With the proper social media marketing strategies you can:
→Grow from 17 to 700+ QUALITY Followers in 4 weeks.
→Generate 34% percent of your total web traffic from Social Media channels
→Deliver a measurable increase in revenue.
(*Real stats from a client)
Effective social media marketing isn’t just playing on Facebook, putting up cat pictures you hope others like, or recycling inspirational quotes.
Your small business CAN GROW with an effective social media marketing strategy. We’ll use a Moon & Owl client as a case study in how your business can increase revenue through Social Media.
But let’s get down to you:
1. Have a Great Company with Fantastic Products/Service and Impeccable Customer service.
Think about it:
Foundational to any marketing campaign is a great company with great products and services.
If you offer inferior products or have crummy customer service, social media is only going to AMPLIFY that lack of quality to the world.
Amplifying simply takes the existing experience and makes it LOUDER!
If it’s great it will be louder. If it’s bad, it will be louder, too!
You can’t gloss over the need to be first-rate in every area of customer interaction if you want to experience long-term profits.
Our case-study client is just that company. Their founder has been borderline obsessed with acquiring only the best materials for their home decor products. Even as a fabric novice, we were able, at first touch, to distinguish their quality versus the competitors by feel. In 15 years of operation, the client has yet to have a client return a product for a quality issue despite her offering a 100% satisfaction guarantee, no questions asked.
2. Stack Your Social Media and Know Where It Fits in the Sales Funnel
All your marketing channels must serve a specific purpose and stack upon one another.
You must know where each marketing channel, including each social media channel, fits in your sales funnel.
Each piece of marketing takes the baton, runs its leg, and passes the baton to the next channel.
(Hint: draw up your existing funnel right after you finish the rest of this marketing goodness…)
In this sense your social media stacks upon your site to drive traffic. Your social media is the DISCOVER/BUILD TRUST portion of the funnel.
Your actual website is the closer for a sale, appointment or enlistment of services.
How integrated are your channels?
As it turns out…there is a CLASSIC small business mistake we see all the time.
Many small businesses have a separate web designer, social media manager, print graphics artist, and media buyer. Often the only true coordination is whatever little time and energy the owner has time to offer.
This mistake almost ensures your social media company will miss out on opportunities to pick up the baton from any traditional marketing you are doing and doesn’t hand your social followers to your website in the best way (example— a boosted Facebook post tied to a custom landing page.)
But it doesn’t stop there…..
With apps like Pinvolve, you can stack your Pinterest account right into Facebook and Instagram.
We knew that the client’s social media would be crucial to growth. Their products are visually appealing. We used Pinvolve, Tailwind and IFTTT app to link all the accounts. When something goes out on our blog or social media channel, that content gets syndicated everywhere.
Once stacked, you’ll have a true WEB presence with every strand playing its proper role.
And what do webs do???? Catch stuff (food for spiders/customers for you).
Let social media do what it does best.
3. Create an Emotional Persona
You have a personality, right?
So does your company.
Your social media is where your company’s culture and feel shine. Create a company persona that is reflected in the content on your webpage. Are you luxurious, sassy, kitschy, professional, humorous, jaded, hipster, or serious as a brand?
One of the best uses of a we-don’t-take-ourselves-too-seriously company is Mackie Audio. Even their product manuals are actually readable.
Another great humorous social media presence is the Old Spice Twitter account.
With this client, we knew we needed to create a feeling peacefulness that comes with an escape to luxury. Why? Most people feel their bedroom is a retreat, a place of respite and relaxation.
What is your emotion? Name it in a single word…
4. Know Your Target Demographic and Start There
Start first with asking WHO do you already sell to?
List your existing CORE customer base in terms of age, gender, demographic, geography and likes/interests. Target them first.
(Hint: One of our solid Moon and Owl strategies involves targeting only friends of existing page friends initially as we know there is the highest chance of like-mindedness. In Phase 2, we go on to expand our social media ads and content to closely related target groups and track results.)
Maximizing your marketing dollars effectiveness means knowing what content is directed to what audience. We were recently served a digital medical ad for a Boston doctor in our Fort Worth ad agency location. That’s bad targeting. What a WASTE of that doctor’s money!
Start on the social media channels in which your demographic is most active. Using Twitter as the primary platform for your geriatrics practice doesn’t make sense. (Well, later it does, when you are targeting your audience’s children who help the elderly make medical decisions, but not as phase one).
