Have you been wondering, which is the best way to reach your customers in the digital world?
The foundations of marketing dictate that you must always balance and optimize your 4ps, which include your product, its price, promotion and place. By now we hope you have found the best product for the segment you aim for, plus you should have studied and established the best price for it. Now, you must focus on where you place your product and how you promote it. Traditionally, place and promotion referred to physically placing your product in the best possible place, and being able to strategically place billboards, posters or give away flyers. With new technology, you should not be looking at how to physically reach your customer but rather were they are located in the web. This means identifying “place” as social media platforms where they spend most of their time. Understanding how your market behaves and establishing the best possible media to reach them, is another key activity. Your consumers may enjoy reading, or perhaps they enjoy looking at photos and videos. Once you've identified and understood your consumers’ behavior in the digital world, you can promote your products or services in the most efficient way.
When talking about choosing the best social media pages to use, we must always consider a series of components and scenarios. These include segmentation, type of media being used and popularity within your industry.
Segmentation refers to how easy it is to divide and reach your target market. Some social platforms specialize in creating communities and uniting people with similar tastes, opinions or interests.
The type of media being used refers more to how the social platform works and how it can be used. For example, some specialize in images, others just in written content, some in videos, and some combine multiple items.
It is important to analyze how your industry behaves and which medium is the best option to advertise your products or services.
Finally popularity within your industry is essential. Normally this will be tied up to the type of medium used since users and follower will be organically attracted. Nevertheless it's essential to understand its functionality in order to achieve better and more optimal results.
If you are working with something related to design or imagery, you may want to focus on Instagram or Pinterest, whereas someone in film-making will use Vimeo and Youtube and so on.
We hope this tips and insight will help you find more about each social media platform in order for you to find the one that best suits up your needs.
Floristry
As mentioned before, its ideal to match your industry to the ideal social media platform. In this case, for floristry and floral designers, the best ones to use are Instagram and Pinterest for sure.
It is true that you can benefit from any social media platform by having an active account, especially in major sites like Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. But we recommend you to pay special attention to these specific pages that will generate you more traffic, visits and will help you get closer to your niche.
Always have in mind that an active social media page will always generate interest in people, and they will most likely follow it. Plus, many of these social media platforms’ algorithms will automatically and organically promote you for having more activity and by contributing to the community.
So don’t be that boring social media page that posts once every 3 months, will not reply to comments and messages and has a boring feed. Be active and share content on a weekly basis, that is step 1!!!
Being one of the most used and growing social media pages in the last decade, Instagram has everything people expect from social media in a simple and direct way.
As you may know, Instagram is based on posting imagery or short videos, with the sole purpose of attracting more people by the quality and attractiveness of the visual itself. You may add a caption or a comment, but that is secondary, Instagram will help you stand out mainly by your visual content.
Now, considering that you work with flowers and you are trying to show your work, this is perfect. You don’t need to convince people to click on your link, or to read a small brief before actually accessing your picture. You just need a striking picture of your work and Instagram will do the rest.
If your work is eye catching it will, for sure, get other people’s attention and generate clicks and interest in your page. This will result in more traffic and in the long run more clients and sales.
Instagram is great to hook up new clients, attract potential ones and keep you current clients updated of what is going on.
Yet, posting your pictures on Instagram is not the only thing you can do. You can also include hashtags, add stories, join and participate in a community, and much more.
To start with, hashtags. They are always the best way to filter your content and label it under any category you wish. Hashtags are a great resource to approach your community. You should research which hashtags are used in your industry, by your competitors and which are the most popular ones.
Just make a hashtag search on Instagram and the favorite ones will appear to you. You can also search trending posts and pages from your industry and see which ones they use. Select the most popular ones and make sure you use those!
Adding stories is very important, it will show your followers that you are active and you care. Adding on a daily basis stories will help you retain your existing followers and clients, they will be entertained and feel like they're connecting with you.
You don’t need nice fancy photos for these, just conversation starters, fun facts and novelties around you that will interest your niche. Instagram offers a series of tools to make your stories interactive and entertaining so your followers enjoy them even more!
Getting submerged in your community is the best advice out there. Find out who is active within your niche, who is posting same things as you, and follow them. Comment their pictures, give them likes. Share the love and it is just a matter of time until they will share it back to you.
Never stop being nice, respond your comments and messages! Follow people that share your interests and once you are part of the community you will start to see changes!
Another visually strong social media.
While Pinterest’s goal is not only to share visual art but a whole collection of ideas and tips for all sort of topics, they do have a strong visual advantage.
Pinterest tries to share inspiration. It wants its users to find ideas and suggestions for them to create or apply in their life.
Pinterest’s layout will permit you to post pictures of your products and your creations, which can be a hook to other social media pages where you have more information about your business, or directly to your own website.
Once you’ve made a Pinterest profile, you must start saving pins and uploading pins of your own. The best way to do this is by creating boards with different topics of interest.
