YOUR ROADMAP TO SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING SUCCESS
IT’S NOT ENOUGH TO JUST PLANT YOUR FLAG ON FACEBOOK; YOU ALSO NEED TO CREATE A STRATEGY THAT FITS YOUR COMPANY’S LONG-RANGE GOALS.
Social media doesn’t just mean setting up a Facebook account or microblogging on Twitter. Social media involves an integrated approach optimizing multiple social media platforms in a coordinated fashion with other marketing tactics to increase business success.
A website supports your social media marketing efforts by giving you a home to build your brand, highlight your products and services, coordinate social media into one place, give folks a reason to buy your products and, maybe, even sell your products.
You don’t have to be an online retailer to make money online.
Increasing sales requires you to bring more traffic to your website and convert the traffic, whether you’re making sales online or using online strategies to drive traffic to your store. Bringing more traffic to your site without being able to close that traffic may boost your ego, but it won’t improve your bottom line.
Successful social media marketing requires a strategy built on an understanding of the unique nature of online marketing, a concerted, sustained effort, effective monitoring, and time. Nothing in social media happens over night.
Of course, this is the notion that belies common misconceptions of social media, that you can generate massive response with a single piece of viral content and become an overnight millionaire.
Another misconception is that you should focus on building large numbers of fans, which leads companies to waste money hosting contests or using other tools to build their fan base. Generating huge numbers isn’t enough to improve your bottom line.
Social media marketing success requires conversion of traffic, not just building it. So what if your YouTube video had a million hits or you have 100,000 fans? You have to convert that traffic into sales.
Let’s look at an example using a Facebook Fan Page:
As you can see, both situations generate exactly the same sales — 1,000 units. In the first situation, the brand has lots of fans, but isn’t so successful at converting them into buyers. In the second case, the firm has only 10% as many fans as the first brand, but they’re much more successful at converting them.
You can either focus on building your network or converting your network. By focusing on both at the same time, you’ll always outperform the results you get from either strategy alone.
Building traffic and converting traffic doesn’t just happen; it’s a function of many actions all working in harmony to create success. A comprehensive and coordinated strategy must encompass action plans across many different marketing areas, including traditional media, social media, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), branding, customer service, and more. Each action plan requires attention to detail and specialized skills and experience.
Social media marketing success doesn’t just happen and it takes more than your nephew who has 593 friends on his Facebook profile. Your marketing plans will likely fail if you don’t have these skills and expertise in-house or hire the right folks to bring your strategies to life.
Avoid The Five Routes to Failure
Since we’re talking about creating social media marketing success, it also makes sense to talk about what contributes to the failure of social media marketing efforts. Here are the top 5 reasons why your social media marketing strategy might fail:
1. Misunderstanding How Social Media Works
Social media marketing requires marketing skills, consistency, and a little luck. Recognize that social media is different than traditional media; it’s not just another vehicle for spreading your advertising and public relations. Social media takes a totally different approach.
2. Not Being Realistic
Businesses are unrealistic about resources required for social media marketing success; they don’t realize the amount of time and money necessary.
There’s the old saying you can have it fast, free, or effective; you can’t have all three at once and you’re lucky if you can get two of the three.
Sure, social media marketing is much less expensive than traditional media, but you still have to pay for some elements. While social media platforms are mostly free, you’ll need to spend a little on creating attractive and effective pages. You need professional images and video, which cost money. You also need people to run your social media marketing and good social media experts cost money. Trying to run social media marketing in your spare time around running your business is not effective.
As mentioned earlier, social media marketing won’t achieve immediate success. Most “overnight” social media successes are actually built on a foundation of sound social media strategies implemented over time.
3. Not Measuring and Monitoring
Folks using social media underestimate the importance of metrics in developing social media marketing success. Firms don’t install analytics, don’t look at their analytics often enough, and don’t track trends across their metrics.
Developing a social media dashboard of metrics is as important as the dashboard in your car. A dashboard tells you what’s working and what’s not. Incorporating a listening post into your dashboard is essential. It allows you instant access to sentiments about your firm across the ‘net.
4. Not Building Engagement as a Foundation
Nothing happens in social media without engagement and, if this isn’t an integral part of your social media marketing strategy, you won’t achieve the results you want. Achieving engagement is different in different social networks, but results when businesses develop “friendships” with members of their social network. It also takes a customer first approach built on self-disclosure, trust, cooperation, and providing value.
Engagement is really the fuel behind spreading your message in social media.
5. Fear of Social Media
By far, the leading cause of social media failure is fear. This is why businesses set up camp in social networks, but then don’t do anything there. Businesspeople often feel this paralyzing fear that they’ll do something wrong and it’ll hurt their brand. What they don’t realize is that not doing anything is much worse.
SO WHAT IF YOU HAVE 100,000 FACEBOOK FANS? YOU HAVE TO CONVERT THAT TRAFFIC INTO SALES.
DEVELOPING A SOCIAL MEDIA DASHBOARD OF METRICS IS AS IMPORTANT AS THE DASHBOARD IN YOUR CAR.
Building traffic and converting traffic doesn’t just happen; it’s a function of many actions all working in harmony.
FIND THE PATH TO AUDIENCE-BUILDING SUCCESS
