Social Media Monitoring and the Internet are to become your best friends as an entrepreneur. They are the key to getting your first customer and keeping them. It’s how you reach out to them and share your ideas, products, and services. Here’s how to do it.
Gaining first customers is a big challenge for today’s entrepreneurs; it doesn’t matter if it’s a startup or a long-time organization. In each industry, we can observe big competition in which day by day is increasing, and this trend is not going to change in the coming years. It’s caused by disappearing barriers for market entry, especially now in the era of digitalization. People without bearing big costs decide to work for themselves more readily.
The evidence for this lies in data from Startup Hubs. According to this organization, there are 830,000 startups, in Europe alone, in which 4.5m employees work. For each of those startups, although it may seem simple, they each had to fight for that first customer.
SEE ALSO: How to Influence and Persuade Your Customers
For beginner entrepreneurs, but also for advanced ones, a solution might be social media and an internet monitoring tool. Still, many entrepreneurs argue over what internet monitoring is and what benefits it provides them. Skillful and proper use of this type of tool can earn them huge benefits, especially in first weeks and months of a business.
Tools on the Market
On the market, many of the tools are available, offering such services but with different prices and possibilities. The most popular tools for social media and internet monitoring are Brand24, SentiOne, Newspoint, BrandSpy, Buzzsumo. Before choosing, you should test as many as possible to select the best one or two of them that finally meet your expectations. Each of the mentioned tools are unique, but the commonality lies in their ability to help you achieve your goals be they any of the following.
- Gaining customers
- Following competitor moves
- Tracking mentions of your company
- Real Time Marketing
- Public Relations and Increasing Sales
You can use these tools regardless of the type of your business: SaaS sale, providing legal services, or plumbing. Good news! There is versatility in these tools, and you can apply them in EVERY business.
How These Tools Can Help
For over 2 years, I have used tools like these, and they, on average, provide more than 20% of annual sales, every year. Is this a lot? I believe that in the coming years, it can be a very good result not only for finances but also for the PR. Moreover, I think that it’s better to have a few extra customers. Around 35% income is from customers acquired through ads. A little more than 40% are customers from recommendations, free ads, etc.
Today, I want to refer to the first point: how to gain customers by social media and monitoring tools. Also, I will introduce tools like Brand24. Creating accounts and entering keywords is obviously too easy, so let’s get to the crucial point of this article.
The form of using all your keywords can be various, but nobody knows your customers better than you, so at the beginning, it’s good to experiment until you get the most interesting results from the tool. As follows, you can see examples of using keywords in social media & internet monitoring tools to find your first customers.
Here are the results from 3 separate projects.
Do you lead a bicycle shop with BMX? Great! Someone is looking for them.
Are you a graphic designer and looking for orders? No problem! You should have a closer look at your results from your project. Contact with a potential customer is close at hand. Your task is only to contact the customer and offer your products or services. Just like the person below.
What Does This Cost?
It’s normal that not all results will be satisfying because used keywords can be in different contexts. Assuming that from 225 results only 3-5% are your potential customers, it could turn into 6-11 of your real customers. The total cost of this test and gaining customers is 0$. Completely FREE!
It’s obvious that everything depends on factors like competition, presentation of your offer, and a product’s or service’s price and quality. We can select results from any source: Twitter, Facebook, Blogs, etc. In my case, it’s generally Facebook. Additionally, from a graph, we can state when our potential customers are looking for our products or services, and when we know it, we can turn on our advertising campaign. You can also filter for positive and negative results and select the best ones.
SEE ALSO: How to Use Social Listening to Keep Tabs On the Competition
The next good news is that many of these tools offer free trials. Some of which are 14 days long! Because of this, we can decide which is the best before acquiring one. Use of social media & internet monitoring tools is very easy and the benefits could be unlimited. So, I think it is worth taking a moment to give these solutions a chance. As you have noticed, the process of gaining customers this way is very simple, cheap, and does not require knowledge of advanced tools or finances! So, don’t waste your time, because your competition takes your customers.
In case you are already a user of such a tool, let me know about your experience with it. I will get to know new tools, ideas, and cases with pleasure.
Test, choose, and earn today!
