9 Facebook Marketing Mistakes You Should Avoid While Using Best CRM For Small Business

Now that Facebook has become the de facto social focal point for just about everything on the internet, it is more important than ever for users of best CRM for small business to harness the full power of this social media platform or be left behind by those businesses that truly make use of Facebook. Fortunately, there are a number of common mistakes that can be avoided by owners of best CRM for small business on Facebook, that if fended off can beyond doubt help your brand excel in your targeted Facebook audience’s news feeds.

Now that Facebook has become the ‘de facto’ social focal point for just about everything on the internet, it is more important than ever for users of best CRM for small business to harness the full power of this social media platform or be left behind by those businesses that truly make use of Facebook.

In our previous article on how to create a custom Facebook audience from your easy to use ConvergeHub CRM for SMB, we have described how small businesses can use their CRM database to send targeted Facebook ad, by creating a list of the custom audience, to draw in prospects to their business websites.

93% of marketers use Facebook advertising regularly, which translates to about 3 million businesses that use Facebook to market their business.- Facebook Click To Tweet

While it might seem like that, all you need is a good page, a sound profile and some regular posts to get your contents really stand out in the crowd. However, the deluge of contents on Facebook often makes it hard to achieve that.

Fortunately, there are a number of common mistakes that can be avoided by owners of best CRM for small business on Facebook, that if fended off can beyond doubt help your brand excel in your targeted Facebook audience’s news feeds.

  1. Leaving Your Profile Incomplete

One of the most widespread yet easy-to-avoid mistakes that many small and medium businesses make is not filling up their profile diligently. Make sure that apart from appealing images your page has your organization’s address, hours, and other necessary contact information. While this might seem like a no-brainer stuff, but you will be really astonished to know how many businesses leave their profile incomplete and visually unappealing that ultimately makes them lose the footfall of many prospective visitors on their page.

  1. Failing to Promote Your Content

It is known to many, that Facebook’s algorithm is a complicated and tricky one. Therefore, while it might seem that just by sharing your content people will magically flock to it, but in reality, it is far too easy for your posts to get obscured by the avalanche of contents that gets posted on any user’s daily news feeds. Fortunately, Facebook has a plethora of built-in paid and free tools to help you promote your content and drive customers to your page.

  1. Ignoring Video Posts

According to Facebook’s own stats, it has been noted that business pages that regularly share video contents outperform image or text-based posts by up to 135 percent. However when you share your video, make sure that you are using Facebook’s native video player, as these video posts are ranked much higher by Facebook’s algorithms than embedding videos from other sides like Vimeo and YouTube.

  1. Failing to Engage Your Audience

Just creating and uploading post regularly is not enough. As a social media platform, Facebook is a place where people come together and share information. Audience engagement, therefore, plays a substantial part in Facebook’s algorithm.  Hence, to make your feeds to stand out in Facebook you need to engage your audience.  One of the most common and easiest means to do this is to create open-ended posts that encourage audiences to reply and replying to comments posted on your post. Therefore, create posts that ask open-ended questions by using your imagination.

  1. Posting too Sporadically

One of the main things about Facebook marketing is that owners of best CRM of small business who uses Facebook for fetching prospects and leads often forget to stay in the user’s news feeds. This means you need to upload your posts on a regular basis, maybe even multiple times in a day, depending on the demographic scale of your business. However, too many posts on Facebook can also make you to get un-followed. Therefore, look into how other businesses in your area are posting and then achieve the fine balance of how many posts you need to upload on Facebook everyday to keep your business growing.

  1. Making Your Page Difficult to Find or Share

Your Facebook page just like your business website is essentially the “face” of your business. However, if you assume that users will automatically find your Facebook page, just after you have created it, you are wrong in your assumptions. Therefore, use Facebook widgets like “share” button of your Facebook page along with your Facebook page’s URL on your website, other official materials, and on your business cards. In other words, link your Facebook page in as many places as possible.

In addition, always remember that your website, Twitter profile, Facebook and other social media profiles use the same name, title or keywords so that your audience can easily find and share your posts.

  1. Not Informing Your Followers Before You Go Live

Since Facebook introduced the Facebook Live feature in 2015, this has become one of the most popular ways to engage your audience. According to Facebook, the use of Facebook Live has risen 330% since its inception to the present times. Moreover, Facebook’s algorithm promotes live videos more than any other posts on its platform. Therefore, if you plan in advance and promote your Facebook Live posts you will certainly find more interactions and hence more engagements on your wall.

  1. Failing to Harness the Power of Giveaway

Everyone loves free stuff. Hence, small and medium businesses must take advantage of this instinctive human liking for free stuffs by using Facebook as a platform for giveaways.

For example, not long ago, we at ConvergeHub developed a Free Lead Generation software and promoted it as a giveaway among our followers on Facebook, who likes our post as one of the best small business CRM software.

However always check out Facebook’s rules and guidelines for giveaways before you post your awards and contents online.

