The Missing Link To a Golden Social Media ROI
If the digital arena is the Wild West frontier, then social media represents its most frequented cities.
Facebookville is rich with communal watering holes, casinos to crush candy, and a steady feed of the latest news that the Wild West has to offer.
Instagramtown is for the creative muses bent on photography, travel, and all things celebrity.
And, there’s MySpaceboro—a practical ghost town giving it one last push to carve out a legendary placement on the map.
Businesses trying to pan for gold in the social media realm of the digital arena often feel like they are drowning their investment on pub tabs charged for consuming the empty brew of engagement and reach. The question if there truly is any revenue driving return from social media marketing mostly goes unanswered by social media practitioners today.
Alas. This sheriff is here to arrest this issue altogether.
Social Media 101: Marketing Before Selling
Businesses look to corral a ROI on social media as if it were a sales channel first. It simply is not. It is, however, a phenomenal marketing channel that can be used to drive revenue over time. The key to successful social media selling is building a comprehensive marketing strategy before you begin.
This strategy has to include an approach to each of these aspects of social media marketing:
- Content Creation and Curation
- Community Management and Customer Service
- Social Advertising using CPC or CPM
- Conversion Activity
- Integrated Analytics
In future articles, I am going to speak to each of these aspects of successful social media marketing in detail; today, I want to speak to how these components work together to best support your marketing funnel on social media, and ultimately lead to revenue.
Social Media 102: The Social Funnel
Many pundits have weighed in on the different stages of a marketing funnel. I like to boil the marketing funnel down to four key stages (again, more articles coming down the road):
- Awareness
- Acceleration
- Acquisition
- Advocacy
Social media builds a bridge to your consumers at every level of the funnel.
Whether it is through integration with other pieces of digital media like your website or email campaigns, it is by understanding how social media conversions should work that you finally start moving from connecting with existing customers, to creating raving fans who bring you customers. While all of the aforementioned aspects of social media marketing play their own role, all of them work much better when they are used to acquire more user information PRIOR to trying to collect a purchase.
The bottom line is that most social media marketing requires soft conversions before dollars are ever spent. There is a simple way to start these soft conversions and that is by adding another type of digital media into the mix.
Social Media 103: Use Email and Social Together
The missing link to golden social media marketing is email. Yes, I know. You may not have thought that wrench was coming. The truth of the matter is that social selling must be done in multiple touches. Watching a video on Instagram or Vine, reading an article tweeted about on Twitter, and filling out an email capture form on Facebook are easy to do actions for the everyday social media user.
Question: Which one of those actions gives you pertinent data to follow up with your fans? Email!
Email becomes the glue that keeps prospects and customers sticky. It is not simply because you can use email content to consistently move people from one stage of the funnel to the next. You use social media marketing, particularly Facebook marketing, to grow your email list. You then use that email data to grow your fan base and extend your brand to more like-minded users via Facebook’s custom audiences and look-a-likes. You can also use incredible platforms like InfusionSoft to create automated follow up campaigns that keep your prospects accelerating down the funnel.
Email is one of the MOST positive sources of ROI still today. Not everyone uses Facebook (crazy, I know), but nearly everyone of buying age has an email.
Don’t take my word for it that email is no huckleberry; Niti Shah over at Hubspot agrees.
Social Media 104: Sensible Next Steps
When you sit down to build out your social media marketing strategy, know that using email as the glue will be the key to moving your marketing from being arduously measured by mentions to being measured by moolaa. Of course, there are many other tactics to incorporate into a robust social media machine; but, simply starting by adding an email capture form to your Facebook page as well as driving any advertising traffic to a similar email capture form will be a great first domino.
Check back again soon as I follow this article up with extensive guides to both the “4 A Marketing Funnel” as well as the different components to sound social media marketing. For now, stop letting Jesse James Zuckerburg run off with your satchels of cash and start using email in your social media marketing, pronto.
Don’t be the lone ranger when you don’t have to be. If you need help overseeing your social media marketing, then call us at 1-844-ECLIPSE (325-4773).
