How Social Media Can Help Scale Your Rubber Flooring Business
With half of the global population using social channels for connecting with each other, finding business information, and shopping, no business can afford to ignore the power of social media. In fact, 74 percent of online shoppers rely on social networks to make informed purchase decisions.
Flooring businesses have long undervalued the importance of social media in marketing. The flooring industry has long depended on the traditional word-of-mouth advertising. But with social media taking the world by storm, it’s about time they leverage this channel to increase their reach, leads, and sales.
In this post, we will share interesting tips to help rubber flooring businesses improve brand awareness and generate relevant leads.
1. First Things First: Go for the Social Media Giant!
That’s obvious, isn’t it! If you want to improve your brand reach, go for the channel with the biggest user base – Facebook!
Use these quick tips to improve your reach on this largest social platform with nearly 2.5 billion users.
Share High-Quality Content
No one enjoys bland and irrelevant content that only talks about the brand. People want to see interesting content that addresses the ‘What’s In It For Me’ (WIIFM) and gives them a clear idea of what a business does or stands for.
Share pictures and videos of ongoing flooring jobs, reviews from past customers, behind-the-scenes, promotional offers, and information about upcoming products or events in the flooring industry. The Facebook Live feature is a great way to showcase your work-in-progress projects, giving your business an authentic human face.
Create Impressive Sales Catalogs
Worried that sharing multiple images of a rubber flooring installation or a completed project may make your post look messy? Use the slideshow option of Facebook that can help you subtly promote your services without consuming too much space. The slideshow catalog also makes it easy for the prospects to navigate the News Feed.
The Facebook for Business page offers detailed information in this regard.
Interact with Your Followers
Social media is all about conversations. Listen to what your customers are talking and the concerns they are sharing. Take time out to respond to (like or share) the comments, reviews, brand mentions, and user-generated posts. This will reassure them that their opinions are being heard, encouraging them to respond to your posts in the future.
Moreover, when a new customer visits your page, they will see you as a business that’s constantly in touch with its customers and takes feedback in a constructive way.
Popularize Your Business Page
The first step to a robust Facebook advertising strategy is investing in creating a self-sustaining page that gathers the right audience. Invest in ads and tools that can earn you more followers, likes, and shares.
Facebook offers the ‘Promote’ option that allows businesses to pay for ads that improve the reach of their page, posts, and videos. Use the below-mentioned questions as a guide to improve the effectiveness of Facebook advertising for your flooring business.
– What’s your goal? Are you looking to drive traffic to your website? Do you want to procure quality leads? Define your goal clearly to craft a perfect Facebook ad strategy.
– Who’s your target audience? Facebook (and Instagram!) offers you an option to define your audience with respect to geography, demographics, interests, and even workplaces, industry, or educational affiliations. Make sure you use it to target the most relevant audience.
– What’s your budget? This is a no-brainer. Yet, it’s critical to set a budget for your ad strategy. To begin with, you can set aside a small amount to test the effectiveness of Facebook advertising. Once you see the results, you can scale your spending. Since Facebook owns Instagram, it’s better to blend ads on both the channels for maximum returns.
– Do you have a creative ad in place? Think about all the factors that go into creating a compelling ad. Brainstorm with your team or hire an ad expert to help you write an effective copy, attractive imagery, and the right message that offers a glimpse of your company values.
– What’s your retargeting plan like? A Facebook pixel or a tracking code essentially follows visitors when they click on a link between Facebook and your business website. So, if visitors have clicked on the link but haven’t completed an action on your site, they can be retargeted and encouraged to finalize the action like booking an appointment for flooring consultation or purchasing a particular product or service.
2. Show Some Insta Love
For the flooring domain, it’s all about visuals. Which social channel comes to your mind when I say that? Of course, Instagram! Over 500 million users access the app daily and 200 million visits at least one business profile daily. Hence, it’s important to boost your visibility on this visual-centric channel.
Here are some quick tips.
Share Engaging Content
Though this point is common for any social channel, it’s worth repeating. Good content is what will differentiate you from your competition.
As mentioned earlier, Instagram is all about visual content like images, videos, and infographics. Curate visually-appealing posts of real-life installations, work-in-progress, or even before-after posts.
