Thursday, March 28, 2024

BLOG | Using social media to attract new business

Social media has proven a challenging battleground for sales forces. For better or worse, the Internet gives every disgruntled customer a platform to voice their dissatisfaction.

The consequences are two-fold: Negative reviews stall new sales and they allow competitors to steal business. On the bright side: There is a treasure trove of data that people have chosen to make available on social networks, and companies that harness technology can reap the benefits.

For many businesses, the concern surrounding social media is not necessarily how to diffuse public relations (PR) fires, but how to use these platforms to attract new business. More than half of all Americans now own smartphones and they live on them.

According to one recent survey, 79 percent of smartphone owners said that they check their mobile devices within the first 15 minutes of waking up. The same survey found that the average smartphone owner spends nearly 132 minutes communicating on their phones everyday.

In the Philippines, smartphone adoption is at an all time high with local sales increased almost five times the volume sales in 2011, valued at $606.5 million according to JWT Manila’s 2013 list of consumer trends report. The probability of Filipino smartphone users to take a similar path as the Americans is very high.

The quality and quantity of data available on social networks is breathtaking. We know where people live and how they spend their money (based on which brands or specific products they show interest in). We may know which times of the day people are most receptive to sales pitches or ads, depending on when they comment on various social media sites.

One of the biggest challenges is sorting through massive amounts of data to uncover valuable information. Twitter users publish more than 400 million tweets daily; Facebook users check in to the site an average of 14 times per day.

Manually wading through hundreds of millions of posts (in nearly 100 languages) over multiple sites is not feasible. And simply compiling a list of customers who have complained about a competitor is not necessarily very helpful to sales teams; only a small percentage of those leads might result in new sales.

Using social analytics, however, sales organizations can effectively manage their existing accounts and build relationships with new customers. They can see broad patterns in consumer sentiment (e.g. a large number of dissatisfied customers in a small region) and use Big Data to anticipate major industry trends.

Equally important, social media can be used to watch competitors — to gain some insight as to whether a competitor’s new pricing structure or advertising campaign has been successful.

It’s still a growing space, but many retailers have already seen impressive results. LabelSneak, an online discount men’s apparel retailer, grew revenue by 148 percent in less than a year, after implementing IBM?s Smarter Commerce technologies. IBM?s analytic tools allowed LableSneak to immediately understand how promotions, products and brands were perceived by its customer base.

The company analyzed tweets and Facebook comments to gauge responses to each sale, and ultimately used the data to determine what brands to carry, which sales channels to use, and how to increase sales from existing customers.

While social media presents an extremely cost-effective way to grow sales, the real value may lie in the fact that businesses gain a much more detailed understanding of their customers.

In LabelSneak’s case, the retailer not only learned which products seemed to generate the most buzz, but it also learned which sports teams and music its customers preferred. It may not seem like important information, but the better businesses understand their customers, the more effectively they can serve them.

Companies have to stop thinking of customers as potential sales and start seeing them as people — social media allows them to do just that.

The author is the country manger for software group of IBM Philippines

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