You can create wedding arrangements boards, bouquets boards, natural flowers boards and so on. Make sure you follow a same style of pictures and sites, so when people see your boards and get interested they will be inclined to save it in order to discover more.
As well as in Instagram, it is very important for you to be active. Saving pins to your boards daily is extremely important, about 20 per day. This will help you get more daily visits and impressions.
Likewise, you should consider uploading one pin from your own per week. This will dd reliability and interest from others. Plus your links and page will travel deeper into the niche and the page.
If you follow these steps, you will create boards of real interest to people. If you don't constantly refresh your boards, people will look at it once and then get bored.
Pinterest is also a great way to get new customers and retain the ones you already have by maintaining an updated collection.
Remember to be active and always be updated!
It is true that Facebook has lost popularity in recent years. Nevertheless it's still the biggest social platform out there, everybody is on it and you must be as well!
Facebook combines every possible medium into one platform. You can find photos, videos, blogs, anything! Facebook versatility makes it a great place to find anything or anyone.
As mentioned before, everyone is on Facebook. This means it is the best place to find people and customers within your niche. You can reach out to them and contact them in an easy way.
Facebook is the best way to put all your content into one single place. Sharing links and posts from all your other social media pages will help you create the best possible profile for your business.
Think of Facebook as your resume. You will include some information about you, direct access to your official web page, you will share your Instagram and Pinterest posts, you may include links to your amazon products and you may even share news or novelty regarding the industry.
Anything about your company must be on Facebook.
If someone wants to know more about your and your page, they will most likely use Google or Facebook. And for this, you must make sure your page is on point and with all possible updated information.
Make sure you Facebook page looks professional, reliable but also friendly!
And once again be active!!
Yelp
People tend to have doubts when ordering products like flowers. They may not know you or not trust for you to deliver what you offer in your page.
They have all the right to be skeptical, it is easy for anyone to post anything on the internet just to make money or for whatever reason. Now, we don't want you to be confused for one of those.
Yelp is basically a social platform where real people post real reviews about your business.
People trust Yelp because they know they are not getting just fancy comments, but rather real opinions from customers similar to them. They will feel identified and see it as a reliable source of information.
Make sure your customers leave you comments on Yelp, saying positive things and encouraging other potential customers to try your services and products.
You must be careful though, you can get negative reviews, and this can prejudice your business.
Google My Business
Google my business will help you gather all your relevant information and put it together on one same place.
Contact information, location, reviews and much more, everything distributed by the biggest search engine and one of the most important companies in the world. Google has offered a wide variety of solutions and tools for business, such as internal communication tools and external publicity and advertising tools.
The amount of reach and influence that google has is something you must take advantage of. This will help you organically reach new customers and be more present within your community and reach.
google my business will help you gain new customers and generate stronger WOM within the people interested in your products and services.
Twitter, Youtube, Linkedin, Reddit
As said before, the more presence you have, the more chances you have to reach more people. Other social media pages may help you gain presence but not in the same manner as the ones previously listed.
Twitter is always a great tool to post news, novelty, new products or just a way to be updated with whatever is going on in the market and industry. Twitter will help you establish better connections with clients and gain a stronger presence within the web.
Unless you are professional florist or you seek to give classes or tutorials, YouTube may not come in as handy as other pages. Creating video tutorial has been a great advertising tools for some expert designers where they show their skills and ideas to other florists, this way they get new customers, sales and visits in their web page.
Nevertheless, creating videos to show you products with a better perspective is also a great way to advertise your products and create backlinks within your multiple sites.
LinkedIn, for B2B purposes can be a great tool. To find more about your competition, possible partners and allies or any other client or provider in general. Is a great way to get in contact with any person or company you wish.
Finally Reddit. Even Though it has a P2P focus, you can still use it to share your content, art, pictures or whatever you wish just to gain popularity and possible traffic. It may be harder to get sales or clients from Reddit since they have a “no business, just real people sharing” philosophy. Still, great to generate presence and for content sharing!
Conclusions
In present time, it is as important to be present in the virtual world as it is to be present in the physical one. Or maybe even more.
Basic marketing principles say you must be able to identify the ideal place to promote your products, and afterwards you must think in what strategies to use.
Place, in the web, refers to which social media or page you choose to sell or place your products. You may use it to generate sales, to gain new customers or to build new relations.
Additionally, promoting you products is as important. Understanding your clients to choose the best social media to promote, which media do they tend to use, do they prefer images or they rather read, and so on. Once you learn these key insight you may build your strategy.
Once you choose the best combination of social media to promote your products and services you just have to be consistent and positive, like on any marketing campaign.
Just remember, whatever you do or whichever social media or strategy you choose, you must always be active and caring!
References
https://floranext.com/top-8-social-media-sites-for-florists/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UgiTBSpNdqo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7dozmbNo1E