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Hello, this is Kathy Gray, Social Media Marketing Strategist for Pole Position
Marketing. Today, we're going to be talking about why you should use social
media for your business. Let's get started. First, I think it's important to
explore some of the benefits and challenges of social media. Many
businesses jump into social media without a plan, or even knowing what it takes to
sustain social media success. I remember comments when social media first became a
hot topic. Business owners were saying it was just a fad. It would pass. "There's no
need to get involved." Social media has really become a part of our everyday
lives. Yes, there are still some holdouts who don't use it. But for an increasing
number of people, social media has become a form of communication secondary in
nature like email, texting, or picking up the phone. Adoption of social media only
continues to increase. Pew Internet Research publishes a great study every
year on social media adoption and behavior. You can see the link to this
study in this slide. As you can see, over the past three years, usage only continues
to rise. It's also interesting to note that the percentage of internet users
using only one site is decreasing, while we're seeing an increase in those using
two, three, four, or even five sites. It's not just the social media marketers like
me that are on a bunch of channels anymore. It's the general public as well.
Social media is evolving, but it's not going anywhere. So what are the benefits
of social media for your business? Social media often doesn't lead to a direct sale.
It's not the direct sales pitch. So how does it benefit a business? It benefits
businesses through branding, customer loyalty, reputation management, authority
building, website traffic, increased indirectly search rankings, purchasing
decisions, and this is really a big one I think with purchasing decisions. Just a
few weeks ago, a friend that I grew up with who now lives on the other side of
the country posted that she was looking for a new vacuum cleaner, and I happen to
have a vacuum cleaner that I love. It's actually kind of crazy that I'm at this
weird stage in my life where I get excited about vacuum cleaners. But she wanted to
know who could help her. So I commented back and said, "I have this great vacuum
cleaner. I love my Shark Navigator Pro." So I comment. Then, a couple of her other
friends comment back, "Oh, I have the Shark Navigator Pro too, and love it."
What's interesting is that I bought my Shark Navigator Pro, because I saw a
blogger that I follow post on social media one night how she had gotten the vacuum
cleaner, absolutely loved it. It was the best vacuum cleaner she had ever used. I
was in the market, so I took that recommendation and review and ended up
purchasing that vacuum cleaner. Two days ago, my friend tags me in a post on
Facebook and says, "Thanks for your recommendation. I bought the vacuum
cleaner, and it really sucks. But in a good way." She was really excited about
it, and so here two people, myself and my friend, have both bought the Shark
Navigator Pro off of recommendations on social media from people we trust. It's
not just vacuum cleaners that people are buying. It's insurance products. It's
cars. It's recommendations on where to travel, where to go, where to stay.
A whole variety of different items that people are purchasing that they're asking
their friends and family for advice on, or other people they trust, and also going to
review sites like TripAdvisor, Yelp, and different places. All of these together
lead to the ROI of social media. So what are the challenges of social media for
businesses? These are the three biggest challenges that I see businesses
struggling with and the stumbling blocks toward their success. The first is time.
Everybody could use more time. I could use, oh, about three extra days in the
week would be fantastic to manage work, kids, life, the whole thing. This same
thing comes when you get to social media. Even I, as a social media marketing
strategist and consultant, struggle to have enough time to stay on top of social
media. You could have an entire team that did nothing but social media, and there
would be still more opportunities that your business could latch onto and take
advantage of, but it's just not possible. So you need to be realistic and think
about the time that you have available or that someone in your company does to
invest in social media. The second challenge is knowledge. A lot of us who
had been traditional marketers before social media came onto the scene are used
to that traditional way of marketing to people. But social media is totally
different and you need a different approach, because it's all about the
engagement and creating a relationship with your customer versus selling to them.
So for some of us, that's a big switch in the way we think about marketing. There
are some great resources online to learn more about social media and increase your
knowledge. One place that I send a lot of beginners to is SocialMediaExaminer.com.
It's a great place to go and learn the basics of social media, the best
practices, the latest changes to the platforms. The third challenge is money,
another thing that we could all use more of. Right? Social media isn't free. It's
kind of a misnomer. Sure, you can set up your profile for free and you can send out
updates for free. But to really take advantage of social media and be
successful, you need a mix of organic posting and paid promoted posts, or
sponsored updates depending on the channel that you're using. It's very much like
Google. With Google, you want your organic listings, and you want your organic
listings to bring you traffic, and you want to rank well for your core keywords
for your business. But in addition to that, you want to use paid advertising as
well, because the mix of organic and paid placements on Google are going to give you
the most *** for your buck and the biggest ROI. It's the same thing on social
media. You need that combination of organic and paid. So how are we going to
overcome the challenges and reap the benefits of social media? By creating a
sound social media strategy. To run a marathon, you prepare. You train. You have
a strategy as to how you're going to complete the goal. You don't show up on
race day with no prep, no training, and finish a marathon. Well, unless you're my
six-year-old daughter who's cute as a button, and they let you count running the
last block across the finish line with your uncle and say that you ran the
marathon. But let's face it. That doesn't happen.
