Social media is exploding and ever-growing in popularity. A lot of businesses are catching the wave, and making profiles on different media outlets to ensure their company’s visibility and customer loyalty. All businesses can profit from this, even if it deals with purely face-to-face services like storage and moving. All you need to do is find the right angle that will represent your business. It is inexpensive, cheaper than actual marketing, but the return of investment can be through the roof.
Make a Plan
First of all, you need a clear plan on what you want the social media to help you with. Since there are dozens of platforms to choose from, and even more ways of making your online presence known, through blogs, videos, and posts, you need to know exactly what you want to achieve. Enhancing the visibility of your brand? Informing your customers of new features? Only when you know what you want to do with the social media outlet of your storage business, will you be able to easily convert it into numbers.
Know the Audience
The second key feature is to create the profile of your typical customer. Think about who benefits most from your business, and you’ll know exactly what kind of content and platform to choose. Depending on the target audience’s age and technical savviness, they might be limited only to blogs discovered through search engines, or YouTube videos, or frequenters of reddit and twitter. The variables you should include are age, gender, location, typical technical proficiency, and platform popularity among the target demographic.
Choice of Platform
The choice of platform is a strategy in itself, as it governs the content you post and how broad and specific of a reach you have.
- Facebook – a laid back, most sociable option out of all of them. Gives great exposure to all ages and profiles.
- Linked in – more professional, but more likely to open up opportunities for partnerships with other companies and professional marketing among peers
- Youtube – although it requires more time to create content, it leaves room for more informative approaches, tutorial videos, and general exposure to audiences
- Pinterest –pinterest is a photo and link gallery that offers the liberty of expressing the more creative side of storage companies, with packing and moving ideas and DIYs
Social Persona
A must-have in your social media endeavor is a social persona. An online face that will represent your company, generate some kind of emotional response with the target audience and communicate with them on a daily basis. This can be a designed mascot or, depending on the platform, you can have your employees as the company’s personas. Like the FedEx and UPS collaboration recently that blew up with social media response. Be creative and approachable, and success is guaranteed.
Call to Action
To ensure the social media exposure converts to actual numbers, have call-to-action buttons on whichever platform you choose. Let the customers follow your blog or profile, discuss, rate and sign up for a newsletter or your mailing list. This is perhaps the only true metrics you have, so don’t let your visitors “dine and dash”. Like seen on the storage Melbourne website, display links that call for users to leave a mark on your site, to fully experience the benefits of the social media.
Monitor Constantly – then re-evaluate
When the conversion numbers start adding up, the graphs from your page’s visits, numbers of likes and so on, sit down and re-evaluate. The goals mentioned in the beginning will always stay the same for your storage company, but the strategies are bound to change. You might notice that some posts or some videos work much better than others. That your demographic is surprisingly different from what you initially targeted. This feedback is a great way to circle back to square one and revise your plans. So never stop monitoring and make the best use of those numbers.
To summarize
Simply because you have a storage company, doesn’t mean you can’t benefit from social media. A common mistake is to believe businesses like these have no other gain than pure exposure and cheap deal announcements. Social media can give a great new face to your company, and one that is widely appealing to the customers, so long as you are willing to take to the more fun side. But don’t get too absorbed in the spirit of social media. What ultimately matters are the numbers. And no original content in the world will mean a thing if your actual business has no ultimate financial gain.
