How To Prioritize Your First-Time Customer

For this blog post, I wanted to share one of the biggest mistakes I see business owners making on social media: not prioritizing the first-time customer. When I say “first-time customer”, I really mean “potential first-time customer”. I’m referring to someone who has never visited your physical location or e-commerce store, and they more than likely know very little, if anything, about your business and brand.

I think the first-time customer often gets overlooked, because, as business owners, we’re surrounded by the happenings of our business every day. For us, the unique qualities of our brands and offers may lose their luster after a while, but that isn’t true for your first-time customer. You, your brand and your offers are all new and potentially exciting to them.

As I’m sure you know, social media is one of the best places to reach potential first-time customers. So, when it comes to your profile and content, it needs to be crystal clear what your business and brand are all about. People want to know who you are, what you do and who you do it for. They also want to see consistency in messaging, aesthetic and visuals.

In the next section, we’ll talk about how you can start prioritizing your first-time customer on social media.

Step 1: Optimize Your Bio

No matter which social media platform, your bio is ridiculously important. It’s your first impression for anyone who happens upon your profile, and it better be a good one. Your bio makes all the difference in whether someone smashes that follow button or keeps on scrolling.

Let’s start with your handle and profile picture. Your handle should either be your business name, or something very close. It’s okay to use a period, dash or underscore in your handle, but don’t go too crazy with the characters. Also, no numbers unless it’s relevant to your brand. No one is going to follow a brand with the handle @johns-socks1994. Next, when it comes to your profile picture, I’m conflicted. Many social media managers say that your profile picture should be a nice picture of your face, but I think it can certainly be your logo. The caveat to this is that your logo must be unique in some way; it must stick out in a sea of, what seems like, the same logos over and over.

Now, let’s talk about the meat of your bio. The biggest thing to note here is that you want anyone who looks at your bio to come away knowing exactly what your brand is all about. You have to be concise while conveying your brand’s essence, which is a taller order than most realize. One simple way I’ve found to do this is to decide what keywords you want to be in your bio first, then build sentences around those with different cadences, word choices, tones, etc. until it feels like you. If you’re unfamiliar with what keywords are, they are words or sentences that are relevant to your brand or topics covered on your account. They help your account and content to be more easily discoverable to people who may be interested in it already, based on their previous interaction with accounts and content like yours.

Step 2: Post for Your First-Time Customer Consistently & Frequently

So, this is where I think many businesses miss out on acquiring new customers/clients via social media. I recommend making at least one post per week tailored specifically to your potential first-time customer, and that means going back to basics.

Remember, this first-time customer knows basically nothing about you. So, you have to tell them what you stand for as a brand. You have to tell them what you’re passionate about. You have to tell them what you do day-to-day. You have to tell them why your offers are different, and you have to tell them why your offers could transform their life.

Below, I’ve listed some ideas to get you started.

• Introduce yourself.

• Introduce your staff (who are comfortable being on social media).

• Show off your physical location (if you have one), or work space.

• Show your process (for making a new product, packaging a product, performing a specific service, preparing for a new project, making your morning coffee, etc.)

• Talk about your core values as a brand (if you don’t have these defined, do that first).

• Talk about your offers (what they are, how they have helped people, what people have said about them, how they’re made or function, etc.)

These ideas are all great for reaching potential first-time customers and also reminding current customers and/or clients about you and your offers.

You may think, at some point, that you’re being too repetitive with your content, but keep in mind maybe 10% of your followers see any given post you throw up. So, sure, maybe two or three of your followers will see that you posted about a specific offer twice in a month, but the majority will have no idea. This is just because of how the algorithms on social media platforms are set up, so post away! In my eyes, being a maximalist on social media is a great thing to be.

Wrap Up

In conclusion, don’t forget to speak to your first-time customer with your content. Get back to basics, and talk about your brand and your offers on a regular basis. It might feel cringe at first, but it’s a necessary and important part of being a business on social media.

Thanks for reading, and I hope you found this post helpful.