Best practices to put your products right in front of your customers
Social media can be a great ally for companies in the indoor air quality industry. Not only for the possibilities to showcase your products in front of a wider audience, but also for the opportunities to establish a more direct relationship with your customers while approaching a new potential target.
A good social media strategy combined with a good sales strategy can do wonders for your company, and help your brand become relevant in a shorter period of time.
Although online presence has become a must for both B2B and B2C companies, not all formulas will give satisfactory results. It is important to test what are the best social media channels, which ones will work better for your type of company and products and what information will you provide your audience with.
B2B companies usually rely on LinkedIn, since it’s the biggest professional network at the moment, but there are great opportunities to explore also in traditional B2C social media channels if we keep one main idea in mind: the power of social media resides in your ability to connect and maintain active communities.
What channels are the best for your company/product? Which ones will facilitate solid community creation and promotion? Where can you find your target market and how can you start conversations with them? Let’s see what’s new and useful for your niche.
First things first: your brand
Companies become relevant when their audience can easily identify with its values and its products/services. This applies to any industry, and air quality is no exception.
Even if your company has entered the market recently, it’s crucial to establish a strong and reliable brand personality from the start, since it will help you to generate trust within your potential target.
If you want to make a difference in the social atmosphere, start with 3 questions:
- What is the personality of your brand?
- What are your core values?
- How is your company helping users?
Once you provide the right answers, it is time to focus on the social media channels that could benefit you the most, according to your type of product and industry.
SOCIAL MEDIA CHANNELS: WHAT AND WHY
Let’s see some of the most popular social media channels, and what are the pros and cons of each of them if your company belongs to the air quality industry:
Facebook/Meta
Yes, it still exists, and there are more people using this platform than we think.
Pros: advertising is still very affordable and it gives you the possibility to create different segmented audiences with very specific characteristics
Cons: interaction with company pages is very limited unless you promote your posts
It’s a great platform for engaging and getting to know more about what are the latest thoughts on a specific topic, thanks to the use of hashtags.
Pros: the possibility to be as much active as you want since Tweets are short, quick and easy to deliver. The same goes for interaction; the more active, the better.
Cons: it is very time-demanding. If you or your team don’t have time enough to create and reply to Tweets in almost real-time, it’s better to opt on another social media channel.
It is the biggest professional network platform by far.
Pros: the possibility to connect with decision-makers, experts from your niche and of course, potential clients.
Cons: personal profiles work better than company profiles. To make your company visible, you should post regularly on your company page and invite your network to interact with your publications.
We may think that this is a platform for young generations, but Instagram is getting more and more popular independently of the age range.
Pros: Just like Facebook, it offers hundreds of possibilities to create segmented ads, and it’s very affordable. You can use it to promote new products, demos and webinars, newsletter subscriptions, etc.
Cons: if your product/service isn’t specially visual-attractive, you’ll struggle to engage and grow your audience.
LATESTS TRENDS
The how-to videos, webinars and online events
Video formats are gaining power within the social media world. It’s a resource that’s easy to consume and attractive for your audience, and it gives great advantages to presenting your air quality product in a more didactic way.
Some companies are creating video content to explain the main characteristics of their products, webinars to solve Q&A and online events hosting experts in the air quality niche. Videos are easily sharable, and they can have multiple lives if we know how to repurpose each content.
Influencers and air quality experts
There are some air quality experts that already count on a big audience that trust her/his ideas, and their online presence is getting stronger and stronger.
Some players in the air quality industry are aware of this, and try to count on experts to help them evaluate and present their products in front of bigger audiences.
Testimonials are key to generating trust, and users tend to rely on those people that have already tested a product and give their feedback in the most honest way.
Don’t be shy with creativity
The possibilities to grow your business online are countless; it’s just a matter of study what are the best ways to connect with your audience, choosing the channels you consider better and testing continuously until you find the right formula. Don’t be shy with creativity, try different approaches, innovate and be patient; online approaches might take time in some cases, especially in the air quality sector, which is just starting to position and grow online.
Whether you are focusing your attention on one social media channel or on more than one, remember these 3 ideas:
- Be active.
It’s better to have 2 well-curated social media channels than 5 that look completely abandoned.
Social media is all about being social – obviously, interacting and providing content on a regular basis. If your time, effort and resources to keep different social media channels alive are limited it’s better to focus on just a few and make the most out of them.
Choose those channels in which you can approach your target audience better and create a routine for your publications.
- Share quality content
Study your community and try to add as much value as possible by sharing quality content.
Being active on social media doesn’t mean posting for the sake of posting. There has to be a value behind it, something that can help your readers in a way and also in their decision making.
Ask yourself what are the main pain points your community experiences towards a specific topic, and offer practical solutions around it. What are the common questions about air quality solutions? Can you create content that can help your community sort them out?
- Always reply to your community’s comments and messages
Don’t ignore the comments and messages you receive from your community. Social listening is a powerful tool straight connected to customer pain points and possible solutions.
Engage whenever possible, solve questions and interact with your audience, it’ll make them trust your company and services, and at the same time, it will offer you an open window to look into your community’s ideas l, needs and desires. Use interaction to understand better the relationship with your customers, and to improve in any aspect that can upgrade communication and customer experience.
And finally, keep in mind the following:
- Make it easy to identify what you offer, and what are the benefits of using your product/service. It seems so obvious that some companies forget about it: tell your audience about what you do and how you do it.
- Be on-brand: your online presence has to be as uniform as possible. Don’t forget to look after your brand’s colours, typography, logos and other visual elements that help you look consistent
- Make yourself reachable. People respond to people. Make your contact details easy to find, and make sure you can reply to any enquiries in a short period of time. Automatisation is a useful tool, but don’t abuse it.