Aside from the challenges mentioned before, a social media strategy is also going to help you avoid the all
too common pitfall of social media ADD. I think every marketer has been there at
some point. "Ooh, new network. Shiny. Let's forget our goals and run after it.
Everyone is saying this is the hot new thing. We have to do it." It's like an
industrial manufacturer wanting to use Pinterest because all of the experts are
saying it's great for referral traffic. Well, Pinterest is great for referral
traffic. But it's only great for referral traffic if your ideal customers are there
and actively engaging in the platform. A strategy that defines your goals, who your
ideal customers are, which social networks they use, and tactics to achieve your
business goals will help you avoid social media ADD. When that new, shiny channel
comes along, you can go back to the social media strategy and ask yourself if this
new platform is going to help you achieve your goals or just distract you. Know thy
audience. Know thy audience. Know thy audience. If you take away anything from
this presentation it is know thy audience. Who are you trying to reach and talk to?
Is it the nerdy kid, is it the fashionista, or is it the biker? Develop
well thought out buyer personas for your ideal customers. Who are they? What age
are they? What gender? Where do they live? What are their likes and dislikes? Where
do they hang out online? What resources do they consult to make important buying
decisions? If you're B2B, you want to outline their job titles, industries,
trade associations, industry publications, etc. In our library at
PolePositionMarketing.com, you can download a buyer persona worksheet which
will help you define each of your ideal customers. The more detail you have on who
your customers are, their likes, their dislikes, their demographics, the better
you are going to be able to market to them online. We want to be smart about our
social media strategy, so we will create smart goals. What are smart goals? They're
specific, they're measurable, they're attainable, they're results-based, and
they're time-based. To get our brains working, let's take a look at some of the
types of social media goals. There are branding goals, loyalty, reputation
management, customer service, authority and thought leadership, website traffic,
and sales and leads. What's a bad goal? Collecting fans like Beanie Babies. This
is a very bad goal. Maybe I'm dating myself with this, but in the late '90s
Beanie Babies were a hot commodity. I worked at a drugstore during college that
sold them, and when they got a new shipment we would have women lined up in
front of the door before we opened for the day. It was like the people who camp out
overnight for a new iPhone, except this was a $6 stuffed animal. People went crazy
for collecting these things. As an employee, I could buy one of the new
releases before we'd open the doors, and I did and I turned around and sold them in
our local classifieds to these crazed collectors. I sold Iggy the Iguana for
$75. They helped pay for my textbooks. Thank you, crazy Beanie Baby collectors
for helping pay for my education. Fast-forward 15 years. The Beanie Babies
are practically worthless. I bought all of the Beanie Babies pictured here for $5 at
a garage sale. They had the tag protectors on. They had been in some case somewhere,
were practically brand new. My kids were thrilled, and they play with them and we
don't worry about the tags. So what does this have to do with social media? Buying
the Beanie Babies is like buying fans. What do the fan counts really mean to your
bottom line? Who are these fans that you're buying? Sure, you can go to
Fbskip.com and buy 1,000 Likes for $25. But who are these people? Do they even
care about your business? Will they ever use your products? Fan growth is
important. But over the long haul, 100 legitimate fans who care about your
business are going to be worth a lot more than 1,000 strangers. But even those 100
legitimate fans will be as worthless as Beanie Babies in 15 years if you don't
engage with them. I use this as an example of a bad goal, because too many businesses
focus too much attention on fan growth and not how those fans are engaging with their brand.
Seventy-two percent of consumers expect a brand response within an hour on
Twitter when complaining. Twenty-four percent of consumers expect a reply within
30 minutes for either positive or negative inquiries. As time goes on, this window
will only get smaller. If you're a company with a very active consumer base on social
media, what's a better goal than collecting fans like Beanie Babies? A goal
that's smart. This is a customer service-related goal.
Consistently respond to questions and feedback within one hour. You can measure it, you can track it, and
increased customer service will have a positive impact on your business's bottom
line. So now, as we're creating our social media strategy, we want to outline the
tactics in the strategy that are going to help us achieve the goals that we have set
out. Keeping in mind the amount of time and resources that we have available. The
opportunities are limitless on social media, and it's easy to lay out grand
plans for all of the things that you could do. But keep it realistic. So with the
example goal of consistently responding to questions and feedback on social media
within one hour, here are a few tactics we could use. Now, these tactics that you set
out are going to depend a lot on where your customers you outline with their
buyer personas are active on social media. So this is just an example. Tactic one,
set up and monitor Twitter keyword searches to find brand product mentions.
