You’re undoubtedly aware that social media is a great way for businesses to reach potential customers and increase brand awareness. These days it’s an intrinsic part of marketing as it’s cheap, user-friendly and allows access to billions of people.
But while it’s easy for a homewares company to make the most of Pinterest, it can be difficult to be positively active on social sites if your sector is somewhat unglamorous. So how can you make social media work for a business that isn’t typically attractive?
The shock factor
Setting up a page on Twitter or Facebook is easy, whatever your sector – but it’s what you do with this page that makes the difference. The beauty of social media is that the subjects you choose to cover can be a lot more fluid than on your main website.
Use a blog to make comment about things related to your sector rather than your specific services. Find out what is trending on Twitter and use news stories as inspiration for your blog. You might offer pest control services, for example – necessary, but not beautiful. In this case, you might want to keep your eye on the science pages for information about deadly diseases or germs on the rise and use this information in your social content. Make it into an infographic for maximum shareability. It’s not pretty, but it’ll get people reading.
Give your customers the information they need
Usually the drier, less attractive topics cover the aspects of life we all need, rather than what we want. Fashion and travel are subjects many of us are happy to read about… finance is not. However, it is possible to write engaging articles on subjects that are relevant to your business, if they offer inside information that can help your customers.
Total Peace of Mind offers insurance, for example, but on its blog pages, the company provides money-saving hints and tips that attract readers – and customers. Insurance might be an unappealing subject but saving cash ain’t.
Competing for attention
You can always grab attention using a competition. Facebook is a great platform for this with its “share” function. If you run a financial company you could ask the question, ‘if you had £1million what would you do?’, and award a prize for the most outrageous answer. This is a great opportunity for your brand name to be seen by thousands of people within a short timescale.
Social media can be well utilised as a marketing tool even in unglamorous sectors, as long as you take the time to create quality engaging content that your target audience wants to read.