  1. Not Having an Overall Strategy

If you are using Facebook for marketing for your brand, you must consider why you are using this social media platform over others. Hence, look before you jump right into promoting your posts, providing giveaways, buying ads or sharing your live videos online.

Conclusion

Many small businesses merely join Facebook because they know they should do it, but are not aware of their overall social media strategies and goals for marketing their brands.

Therefore, create your social media marketing goals before using Facebook. Are looking for retaining your existing customers, attract new leads, open a new market, or boost your online sales?

Hence, if you are already using the best small business CRM software for taking care of your customers and your sales and marketing leads, the best way to understand the complex world of Facebook marketing is to hire a social media marketer and then create a strategy for marketing, before you place your brand on this most popular social media website.

4 Tips on Optimizing the Lifetime Value of your Consumers in 2018

In these times of dramatic change, it is more crucial than ever before to establish a strategic focus for your business. The way we see it, businesses need to set an unwavering focus on CLV (Customer Lifetime Value), which help provide the solid foundation that is needed to enjoy lasting growth and success in businesses. Looking through the lens of analytical and quantitative science, Customer Lifetime Value embodies the critical virtuous cycle that will build relationships and fosters customer acquisition in 2018.

In these times of dramatic change, it is more crucial than ever before to establish a strategic focus for your business. The way we see it, businesses need to set an unwavering focus on CLV (Customer Lifetime Value), which help provide the solid foundation that is needed to enjoy lasting growth and success in businesses.

Looking through the lens of analytical and quantitative science, Customer Lifetime Value embodies the critical virtuous cycle that builds relationships and fosters customer acquisition. CLV is, in fact, a guiding strategy that helped Amazon to grow into a powerhouse of market innovation.

Brands that provide the best experience throughout the customer journey accomplish higher levels of sales, retention, and customer satisfaction than businesses, which only focus on transactional touch-points- McKinsey & Company Click To Tweet

Here are 4 ways by which you can maximize Customer Lifetime Value in 2018 and for years to come:

#1. Get ready for customer journeys; do not count on just transactions

According to McKinsey & Company, brands that provide the best experience throughout the customer journey accomplish higher levels of sales, retention, and customer satisfaction than businesses, which only focus on transactional touch-points. Hence, companies need to examine the entire customer journey, find out the root cause and work across functional areas using advanced customer journey analytics to better understand their customer behavior across multiple touch-points over time.  Better insight and visibility from marketing to sales and service, across the entire customer lifecycle, provides businesses to break down the walls between internal silos and solve the biggest pain points that influence a buyer’s next step to achieve business goals such as new-offer acceptance or increased renewal rates.

#2. Engage customers through chat-bots and messaging apps

According to a survey done by eMarketer, it has been found that more than 1.4 Billion consumers use messaging applications such as WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, WeChat and others and the number will scale up to 2 Billion in 2018. Hence, because of the ever-rising popularity of messaging applications, in 2018, chat-bots will play a pivotal role in improving customer experience and developing deeper relationships. More to say, now that chat application providers are allowing brands to use their apps to interact with the customers, brands are also using these apps for new consumer-interaction channels. Presently in 2018, it is assumed that because of advances in AI (Artificial Intelligence), NLP (Natural Language Processing) technologies, machine learning, brands must engage in a more meaningful and personalized way for providing even more helpful interactions with their consumers.  Therefore, with this latest type of “conversation-commerce” customers can now establish ‘chat’ with the brand representatives for obtaining customer support, get tailored recommendations, ask questions, read on the reviews and even make a purchase without having to leave the messaging application of their choice that they prefer to use.

More to say, unlike email interactions, AI-driven conversations are not disjointed as messaging provides a continuous thread between the consumer and the brand, which makes the flow of the interaction more akin to a dialogue that, facilitate tracking and management from either side. Therefore, with this more natural flow of interactions and conversations between support and sales, there are chances for greater opportunities to cross-sell and seek or share feedback on social media platforms.

#3. Gain tangible results from machine learning and AI

Although the words “machine” and “artificial” may imply and sound impersonal in their approaches and hence robotic, nevertheless with the rapid development in Artificial Intelligence technology, this advancement is actually helping several brands to deliver greater customer experience, and to a larger audience, something that we just could not have been able to do before. For example, by pairing NLU (Natural Language Understanding) with deep-learning algorithms, retail brands can now help customers to express their requirements naturally through Facebook Messenger-based chat-bots.  Retailers can now also create a size profile for any customer by presenting a browsable inventory of curated collections, which according to several market survey reports have shown nearly three times more engagement rates, compared to that what was found while using traditional inventory browsing.

Apart from this, top-performing AI-powered chat-bots can also recognize when it is the ideal moment to transfer the interaction to a live customer support representative. The main objective over here is to make this transfer as seamless and natural as possible. This way, brands can bring in human expertise for support related issues, when it makes the most difference.

