OK. You’ve heard about social media marketing. It’s ‘the next big thing’, but everything was ‘the next bug thing’ at one time, and where are most of them now? Do you really need to spend the time and effort figuring out how to use social media marketing effectively? Does it really have the potential to match up with the hype?
Absolutely, and here’s why: SM marketing is ideally suited to the new world we find ourselves in.
2020 and 2021 were… a ride. Halfway through 2022 and things are starting to settle down again, but nothing is the same as it was. We’re doing business differently people are shopping differently, and the same old marketing techniques aren’t performing the way they used to – how could they, when so much has changed?
In 2022, social media is the go-to for learning, finding a better job, learning what’s hot and what’s not, and even getting business intelligence. If you are not just visible but entertaining and useful to interact with in the for a where people are actually spending their time, then you gain relevance to people’s lives in a way no pop-up ad or television commercial can.
Social media marketing can vastly outperform traditional marketing techniques in terms of:
- Building brand awareness – SM lets you tell your brand story, but also to interact directly and visibly with something new – actual customer stories.
- Generating hot leads – Every great interaction can be mined for leads. Not just the people responding to you but the people engaging with them – all can and should be targeted for sales interactions.
- Nurturing those leads along the sales funnel – every salesman knows that you need to build a relationship with a lead before you can sell to them. The right kind of social media presence does ¾ of that work for you.
- Making customers and potential customers feel listened to and valued – ‘Social listening’ is hugely important. Not only does it expose areas where your brand needs to improve, it displays you as a brand that cares and does something about it.
- Giving you a clearer picture of what your market actually wants and needs – this works on 2 levels, actually. On one level you can gain vital intelligence just from heeding what your market says about you. On another, you can usher these interactions over to your CRM solution to really mine them for data, all while making them feel that their opinion really matters (because now it actually does).
- Tracking the KPIs of both social and traditional marketing efforts – both the tools built into most social media platforms and your own management tools can gain in incredible amount of data from social media interactions. Proper use of the right solutions can use the public’s response to traditional campaigns on SM to track their effectiveness as well.
- Building trust and authenticity – social media interactions are your golden opportunity to be seen as a company that is worthy of trust and loyalty because you care about your customers and want to improve their lives.
If you can do all this – and you can – why wouldn’t you?
– How to leverage social media marketing
There is so much more to social media marketing than just getting your name and brand out there. Not that those aren’t important goals, but if you fail to leverage everything else SM has to offer, you are leaving a lot of money on the table. Let me give you just 2 examples of ways you could be leveraging your SM presence to do so much more.
If you leverage your social media presence skilfully, you can be seen as a partner, problem solver and though leader, not just a seller.
Engaging with people – not just your market – on social media can do something wonderful. It can change how people see your brand. Of course you want your customers to like and trust your brand, but that is only half the story.
The other half is that you are not just interacting with customers and potential customers. Everyone who sees a social media post becomes part of the equation, and you’ll be changing the way people who will never buy from you feel about your brand. Why is that important? Because partner businesses are not immune to social media influence. They are made up of people just like everyone else, and improving their opinion of your organisation can have far reaching and incredibly important repercussions.
Do you know who else you are influencing with your SM presence? Talent. Recruits. Call them what you will, if potential new hires gain a better feeling about your brand even before they apply or are approached, imagine how things could be different! Ask your HR people how important it is to have your employees feel good about your brand and the organisation behind it. Go ahead, we’ll wait.
Now, about your audience – growing your audience is fine, but imagine turning them into a real interactive, self-reinforcing community!
We all know that one of the most important factors of a marketing campaign is to grow your audience, and SM has huge potential to do just that. Last year, there were 4 and a half billion social media users worldwide. You don’t even need to divide that up into channels, because you can interact with all of your SM channels at the same time. Your addressable market is half the planet! Once you demonstrate thought leadership on issues they care about, many of those billions will become your actual audience.
But again, that is only half the job. SM marketing lets you do something almost unheard-of by traditional marketing techniques. It lets you consciously and tactically build a community. Not a notional community either, but an actual network of people who interact not just with your brand but with each other. A viral post is like a flash of lightning, but a community is a lantern in the darkness. It begins to generate its own content, and solve its own problems, it self-reinforces and self-recruits. And it does all of that in your name.
That is just a taste of what a properly leveraged social media presence can do. Want to learn more? Check back here often.
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