Fish for people willing and eager to be your partners
By: Jim Katzaman - Get Out Of Debt
Tags: Social Media, Marketing, Entrepreneurship, Digital Marketing, Customer Experience

Dear Business Owners, the №1 thing to focus on is to figure out who you can best help with your business. Then serve them with everything they need.

That’s the bait Kelvin Muema uses as he casts about for his company catch of the day. The graphic designer, digital marketer and social media manager readily dishes out knowledge with his pen and notebook at the ready.

As he explained during an Africa Tweet Chat, Muema’s greatest marketing success comes from landing customers organically through social media. He specializes on Twitter, being active every week during chats and engaging with other tweeters.

Muema thinks of a customer as someone who he can best help — although he dislikes the word.

“‘Customer’ to me sounds like an unwilling person who you want to force to buy your product by pointing a gun to their head,” he said. “I don’t want to become anybody’s customer. Do you? Of course not.

“I want that person to be someone who I can best help in my capacity as a marketer,” he said.

He contends that businesses can acquire customers organically through digital platforms by sharing content with these elements:

Findable: Ensure it’s on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

Understandable: Have an appropriate content type such as text, photos and videos.

Actionable: Have a call to action.

Shareable: Have something to provoke a positive emotional response.

“That means sharing content that truly solves your customers’ problems,” Muema said.

Right frame of mind

To grow organically, he recommended going by the five M’s of social media:

Mission. What is the goal?

Message. What are your messaging priorities?

Management. What are your processes and procedures?

Medium. What are your primary platforms?

Metrics. What will you track?

When acquiring customers, Muema most often sees mistakes created by mindsets of wanting more likes and followers.

“Get rid of that thinking,” Muema said. “Instead, use social media to educate others, help people and create a community. Success will follow you.”

Acquiring customers organically online is at no cost in money, but just a concerted investment in time and effort.

“The greatest benefit is brand loyalty,” Muema said. “People ignore sponsored tweets and YouTube ads. They don’t really notice Google ads. Like with viruses, we grew resistant. Acquiring customers organically creates trust, which creates brand loyalty.”

He knows that attraction firsthand. His top-of-mind businesses that use social media to organically acquire customers reeled him in with fish and shirts.

“There’s The BigFish,” Muema said. “I saw the pictures of the fish on their timeline so many times that I decided to go to The BigFish restaurant myself. The fish was simply delicious.

“Damsel in Distress supplies Ankara T-shirts,” he said. “Someone else retweeted them on my timeline. So, I decided to go to the store and buy them. I get complements every time I have them on.”

About The Author

Jim Katzaman is a manager at Largo Financial Services and worked in public affairs for the Air Force and federal government. You can connect with him on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.