If your consumer base is active on Pinterest, it could be implement Pin
alerts to receive notifications when someone has pinned an item from your
website, and you can go on with tactics that are relative to your business and to
your ideal customers. We know our audience. We've decided on smart goals and
outlined tactics to achieve them. So what next? We need to outline how we are going
to measure success so that we don't go into analysis paralysis and can
effectively show the C-Suite the impact and results of our marketing efforts. We
need to tie goals to metrics to measure success. These are examples of general
metrics that can be tracked and tied to goals. The more specific your goals are,
the easier it will be to measure success. When you get to this stage, you may want
to go back to your goals and see how you can make them more specific. If your goal
is to increase website traffic from Pinterest, what increase are you looking
for? Is it 5%, 10%, or 15%? If it's leads, is it 5 leads or 100? I worked with a
lawyer specializing in turnaround management. If he got five leads in a year
from social media and one converted, it more than paid for all of his marketing
efforts for the entire year, both online and offline. Your metrics need to be
applicable and realistic for your business and industry. Five leads may not pay off
for your business. A 10% growth from Pinterest may be child's play for your
business. But maybe 5% growth from Pinterest would be huge to your business.
It all depends on your business, your goals, and your industries. How are we
going to track these metrics? Here are examples of metrics and the tools you can
use to collect them. So engagement, this is your comments, your Likes, your shares.
Each of the networks has analytics. Some have more in-depth analytics than others.
YouTube, great in-depth analytics. Facebook has really good in-depth
analytics. Twitter is getting there. So it's going to really depend on the channel
you're using. I personally like to use the tool True Social Metrics that pulls in my
metrics from all the different channels into one spot. The other great thing about
True Social Metrics is that I can track my competitors' engagement metrics, and they
have a relative metric score. So I know, relative to the number of followers both
the client has and the competitor has, how they compare apples to apples. Another
source of engagement metrics is scheduling tools. Buffer, Sprout Social, Hootsuite,
they all offer some level of analytics. When you're looking at your brand metrics
like mentions and reviews, here are just a few different services you can use.
There's Mention, Social Mention, Google Alerts, and the networks themselves. Let's
look at your website. We want to see social referral traffic and organic search
traffic. If you're doing paid ads, you're also going to look in your campaign
traffic and metrics, and these would all be through Google Analytics which is free.
Purchasing decision, so these are leads, sales, and repeat business and these can
be tracked through conversion tracking in Google Analytics. Many e-commerce
platforms also offer conversion tracking. Or in-store, people will come into your
store from social media. It may not be direct all the time. But there are ways to
track, especially through things like coupons and special offers.
When we think social media, we often think Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn,
and only inside of those networks. The danger with social media activity only on
those networks is that you don't own your space. You're essentially renting space on
them. How are you going to connect your activity on this rented space to your
owned real estate on the web? Blogging is a great way to engage your audience on
rented space with your own space. I'm talking a blog on your website. Tumblr,
Medium, and other blogging platforms outside your website have their place. But
with a blog on your website, you totally own and control the space and interaction.
They can serve as a great way to attract social traffic to your website and into
your sales funnel. You own the interaction when it happens on your website's blog.
Email marketing has a higher conversion rate than social media. It takes less
buy-in on the part of the consumer to Like or follow you on social media than it does
to give you their email address. It's like moving from a first date or second date to
calling someone your girlfriend or boyfriend. Once they take the relationship
to the next step and give you their email address, they're getting even closer to
the final step of marriage, or really in this case, conversion. So we bring them in
at the top of the funnel with social media. We send them to a landing page that
has a lead generation form, and we collect their email address, and then you start up
your email marketing which will eventually lead to their sale.
Marketing doesn't begin and end with social media. It doesn't begin and end online. Building a
strong brand throughout all of your marketing channels, both online and
offline, will ensure that your followers will follow you when networks fade away
and others come into favor. Remember Myspace? I was there, but I followed the
brands I had a strong relationship with when they moved to Facebook, when they
moved to Twitter, now when they're moving to Pinterest or Tumblr, or the other new
networks that are coming up. So make sure that you are building your brand on all
possible networks, channels, print, online, offline. A strong brand will help you weather every single storm.
Have questions or thoughts? Give me a shout.
You can find me on Twitter @KAGray, or email me at
Kathy@polepositionmarketing.com. Thanks for listening.