Sharing images of a rubber flooring project you recently completed along with a compelling story caption and relevant hashtags can make your content look authentic (not salesy!). This will surely increase your follower base and attract leads.
Use Instagram Advertising
Instagram ads are often non-intrusive and relevant. Consequently, ads on this channel enjoy a high engagement rate in comparison to Facebook. No wonder, ad spending on Instagram is 23 percent higher than Facebook.
Besides attracting leads through awesome content, you can use paid advertising to attract leads. Choose from the three main paid Instagram ad types mentioned below.
Photo Ads – Tell your brand story by sharing compelling images of our flooring installations. Instagram photo ads allow businesses to engage either a broad or targeted audience in your geographic area using visually engaging images.
Video Ads – A video ad allows you to engage the vital senses, namely sight and hearing for a whole 60 seconds. Sharing short videos can help capture your viewer’s attention and improve the chances of a response.
Carousel Ads – These are slide shows in the ad format, allowing your audience to multiple images and videos through a single post.
Story Ads – The vertical, immersive, and full-screen story ad is not another Instagram feature. It’s an effective way to build brand awareness and drive valuable actions.
Each of these paid ad types have a clickable call-to-action or CTA (like ‘Learn More’ or ‘Send Message’) to encourage the user to take an action.
Finally, it’s critical to remember that both organic and paid posts face the ‘swipe-through’ challenge. In order to stop the proverbial thumb, you need to target your content to a relevant audience. Use Custom or Lookalike Audiences to define your audience on Instagram. Secondly, use carousels to offer a compelling peek into your brand. Carousels work best on Instagram as well as on Facebook.
For more information on advertising on Instagram, read this post from Instagram Business.
Leverage Instagram Stories
The content shared in stories disappears in 24 hours. Stories leverage the FOMO element and hence are quite effective and popular. In fact, statistics reveal that one-third of the stories views on Instagram come from businesses.
Use stories to share interesting deals, expert tips, a quick video clip, or answer common customer queries. You can also use it to engage your audience through live polls, quizzes, and user tagging.
What’s more? Instagram stories also allow businesses to drive traffic to their website by sharing a swipe-up link.
Go Live
Share live videos of your rubber flooring installations, the arrival of a new product, an in-store event, or a customer testimonial to add a human touch to your business profile. A live video appears as a pop-up alert in your followers’ app window, arousing their curiosity and persuading them to watch before the content disappears.
Live videos add a face to a business, thus improving your online trust and reputation.
3. Ride on the Social Video Trend
Besides sharing video content on Facebook and Instagram, it’s critical to grow your brand presence on the modern media powerhouse – YouTube. Also, don’t forget, besides making an effective social platform for video content, YouTube is also the second-largest search engine. So, it can also help boost your overall search ranking!
Here are a few YouTube marketing tips and tricks you should consider.
Post Value-Adding and Engaging Content Regularly
How-to’s and tutorials work best on YouTube. Sharing such valuable content can encourage viewers to subscribe to your channel and spread a positive word about your brand.
Moreover, if you have a decent number of followers make sure you keep them engaged by sharing useful content on a regular basis.
Optimize Your Video’s Title and Description
Take time to write an effective title and description that includes the keywords relevant to your rubber flooring business. Also, remember to highlight the relevant keywords in your tags.
Use tools like Google Keyword Planner, SEMRush, and Ubersuggest to target the best keywords.
Spread a Word about Your Channel
Once you have created a page and uploaded content, it’s time to promote your channel. One quick way of driving traffic to your channel is to share content on other social channels, your website, and blog and link them back to your YouTube channel.
I also recommend reading this post by HubSpot that offers effective and practical tips on YouTube marketing.
4. Experiment with Other Social Channels
Social channels like LinkedIn, Twitter, and Pinterest can prove to be quite effective in strengthening your brand image, even though they have lesser users in comparison to the social giants.
Give credence to these channels and nurture your presence to reach and engage different types of audiences.
Besides Instagram, Pinterest is a great platform to share images and short videos. In fact, the platform is often used as a search engine and can prove useful to drive traffic to your business website.