Houzz and Pinterest rule the roost in terms of home decor. Because they wanted to work on aspects of the campaign themselves, we had the client create a feel around each collection in a Pinterest board. The “feeling boards” draw viewers into an alternate reality of luxurious escape.
We also launched their Facebook page with targeted ads to females in affluent areas in where they knew they already had a degree of brand resonance because of an existing history of sales.
With a small $200 initial boost budget and careful targeting, we saw dramatic growth, from 17 Facebook likes to 650+. In addition, their Pinterest following saw dramatic growth, and we got on the early adopter waiting list for Pinterest ads which will undoubtedly be huge for them.
5. Never Buy Social Media Likes
Read here about why you should not buy social media likes. You want REAL customers!
6. Drive Two Directions
Some social media managers want to look good.
You want the same thing, right?
In order to look good, some social media managers drive all the social media leads back to the social media page. This works to increase likes (making them look like a rockstar social media manager), but this actually costs your business money in lost sales.
Remember that funnel thing above?
To avoid simply feeding the social media beast, drive half the traffic back to your Facebook, Pinterest or Twitter pages, BUT use some of your paid Social Media marketing dollars to drive traffic straight to your site. (Preferably a landing page, but if not the closest page to what the ad actually promotes.) Make sure your social media content has EASY ways for followers to get to your company site.
We drove our client’s traffic to both their social media pages and their actual company website. In fact, social media traffic to their site resulted in 30% of their month’s unique traffic. The content we folded back to their social media had great results seeing a 10x increase in followers in a four-week period.
7. Test, Test and Test Some More
You always hated taking tests, right? But now you get to MAKE the test.
Social Media is one of the BEST testing grounds for headlines, content and graphics. Because you purchase an ad and pay only when it receives clicks, you can create a series of ads in a campaign and tweak one variable in each, watching the results. Maybe an “!” makes the difference in conversion. Maybe’s it’s the headline, offer, or picture. By changing one element at a time, you can create a more perfected ad. This is great insight to have when moving into mass media marketing where testing is much more difficult.
We consistently tweak our client’s ads in A/B testing, declare a winner and move onto the next test of best practices. We also determined our direct mailing wording and imagery from the most effective ads we were running for them on Facebook.
8. Track All the Way Through the Sales Funnel
Here’s the truth…your business must make a profit or it dies.
With so many tracking opportunities available there is no excuse for not knowing how well your social media is performing in terms of revenue generation.
Here are simple tracking tools:
- Facebook pixels on your checkout page.
- Pinterest code you can place in your website to see pins and traffic to checkout page.
- Discount codes used at checkout sourced to a campaign
- Unique trackable phone numbers on various Social Media campaigns.
When you pair this information up with a properly set up Google Analytics account on your company website, SHAZAM, a clear picture emerges.
If you feel technologically challenged, many web developers (including ours) will be glad to establish the coding needed on your site for better measurements. We even offer training for those of you BUSY owners who, for some crazy reason think, “I want to DIY my social media.”
We set up all our clients with state of the art measuring tools to track our Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, and Twitter gains all the way through to the checkout page in most cases. A weekly report is sent of these measurements along with more conversational interaction with ownership. We even integrated a paid SEO/PPC strategy and custom phone numbers and coupon codes onto ads which also gets noted in our Google Analytics and Dashboard reports.
Finally…
9. Be Willing to Listen to the Data
You are the owner of your business. Sometimes owners can get the blinders of it-has-always-been-this-way over their eyes.
This obstructs objectivity and new growth. If the data reveals a new demographic, audience, or message is effective embrace it. If something isn’t working, tweak it or kill it.
Don’t lose your company’s soul, but be willing to listen to the data and ask, “What does this mean?”
This particular client always sold well into affluent, predominantly Anglo suburbs. As we parsed our new social media likes, we also noticed a growing following among a new audience of affluent African-American and Hispanic women. We saw we had a new audience.
NOW GET TO WORK! YOU HAVE ASSIGNMENTS TO COMPLETE FROM THIS BLOG. GROW, GROW, GROW….
Taking steps into effective social media marketing that converts WILL help your small business.
If you need help with social media set-up, social media training/coaching or ongoing management of your social media presence, call us @ 817-889-1487.
