage – they go on to consider what’s the best fit for them. You want to convince them to go with you and convert them into a customer.

This is the stage when they compare their choices and go into more depth for their potential options, so the more information you can give them about why your product or service can best serve them, why it’s the best value, and ultimately why it’s the best choice for them, the better.

3. Closing

Once your customer has made their decision, you need to give them a reason to buy from you. It may be that you’re the only business that can offer a specific solution, but if you have competitors then you need to make sure you stand out. For customers that have come through the buyer journey with you, you’ll already stand out.

Some buyers, however, will come straight to your site at this stage. For them, you’ll stand out partly on what you’re offering (including cost and after purchase support) but also on factors such as case studies, testimonials and examples of your work in action that can show why they should pick you.

4. Delighting

Making the sale should never be the last transaction with a customer. Depending on what you’re selling, there are hundreds of ways you can reach out to make sure they’re getting the most from their purchase – which means they’re more likely to be pleased with what they’ve bought and satisfied with you. A happy customer is not only likely to recommend you to others, they’re more likely to be a repeat customer too, which is often a lot easier to get than a brand new client.

Content can help customers post-sale in a number of different ways. Video tutorials can help them get to grips with their new product more easily, while a specially designed app or an e-mail newsletter (with occasional coupons) will help keep your company in their mind. These can all go a long way to showing that you go above and beyond the call of duty.

By creating content for each step of a buyer’s journey, you can maximise the effectiveness of your content marketing campaign and increase your online sales.

Many business owners are still wary of the internet and prefer to stick to traditional – or outbound – marketing techniques. Combining the two methods, however, can have even better results for a business.

What is outbound marketing?

Outbound marketing is the traditional way of doing things, and can generally be seen as an interruptive practise. It reaches out to potential customers (whether that’s through mailbox drops, cold calls or advertising) and hopes that they become customers.

These methods generally interrupt what someone is doing (whether that’s a phone call while they’re busy or an ad during a TV show they’re watching) and it’s becoming easier for people to avoid. Caller ID lets people screen calls, TV viewers can record shows and skip the ads (or sign up for something like Netflix to avoid them completely) and ad blockers let people browse online without seeing any advertisements.

While outbound marketing may be becoming less effective, it can still be a great way to get your name out there and to let people know about a new product or an upcoming sale.

What is content marketing?

Content marketing – sometimes referred to as inbound marketing – works by having potential customers come to you (generally through search engines, social media sites or because they’ve heard about you elsewhere) rather than you going out to them.

You do this by creating content for your site that people want to read, watch or interact with. While entertaining content can be a huge draw, generally the most successful campaigns provide helpful information for customers (and potential customers).

You can do this by creating tutorials, writing reviews, maintaining a blog, making videos or anything you can think of as a way to give information to visitors. As well as helping keep people on your site, great content can also help you rank better in search engines.

Why is content marketing important?

Firstly, with so many ads prominently displaying a website address, it makes sense to engage in content marketing. Otherwise, what are people going to find once they get to your site? They may be able to book an appointment or buy a product, but often people want more.

Almost everyone researches a product or service online these days, so the more information you can provide them, and the more reasons you can give them to come back to your site or to share a link with someone they know, the more likely you are to increase your sales.

Every business in every industry can benefit from content marketing.

Take a cinema for example. As a rule, people will go to a cinema’s website when they want to buy tickets or to check what films are showing at the moment. By adding a blog – with movie reviews, interviews with directors, opinion pieces etc – you’ll give people a reason to go to the site more often. Once they’re there they might see a film that catches their eye, learn about something they might not have thought about going to see or share an article with a friend.

A hardware store might want to go a different route. Instead of entertaining pieces about the industry, it would be more likely to focus on handyman tips – how tos, tutorials and guides. Written well, these will have people coming back to you every time they have a job on and when they don’t realise they have the right tools, it’s likely you’ll stick in their mind for that too.

Not only does inbound marketing let you help someone (and shape their opinion of you positively), it also helps you position yourself as an expert in the field.

How do you get started?

Before every content marketing campaign comes the content strategy. Just creating content can be effective, but it can often miss the mark without you knowing why.

To make your campaign more successful, you need to do a bit of research. Do this by working out who your target market is and what problems they might be having.

There are plenty of ways to do this. Think about the questions you get asked most often (if you have a customer service team, they’re often a gold mine of information), ask customers what problems they have or have a look online to see what people are asking about.

Your content should cover every step of the buyer’s journey – from making someone aware of a product or service and comparing their options to solving their problems and making sure everything goes smoothly in the future.

As you start creating content you’ll be able to see what’s most popular with your audience. Use this to work out what you need to write more about – and use social media discussions, blog comments and your analytics data to round out the picture – and you’ll soon notice an increase in traffic and, hopefully, sales.

Image: “Math teacher” by Blondinrikard Fröberg is licensed under CC BY 2.0