3 Ways to Grow a Customer Base with Social Media Marketing

So, your startup has finally launched; now it’s time to grow your customer base. Chances are, you want national customers but can’t afford a PR staff and aren’t well equipped to start attracting major media attention just yet. If those things are the case, then social media marketing is your best hope for establishing a nationwide customer base and a necessity for comprehensive inbound marketing. Here’s how startups can use social media to get more customers:

1. Help Solve Problems

A good business owner knows that a product or service can only be successful if it solves a problem. On social media, you can promote yourself simply by helping people out. Search for questions regarding your product or service, and then answer them in the form of a reply. People may retweet, like or comment on your answers, and some of them may end up becoming customers. If nothing else, it gets your name out there.

2. Start Blogging

Press releases are impersonal and way past their prime. Instead, start a company blog and include the keywords that people in your target audience are searching for. Link to high quality sites that are relevant to your content, and comment on other blogs so that you may end up getting quality sites to give you good links back. All of this is not only good for your SEO, it’s great for your social media. Add a social share button to the end of blog posts so that others may share your articles, and then link to them on your own social media pages too. It’s the same concept as the first one; blogging, like any social media marketing tactic, spreads word about your business and gets people talking about you.

3. Reach Out

That expression is a little overused in business today, but in this case it’s the only one that applies. By reaching out to users who ask questions or concerns in their comments and replies, you can build loyalty among your first few customers and that can result in the word-of-mouth acquisition of their friends and followers (both in real life and on social media). Marketing is not just about your product, but about the service you provide customers and the impression that leaves them. Good customer service leads to good exposure, and vice versa.

Social media marketing is no different than anything else you had to do to launch your startup; in the end, you get a result that equals the effort you put into it.