Using Social Media to Drive Conversions

Do you have a great product/service that most of your customers love? If so, you should be able to further increase product awareness and sales by creating "online buzz" for your product through social media channels (social networks, wikis, email, calendar events, podcasts, blogs, videos, etc); especially in industries that are competitive in feature sets and price.

In an abbreviated form, atypical sales process can be summarized in the following phases:

• Awareness – customer defines a need for a product or service.
• Research/Consideration – customer researches different company product offerings based on factors like price, features, support, design, reputation, etc.
• Purchase – customer purchases the product online or in-store.
  

Take for example, the portable music player industry which has dozens of companies that offer similar products at similar prices. Two of the most popular include the 32 GB Apple iPod and Microsoft Zune which have very similar features, specs and pricing (see a competitive review at: http://reviews.cnet.com/zune-vs-ipod/). There is a good chance that a customer might buy the iPod over the Zune (or vice versa) depending on the positive social media generated for it – customer recommendations, product reviews, blogs, videos of the device, number of social network followers, etc.

If you offer a great product or service that develops a large advocate base, consider adding social media tools to your website like the free one at addthis.com which is being used on this blog. Your advocates will use the social media tools to promote your product which will increase sales from those that are considering/researching your product.