Social Media: Uniting Local Businesses
At Polar we love working with local businesses, to help them create a brand image to boost sales and beat competitors. Your brand image is incredibly important to how your company is perceived and Social Media has now become the best way to get that image seen. Based in Great Baddow, in Chelmsford, we have access to so many exciting and evolving companies across East Anglia and have the pleasure of being in contact with them regularly via Social Media.
There are a few tips we have picked up along the way that we think can combine Social Media with an effective brand to help local businesses flourish. Whereas before days were spent traveling from network meeting to exhibition to event, now you are able to speak consistently with likeminded people with knowledge to share via these platforms.
A great example of this is the ‘Hashtag Hours’ that we take part in each week. #ChelmsfordHour, #ColchesterHour, #MaldonHour, #BraintreeHour as well as many more for each major town across the county. These hours are scheduled for the same time each week and are focussed on businesses sharing updates, special offers and upcoming events across the network. For us the hashtag hours have been a huge boost to our customer base, with referrals from those who take part a rewarding and exciting result. #ChelmsfordHour has even gone live, so that people who have become close online can meet once a month, follow up leads and continue to build the sense of community that Social Media has created.
One thing we have also noticed about Social Media is how important your brand really is. It is all well and good having a website, brochure and business card with eye catching imagery, but if your social presence remains blank you are failing to reach your potential. Our Social Media Branding packages help you standout where it matters most, by designing pages that perfectly reflect you. As a business it is incredibly important to care for your brand. Your number one salesmen will be your clients and for them to be able to explain to their friends and family how successful your services are with a clear branded message will do wonders for your business.
We are always keen to make it easy for potential clients to interact with us and understand our services. We like to be transparent with our pricing where we can and so the idea of promotional imagery was born. The fact that tweets with imagery are twice as likely to be retweeted has made them an instant success for both ourselves and our clients. By creating branded adverts and formatting them for use on Twitter it allows our services to immediately jump out and grab the reader, knowing how much they will pay and for what. They have been an incredible success and we have lost count of the amount of conversations from new clients that have started ‘I saw your advert on Twitter…’ but do know that since the adverts were introduced our followers have doubled. See our Twitter page for examples of how it works.
So make sure Social Media is being used to its maximum potential. Engage with local business for important referrals and customer sourcing, create striking advertising that reaches across the web through Social Media and make sure your company pages are as vibrant and standout as you are.
With these simple additions to your marketing, boosting sales with Social Media couldn’t be easier.