If your small business venture is reliant on customers making bookings or appointments, you’d better get savvy with social media.
It’s imperative in this day and age to be completely present online to boost your bookings. Harnessing the titanic power of social media can be your saviour.
By now, you should certainly have taken up a reliable booking or appointment scheduling solution like Better HQ to manage the process of gaining clients and filling your calendar.
But what now? Once you have your booking software set up on your business webpage, getting people through the door becomes your top priority.
Make your landing page pop
Before we wade into optimising social media to take bookings, let’s start with your landing page.
A landing page is the primary webpage on your site which is entirely dedicated to one outcome and one outcome only – making people book your services. That’s it.
In many social media situations, this is the link you provide when you say, ‘book now’.
For some this may be your home page, but to really squeeze the most juice out your booking potential, make a unique landing page that’s completely uncluttered and focused on your outcome.
- Make it a page that has no other options but to book.
- Make sure it’s clean and simple.
- Let your brand shine on the page but do it without distracting from your purpose.
- See how tight you can make the workflow by asking for minimal information on the booking form and using the least amount of clicks and text possible.
- In a world full of distractions, all of this results in a much higher chance of bookings. Make no mistake, this targeted simplicity really counts toward your bottom line.
Passive social media booking
In many social media platforms, there’s no dedicated booking solution.
What you’ll need to do when posting ads or content on platforms such as LinkedIn or Twitter is to provide that all important landing page link.
After you have created alluring copy associated with your services, or perhaps an entrancing photo which captures the essence of your services, a simple ‘book now’ with a hyperlink to your landing page will suffice.
Dedicated social media booking
Social media channels like Facebook have already taken steps to create a dedicated booking solution within Facebook itself.
This has several advantages over more passive booking methods.
Firstly, people like to stay where they are instead of hopping away from the channel they were scrolling. They came for the feed and they want to stay there. So, meet them there.
By harnessing the dedicated booking services within social media, you’ll see less ‘bounce’ (when people get to your page and then leave without completing a booking).
You’ll also have enhanced trust, as people are already familiar with platforms like Facebook.
Through a platform like Facebook, they’ll have the option of having a look at your page, your posts and your website if they desire (assuming you have a professionally filled out business page). This too increases trust.
Better yet, you can use the dedicated service or enhance it with your own customised booking solution.
Check out Facebook Bookings here.
Work on the workflow
The workflow is essentially the steps your potential clients have to tread in order to get to the end result of a completed booking.
This is absolutely imperative. Most people become lost, distracted or get cold feet during a booking workflow. This mostly comes down to too many steps, not enough faith in your brand and anxiety around who you are and whether there’s something better.
We need to resolve these concerns with a tight workflow.
This means the least amount of steps possible and the least amount of content and distraction. Less is more.
Smooth, well designed workflows will trump a messy complex process every time. Make sure you get a friend or colleague to test your workflows as if they were a potential client, and always work toward improving it.
Nail the branding and gain trust
No matter how you go about this, nailing your branding is imperative. We don’t need to bang on too much about branding’s effect. For that read here.
As an integral part of your booking workflow, solid branding is essential. What you need to concentrate on is consistency.
Once your brand colours, images and style are in stone, make sure it’s reflected across your landing page, booking form and social pages. All need to be in sync.
If people see inconsistency in your branding, especially when they go from social post to landing page, they lose trust in you and will be more prone to bouncing.
Consistent cross platform branding is something you simply can’t ignore when taking bookings through social media, so spend some time on it now to reap the rewards later.