The word is social. It’s a place to be social yet many make the mistake of trying to sell on social media.
Most businesses I spoke to shy away from social media marketing because they are unable to measure the return on investment on their social media marketing efforts. Despite the fact they know social media marketing is important to their business.
We use social media to have conversation. We do not want to meet someone who is trying to sell us stuffs or read a flyer. So what can we do to create results that can be measured for social media marketing?
Plan to have non-disruptive ways to engage with your fans.
What we usually do is prepare a list of frequently asked questions by our fans.
We then prepare answers to each question for our social media postings to link to our blog content. Our favorite source is Quora
We start with building content that establishes us as an expert in our field. As we progresses, our content will need to focus on building a stronger relationship with our fans.
We also bring in social proof to build a know, like and trust factor in our messages. We only will offer sales to potential customers who have some level of interest after reading our content.
Always build relationship. Don’t start selling to your fans the moment they land on your social media platforms. Focus on conversation. Remember this formula:
Conversation creates conversion and conversion creates cash
How do you have a conversation that will not scare your potential customers on social media?
Need to stop ‘speaking’ to your customers. Instead, always begin conversations with a question that requires a response. Be a familiar face to your audience.
As often as possible make your customers ‘celebrities’. Feature them. Ask for testimonials.
When you highlight your customers, they are most likely to share the highlights to families and friends. It is a powerful referral marketing in process.
Whenever we plan content on social media marketing, we always use the following guide : 85% public broadcast content and 15% promotional content. Use original content when you share your public broadcast content to establish yourself as an authority or expert.
We only share other people’s content not more than 5% of all the content we share. However instead of just sharing links of other’s content, we curate the content by giving our insights and thoughts or ask questions to encourage engagements.
Even we are on social platforms, all our content should focus on sales goal. We then build our content around the goal.
The feedback we get from our consulting clients is – how do we promote and ask for the sale when we are supposed to be on social media?
This how we do it …. But promise us not to share.
Always track your activities online. For website we use Google Analytics. On Facebook we use the built-in Insights analytics. On Twitter we use their built-in Twitter analytics and Instagram we use Iconoquare
We will determine which content that has our product or service that has the most traffic. We will then create a campaign around the product or service.
We would then create advertisements through progression of articles. We then retarget each article with new articles. This process goes on until we reach the fourth advertisement with a call to action.
We use the following metrics to measure ROI – get a click through, an opt-in or drive a to purchase to measure our social media marketing activities.
What’s your thought on this? Tell us. We would love to hear from you.
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