Social media has brought us all the wrong customers. Help!

Dear Aunty B,

My company has enthusiastically embraced social media, with my staff spending lots of time during the last two years on Twitter and Facebook.

There has been a big increase in traffic to our website and inquiry levels which got us all excited. But it is not translating at all into increased sales. In fact, the opposite has happened. It has distracted my staff and worse, it has influenced their thinking. They are using customer insights from Twitter and Facebook to guide their thinking on new things to offer the marketplace. But I have just realised the people they chat to all day and who hover around our website are not the customers I want and I don’t care two hoots about their insights.

I am now kicking myself that we have travelled down the social media route without questioning where it was taking us.

Can you help me Aunty B? I feel like I have woken up and am kicking myself for not having thought this through.

Dear Can you help me?

Gee. You are a bit hard on yourself. I bet half the people using social media for marketing are going to wake up one day and realise they have been in a nightmare.

You know the one where you turn up at the wrong party with people you have nothing in common with, you don’t know anyone, you don’t know why you are there but for some reason you can’t escape?

So you woke up first. That’s what happens when you are a pioneer and go where no one has gone before. So what do you do when you are in trouble? You do a plan. Sit down and outline the marketing strategy. The first step of course is to define who your customer is. And that means defining who is actually going to pay for your product. Next, how do you reach those people? And how do you convert them into paying customers? It is back to the drawing board so get your skates on.

Be smart,
Your Aunty B

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