Social Media –The 5 Reasons Your Business Cannot Survive Without It
Social Media –The 5 Reasons Your Business Cannot Survive Without It
By Chris Paradiso
Social media is no longer just a possible fad. It is now an actually form of communication. If you are an agency owner and have yet to begin using social media to support your sales strategy, you may need to recheck your approach. Social media is one remarkable marketing tool. Let’s talk about five reasons why all businesses will not survive without social media built into their marketing strategy.
Number 1: Social media is extremely contagious—More than likely, the biggest problem of your business is getting your marketing out to as many people as possible for the smallest amount of investment. Social media allows you to target a relatively small sector of people while reaching a large marketing audience. Here’s a quick example: if you can get one person to like your agency Facebook page, that one person will turn into a force multiplier projecting your page to several others pages, which in turn will look at your profile because it’s showing up on their page.
Number 2: The power of word-of-mouth marketing—you can turn people into advertising agents very easily. A person may either see your Facebook page and skip over it without thinking anything or that person may follow that link back to your Facebook page. Now imagine you get a couple hundred people to look at your page–suddenly your chances of more people visiting your agency Facebook page will grow as each person likes your page. This process will continue to repeat and the best about it is that it’s all FREE.
Number 3: The ability to build an audience— social media allows you to develop a marketing audience like no other platform. You do not usually have the option to have people actively attending your advertising but through social media, it works out well. With social media you have a static location where people can come to see your advertisement on their time, and in today’s world people want to work and review things on their time not yours. This allows you to direct traffic to these spots within the Internet world rather than elsewhere on the web.
Number 4: The extreme power of engagement with your customer—with social media you can offer giveaways or incentives to get people to like your page or follow you on twitter. Gathering your audience is the first step but the key factor is the engagement after they have joined your audience. Make sure you’re attracting an audience that you can sell to. For example, if you’re on Facebook giving a free iPad away to those who like your page, are the people that you’re attracting even people that you can sell insurance to? Review your audience and come to understand who they are before you move on.
Number 5: There is nothing more powerful than a client who socially approves of you and your agency—Social media gives you the ability to see if the people who have liked your page did so for their personal gain or if they are actually approving of your insurance agency. Social proof is one of those quiet ways that your agency can turn in ROI on it social media marketing very quickly. One quick way to discourage people within the social media world is to ignore them. Ignoring them will help your agency lose business, so if there’s one key factor in all social media marketing, it is to always respond and never turn a blind eye to a comment.
You’re probably looking at these five key factors and wondering why I left search engine optimization out. Search engine optimization is by far the most powerful tool for all of our agencies, but I’ll save that discussion for my next article.
Christopher Paradiso, CPIA, is President of Paradiso Financial & Insurance Service. He has been acknowledged by several insurance publications as a leader in the industry for his use of digital marketing and social media to help brand his agency and promote other small businesses within his community. Chris has also been recognized for his charity work with The Connecticut Children’s Medical Center.
In 2011, Chris introduced “Paradiso Presents LLC,” a social media program aimed at teaching small agencies how not only survive, but compete in today’s complex online marketing world. Chris resides in Stafford Springs, CT with his wife and two children, Mia and Gianni.