Use Pinterest for sharing a compelling brand story that humanizes your brand and allowing customers to get closer to your brand. For example, you can create boards featuring your work portfolio and blog posts, thereby driving traffic to your website.
This is a great business platform that can help you improve your online image, grow your professional network, and generate leads. For instance, writing a strong company description can help you differentiate yourself from your competitors on LinkedIn.
Similarly, sharing the latest news and information in the flooring industry can position you as an authority in the segment.
Twitter is a social platform for the latest tweets and people generally communicate on it using messages shorter than 240 characters. It offers a variety of features that help businesses boost their brand image.
For instance, the hashtag feature can help you tag an identifying word or phrase, thus improving your visibility. For instance, using #rubberflooring in your tweets will not only draw attention to your brand but also allow you to track the trending posts under this hashtag and contribute to the social conversations.
Similarly, you can also attend to customer problems and troubleshooting issues through direct messages.
Twitter also has an advertising option where you can pay to promote your account, tweets, and trends.
5. Leverage the Power of Reviews
Social proof is as important for brands as it is for customers. Data shared by Global Web Index reveals that 54 percent of social media users visit these channels to research about a brand. In fact, 76 percent of customers trust online reviews as much as recommendations from family and friends.
Reviews help prospective customers get a pulse of your business and offer instant insights into the customer’s needs and preferences. So, take time to collect and leverage social reviews.
Here are some tips that can help.
Enable Reviews on Your Social Page
Social channels like Facebook have made it easy for businesses to set up reviews and recommendations section on their social page. After you have set up a business page on Facebook, follow these simple steps.
– Click ‘Settings’ at the top right of your page.
– Go to ‘Edit Page’ in the left-hand column.
– Look for ‘Reviews.’
– Click on ‘Settings’ in the Reviews section.
– Change the slider button to ON.
– Save the changes
Bonus Tip: Activate and verify Google My Business page. That’s one place where customers like to leave reviews.
Never Delete Negative Reviews
As the owner of the social media page, it’s tempting to get rid of negative reviews. This will also boost your business rating to a 4 or maybe 5-star. But everyone knows there’s no such thing as a perfect brand. So, a perfect rating looks unrealistic, raising questions about the legitimacy of your business.
Use negative reviews as an opportunity to understand the customer’s pain point and improve your business standards. Also, be courteous when responding to reviews and strive to resolve customer issues. This will improve your standing as a customer-centric business.
Create Video Testimonials
Do you have a huge base of satisfied customers? Convert them into brand advocates by making video testimonials that can be shared on your social channel and website. Video recommendations from satisfied customers add an emotional and authentic touch to the brand. Further, by involving these customers in your marketing mix you are turning them into brand ambassadors.
6. Measure Your Social Performance
We’ve all heard the famous quote attributed to Peter Drucker – ‘What gets measured gets managed.’ In order to make sure your social media strategy pays off, you need to track it.
Here are a few tools that can help you monitor your social campaigns.
Hootsuite – It’s a popular freemium tool that helps track activity across multiple social networks like LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook.
Keyhole – This tool is specifically designed for Twitter and Instagram accounts as it helps track keywords, hashtags, URLs, and usernames. The data is available in real-time. You can also view heat maps that show the social activity of users across various locations.
Sprout Social – It is a popular social monitoring tool that offers interesting insights to improve your social engagement.
Buzzlogix – This is a great social listening tool that literally catches the ‘social buzz’ on various products and services. It helps you know what people are saying on social media in real-time.
Buffer – This is a great tool to schedule your social content and manage your Facebook business page and groups, LinkedIn company page, Twitter profile, Pinterest account, and much more. Its analytics tool offers insights on what’s working and what’s not.
Summing Up
The growing popularity of smart devices has made it easier for people to get active on social platforms. In fact, social media is proving to be a great channel for people to share ideas and information, connect with businesses, and influence purchasing decisions. Therefore, more and more businesses are prioritizing ‘meaningful social interactions’ (in Mark Zuckerberg’s words) to engage their audience and drive conversions.
Social media is a perfect channel for rubber flooring firms to improve their customer reach and leads. Use the insights and tips shared in this post to rev up your social strategy and improve your online influence and profits.