While Bots and AI technologies are still in their early phases, in 2018, as bots learn more from user behaviors, they will evolve to create a more richer experience and therefore deliver better results for both brands and their consumers.

#4. Merge customer service and sales mindsets to drive revenue

To a customer, there is practically no distinction between sales and service departments of a brand, and so in this hypercompetitive market, the company cannot let their sales and customer support teams operate in silos in 2018.

Therefore, companies this year and going ahead on time, need to adopt strategies that help blend service and sales, by adjusting their evaluation metrics and incentive plans, and the key to achieving this is ongoing training.

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Takeaway

Hence, to conclude we can say that new data and better coordination between sales and service teams are the empowering factors that can only create more sales value in 2018. For companies that shall use AI, bots, advanced CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system, and messenger apps will be rewarded with higher customer lifetime values, greater customer retention rates, and profitability, rather than fall back in the race by just cutting on service delivery costs.

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Reasons for a Small Business Need of CRM to Survive

Small Business’s Need of CRM or Customer Relationship Management platform enables small and medium business owners to manage operational challenges, such as client attrition, sales decline, misalignment between corporate revenue targets and their salespeople’s commission policy and others. Therefore, if you are a small business owner, there are various ways that a client-tracking tool, can affect your company’s bottom-line. Check out our top 7 tips on why small business needs CRM.

Small Business’s Need of CRM or Customer Relationship Management platform enables small and medium business owners to manage operational challenges, such as client attrition, sales decline, misalignment between corporate revenue targets and their salespeople’s commission policy and others.

Recent studies show that companies with a fully utilized CRM system can increase sales by 29%.- Forbes Click To Tweet

Therefore, if you are a small business owner, there are various ways that a client-tracking tool, can affect your company’s bottom-line.

Check out our top 7 tips on why small business needs CRM:

  1. Be Organized

As a small business owner, you can claim that you are managing your company’s task management systems, business emails, calendar system, but in reality, unless you organize all your information in one system, you are missing the big picture of your business. CRM integrates all these activities and much more in one easily maintainable and managed place, which can help you learn things about your business you never knew before. Hence, understanding the small business’s need of CRM, and being organized will never ever be a detriment to the success of your business.

  1. Client Management

Another most vital reason why small businesses are in need a CRM is that CRM is a tool that provides more visibility into your client base. It helps small business owners to ponder on different strategies and tactics that are needed for formulating better plans and thereby break new grounds for long-term profitability.

  1. Track Profitability

CRM is a tool that can help ease-up the work of your accountants. Once you adopt a CRM like ConvergeHub, you need not worry about tracking your billing processes and instead concentrate on activities like strategizing on product discounts, client returns and shipping costs. Converged CRM platforms provide small businesses with a speedy bookkeeping system and can produce accurate financial reporting, which is a crucial process in the corporate value chain.

  1. Sales Strategy

As an owner of small business, the last thing you must be wanting is to lose income by targeting the wrong customer. Client administration programs, which are the core utility of a CRM, can provide small business owners with extremely valuable intelligence about future sales trends that can aid them to adjust their present corporate sales strategies and drive higher revenues.

  1. Never Lose Your Data

Do you store all your business and client relationship information on your laptop? Then the odds are high that your laptop can be damaged or stolen.  Small business’s need a CRM system helps you to get rid of notepads, calendars, memo-books, and other outdated systems for tracking your data. A web-based or SaaS-based CRM system such as ConvergeHub lets small businesses to protect their data from being lost. With a Cloud-based CRM, as your data remains on the Cloud Server, it guarantees data safety and so provides you a protective cover against data loss.

  1. Statuses Are Important

Are you aware which of your clients are ready for a quick callback and who is not? Knowing which of your prospects are showing interest in your products and services, and which clients are presently on a hold will surely help businesses to improve or modify their sales strategies. A CRM at its most basic level lets you see the statuses of your customers. Small businesses need CRM for every time you make a call, contact the customer or your prospects and leads by email or SMS you can easily update all your customer related information along with their current status in your CRM. This way by mapping your customer journey, you can avoid following up on cold leads and instead mature the hot ones.

  1. You Need Metrics

Do you remember how many successful conversions of your leads-to-customers you had in the past weeks or months? Can you provide a quick data of your conversion ratio or explain the most fruitful method that helped your sales reps to reach your customers? Metrics are critical for the growth of any business. You can always figure out these statistics to some extent using Excel formulas in a spreadsheet, but then again, the odds are high that you may make mistakes while calculating your result. Most people do. CRM software is capable of providing you instant metrics on several aspects of your business and generates reports which are specific to your needs.

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Conclusion

Finally, small business’s need of CRM is highly recommended, as this software is capable of improving an organization’s customer service practices. It helps your support staffs to respond to client’s queries quickly apart from providing insight into customer’s order trends, which ensures that your support staffs never mess up with order related questions from your customers.

Wait! If you have 2 minutes to spare… leave a comment below letting us know what was your biggest takeaway!