Okay, so you have a business and you're wondering if social media marketing can help to grow your business.
First of all it's not a case of 'If' social media can help your business it's 'how' social media can help your business. We live in a different world and your business absolutely needs to have a social media presence. What platforms you choose to be on is up to you, but you need to choose and start your social media journey NOW if you haven't started it already.
As an example of how important social media is, think of one of the biggest blogs in the world: Buzzfeed
A report at the end of last year shows that 80% of Buzzfeed's traffic is driven by social media
In this post we're going to give you an overview of just how social media marketing can help your business, whether you're a little mom and pop store or a large company who has thousands of customers.
What Is Social Media Marketing
First let's look at what social media marketing is, as this is where a lot of the confusion lies in the minds of business owners.
Putting your business on social media is all about connecting with people who are interested in what you have to say, what you have to sell and what your business is about. This is not just about buyers, you're creating a relationship first and then further down the line you can start thinking about selling.
You have to put the Socialback into social media, as too many business owners are not getting it.
The Journey Of A Follower
Here's an exercise for you: Think about the last business page or person you followed on Facebook.
Ask yourself why you followed them.
Then think about the steps it took you to follow them; did you see them once and follow them, did you see a post of theirs and then follow, or did you see several posts or videos and then decided you liked them enough and trusted them enough to click that 'Like' or 'Follow' button?
Chances are that you had to see their content a few times before making the decision to follow them.
That's exactly the same journey your followers (potential customers) are going to take when they make the decision to follow you, whether it be on Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, Twitter, Medium or sign up for your newsletters.
Education Based Marketing
The beauty of social media is that is it constantly evolving and now video is taking over in a big way.
Video gives you the ability to connect like never before, whether it be live or recorded. You can literally be your own brand and use education based marketing to allow your readers, viewers, listeners to get to know, like and trust you.
As an example, I recently had an interview with Russell Brunson talking about his new book Expert Secrets
In the interview Russell didn't try to sell the book, instead we spoke about the contents of the book and educated people on what it means to be an expert. He gave a few brief overviews of how to become an expert and how to think like one.
Here is the interview:
You can use education based marketing to grow your sales purely by teaching others what you know. That way you gain the trust and respect of your audience who will hopefully become customers in the future.
5 Ways Social Media Marketing Will Help Your Business
1. Customer Insight
To be able to sell anything online you have to know what type of customer you want to attract. This is going to be different for every business.
With social media you have a wealth of information at your fingertips every time you post something new to your social media sites.
Social media generates a huge amount of data about your customers in real time. Every day there are over 500 million Tweets, 4.5 billion Likes on Facebook, and 95 million photos and videos uploaded to Instagram. Behind these staggering numbers is a wealth of information about your customers—who they are, what they like, and how they feel about your brand.
Through daily active engagement and social listening , you can gather relevant customer data and use that information to make smarter business decisions.
This is the demographics for my page at ChangeYourThoughtsToday
This is great information to have about your followers and helps to make great business decision.
2. Inbound Traffic To Your Site
Without marketing your business on social media, your inbound traffic is limited to your usual customers. The people familiar with your brand are likely searching for the same keywords you already rank for.
If your not using social media as part of your marketing strategy, it's going to be difficult to find new visitors to your site, outside your normal network.
Every new social media profile you create is essentially a potential new audience for you, your brand and awareness of your products and services.
3. A whole New Audience
I love this example of how powerful social media is. The article from The National Psychologist (January 2013) states:
"Obama dominated the social media space because his team got how networks work. The real power of social media is not in the number of posts or Tweets but in user engagement measured by content spreadability. For example, Obama logged twice as many Facebook “Likes” and nearly 20 times as many re-tweets as Romney. With his existing social media base and spreadable content, Obama had far superior reach."
Obama also spent a hell of a lot more on his social media campaign, approximately $47 million, but brought in approximately $639 million in funds (80% of this was from people donating $20 or less). That is the power of social media.
You might be thinking what has politics got to do with business; Everything! politics is business.
When you set up multiple social media accounts you are effectively syndicating your content across multiple platforms. These multiple platforms have different demographics. By marketing on social media you can effectively open your business to a wider variety of versatile consumers all over the world.
4. Speed
Never before has it been easier to get your media campaign front of mind to the people who matter to your business.
With social media you can now instantly send pictures, videos, messages to a mass of people literally at the touch of a button.
With the advent of social media software like Hootsuite, Meetedgar, and Hubspot to name just a few it is even easier to cross promote your content and messages across multiple platforms.
5. Social Media Helps Generate Leads For Less
Using social media to generate leads for your business is a lot less expensive than using traditional means such as television ads, newspaper ads and radio advertising.
This is a case study from Connectio.io
What Noah Kagan Learned Spending $2 Million on Facebook Ads
This is the case study and key insights from Noah Kogan who has spent millions on Facebook Ads so far.
The advice and lessons learned from this case study will be far more insightful than people that have to spend some hundred or thousands of dollar on Facebook Ads.
Noah Kagan of AppSumo and SumoMe shared his experience spending $2 million on Facebook Ads across his different products.
Apart from promoting his key products ( AppSumo and SumoMe ), he showed how he earned $267 in profit from each Monthly1k course he sells.
He used Facebook Advertising to bring traffic to his website, increase his email subscription and later sell them the course.
Each email lead would cost him $3, and every 89th email lead went on to buy the course giving him $267 in net profit (after all deductions, cancellations, etc.effectively).
This is a classical example of how to best leverage Facebook Ads. People browse Facebook for casual fun, catching up with friends and family – but not to being sold.
It is best to use Facebook to drive them to opt-in to your lead magnet before pushing them your product.
They will be more inclined to engage with your Facebook Ads if it’s not asking for their credit card but rather giving some value without any cost to them.
Although, he provided a lot of insight from his million dollar spending on Facebook Ads, here are some of the key takeaways and lessons learned.
Lesson Learned # 1 – Use data at hand effectively to target your Facebook ads strategically. Such as copying the success of your competitors , targeting the fans of your competitors and creating lookalike audience from existing customers and email subscribers.
Lesson Learned # 2 –Start with a small budget and capitalize on the ads targeting which is giving you the best ROI.
Lesson Learned # 3 –Keep your targeting narrow than being broad. Narrower audiences not only is easier to reach on a limited budget but are highly likely to convert. But narrow audience doesn’t mean it has to be small, rather an ideal size ( in between narrow and broad)
Something To Think About
I could have written for hours about why you need social media for your business, and I hope the above information has given you some food for thought.
The thing to remember with social media it is about being social, yeah kinda dumb to say that, but a lot of businesses do forget it. Think of it as a tool to connect with your audience in an authentic, genuine way and you won't go far wrong.
Let me know your thoughts on this article.
Some Amazing Comments
Comments
