Social Media: Avon is Calling!
Social Media for All Sizes of Businesses.
Social Media is Important for Businesses of All Sizes
Social media can’t be ignored by businesses anymore. Not even direct sales businesses that typically rely on door-to-door, word-of-mouth sales.
A recent Wall Street Journal article outlined cosmetics company Avon’s struggle to remedy falling sales; the profit per representative in the US has seen a 75% decline over the past decade.
Why?
Many are attributing it to the company’s reluctance to adopt technology that’s relevant to today’s culture — namely, social media.
While Avon does have a website and e-catalogs, they are just beginning to establish a strategic and unified social media presence.
Battling against such beauty retail giants as Sephora (which recently launched their highly re-designed social media campaign) and Beauty.com, Avon has come to the late realization that social media is critical for a company that wants to remain relevant in a digitally-connected culture.
It’s not enough to only have a website anymore. Internet users are looking for a way to connect with companies on a more personal level.
How Social Media Can Help Your Business
Avon representatives are recognizing the need for social media to remain relevant in today’s culture, and other businesses can learn from what’s motivating Avon to adopt social media. Two of the primary ways a strategic and active social media presence can help a business include:
1. Social media helps businesses generate leads, no matter how big or how small
Studies have found that more than half of active Twitter users follow companies, brands or products, and that 79% of Twitter users are more likely to recommend brands they follow.
What’s more, companies that use Twitter average about two times more leads per month than those companies that do not engage in social media.
Using Twitter and other social media should help Avon generate leads, just as it could help your business. What matters isn’t the size of the company. It’s the social media presence that helps businesses generate leads.
2. Social media can help you reach more clients
Avon has been around since the late 1800s, and is known by its trademark phrase: “Avon Calling!” Yet Avon is struggling to remain relevant as social media takes over customer outreach from the traditional door-to-door or make-up party methods.
63% of companies using social media say it has increased marketing effectiveness, and more than half of US small businesses say social media plays an important role in active sales.
Avon is a large and well-established company, but dwindling US sales mean that customers are connecting elsewhere for their make-up needs. By utilizing social media, Avon and companies like your business can increase their marketing effectiveness.
Now is the Time to Join the Social Media Revolution
Social media is a revolution of business marketing. With nearly 2/3 of US internet users logging on regularly to a social network, there is an immense pool of potential customers for businesses to connect with.
What Avon teaches us is that no business is too big — or too small — to have a strong social media presence. Whether it’s Avon, Mary Kay or Tupperware, we believe direct sales businesses can benefit from a strong, strategic social media presence. Large companies with local sales representatives need to create a unified social media front that enables them to engage clients at the corporate level, as well as encourage reps to engage clients on an individual level.
A successful social media campaign does take effort to strategically engage clients and potential clients on behalf of your business; there is a right way and a wrong way to interact and reach out. Social media is also an investment when it comes to time. An experienced internet marketing firm like SonicSEO.com understands the ins-and-outs of social media and can help you successfully navigate the marketing revolution that is social media.
It’s never too late to join this revolution in communication for the benefit of your company!
Hope social media can help turn Avon’s sales around. I only hear about them rarely; it seems they really are a relic of pre-social media networking days. It’s hard to believe, sometimes, that door-to-door sales models still exist.