Wake Up! Social Media Marketing is The New Wave of Marketing

Social Media Marketing – The New Wave of Marketing 

When it comes to social media mar­ket­ing, the num­bers real­ly speak for them­selves. First, close to a third of peo­ple world­wide use social media, so the audi­ence is there. Then, with 90 per­cent of mar­keters stat­ing that social media mar­ket­ing has boost­ed their expo­sure, it’s clear that the audi­ence is recep­tive.

Even though the mar­ket is huge and recep­tive, most social media mar­ket­ing strate­gies fail.

Why is that?

It comes down to a sim­ple con­cept. Most peo­ple don’t real­ly under­stand social media mar­ket­ing, so they don’t know how to use it. You need to under­stand what it is and how it can work for you. Then, you can devel­op a social media mar­ket­ing plan for your spe­cif­ic needs.

First, let’s look at some social media con­cepts, and then let’s look at the indi­vid­ual net­works.

Social Media Marketing – The New Cold Call

If you’ve spent much time in mar­ket­ing, you’ve prob­a­bly cold called a per­son or two.

It is not pleas­ant.

You can feel your pulse rac­ing as soon as you punch those num­bers into the phone. What is the per­son on the oth­er end of the line going to say? Is he going to be friend­ly, or is he going to yell at you and hang up?

That’s a lot of stress.

Here’s some good news for you. Social media mar­ket­ing has replaced cold call­ing. It is the new method of cold call­ing, and the num­bers are huge.

Social media mar­ket­ing leads to a 66 per­cent increase in quo­ta attain­ment when com­pared to tra­di­tion­al prospect­ing tech­niques (i.e., cold call­ing). It also leads to an increase in upsells and more rev­enue.

The big ques­tion is why. Why is social sell­ing bring­ing in num­bers that are so much big­ger than cold calls and oth­er forms of prospect­ing?

It begins with con­ver­sa­tions, or lack there­of. Only 28 per­cent of prospects con­verse with sales­peo­ple over cold calls. It is hard to engage a prospect if he or she won’t engage with you. Com­pare that to social media engage­ment. One-hun­dred mil­lion hours of video are watched each day on Face­book alone, so the engage­ment oppor­tu­ni­ties are there. It is much eas­i­er to bend a prospect’s ear and get her inter­est­ed when you put your­self out on social media.

Then, you have to con­sid­er the val­ue that peo­ple receive dur­ing the prospect­ing process. Most cold callers sim­ply do not have the val­ue nec­es­sary to close the deal. They don’t have case stud­ies they can read­i­ly share or exam­ples to pro­vide to the lead. On the oth­er hand, social media lends itself to edu­cat­ing con­sumers. It is easy to add val­ue in this for­mat. You can link your read­ers to case stud­ies and use tes­ti­mo­ni­als to prove the val­ue of a prod­uct or ser­vice.

The more val­ue you can add, the bet­ter. Engage­ment increas­es by five times when you add val­ue to sales mate­ri­als. Engage­ment helps with the deci­sion-mak­ing process.

That is one of the rea­sons why it is so hard to get peo­ple to make a deci­sion with a tra­di­tion­al cold call. It’s report­ed that a mere 1 per­cent of top-lev­el B2B deci­sion mak­ers are will­ing to make a deci­sion based on a cold call. The engage­ment and proof sim­ply aren’t there, so they are not going to pull the trig­ger. The same isn’t true for social media. Three-quar­ters of B2B lead­ers use this plat­form as part of their deci­sion-mak­ing process. That’s a big rea­son that social media mar­ket­ing is so pow­er­ful.

You know that social media is a great way to sell, but should you just try to unload your prod­ucts or ser­vices on the plat­form?

Not exact­ly. That might be part of it, but the best social media mar­ket­ing experts know that the plat­form is a great place for lead prospect­ing.

Lead Prospecting – An Important Component of Your Social Media Marketing Plan

Twen­ty-four per­cent of busi­ness­es that engage in lead gen­er­a­tion prac­tices on social media enjoy an increase in rev­enue. It can be argued that the num­bers would increase even more if peo­ple under­stood how to suc­cess­ful­ly use social media for mar­ket­ing pur­pos­es.

It’s pret­ty easy to col­lect email address­es on social media. Email man­age­ment plat­forms, like MailChimp, offer social media inte­gra­tion for Face­book, while Twit­ter has lead gen­er­a­tion cards that you can use to cap­ture email address­es. LinkedIn and Face­book both have lead gen­er­a­tion ads that you can use to col­lect email address­es.

Insta­gram makes it a lit­tle bit trick­i­er. You can’t put a lead gen­er­a­tion form on the site, and your fol­low­ers can’t leave their email address­es in the com­ment sec­tion. Because of that, you should add URLs to your grams to send peo­ple to a lead gen­er­a­tion page.

You should do the same with the oth­er social net­works, as well. It is always a good idea to have a mul­ti-pronged lead gen­er­a­tion strat­e­gy. That will allow you to get the best results.

Of course, you can’t just try to col­lect email address­es and expect to get great results. You have to put the work in by build­ing rela­tion­ships.

Add Relationship Building to Your Social Media Marketing Strategy

Some mar­keters start using social media with one goal in mind.

They are going to make lots of sales.

While dol­lars and cents are always impor­tant, social media mar­ket­ing is more about build­ing rela­tion­ships — you must build a bridge of trust between your busi­ness and your cus­tomers. The evi­dence over the years has been clear. Using social media net­works that your audi­ence fre­quents allows you to stay rel­e­vant. That, in turn, makes it easy to build rela­tion­ships, which allows you to turn a prof­it.

How you do this depends on your brand. Brands like Nike Women and Weight Watch­ers have used social media to bring peo­ple togeth­er who face the same tri­als and tribu­la­tions that they do. That puts these brands at the cen­ter of the com­mu­ni­ca­tions, which estab­lish­es them as an impor­tant com­po­nent in the entire process. Con­sid­er using this method for your own social media mar­ket­ing plan.

Brands also use social media to estab­lish their own voic­es and con­tribute to ongo­ing com­mu­ni­ca­tions. They share rel­e­vant con­tent that edu­cates their audi­ences, and in some cas­es, inspires them.

There is a key com­po­nent to all of this. Your social media strat­e­gy should be about the cus­tomers instead of the prod­ucts. As entic­ing as sell­ing on social media is, that isn’t what it is all about. It’s about the peo­ple who are sit­ting on the oth­er side of the key­boards around the world.

Speak­ing of that, do you know where your cus­tomers are? There are sev­en big social net­works out there, and you need to know how to use them all.

The Best Social Media Marketing Services Use the Big 7 Networks

When you think about social media mar­ket­ing, you prob­a­bly think of Face­book. Every­one is on it. Your friends are on it, your co-work­ers are on it, and your mom is even on it.

Your cus­tomers are on it, too, but that’s just one of the many net­works where you can find your cus­tomers. If you’re seri­ous about devis­ing a sol­id social media mar­ket­ing strat­e­gy, you need to under­stand all of the net­works.

Facebook

Peo­ple spend more time on Face­book than any oth­er social net­work. They are on Face­book for 40 min­utes a day, com­pared to 21 min­utes on Insta­gram, 20.8 min­utes on Pin­ter­est, 17 min­utes on Twit­ter, and 9.8 min­utes on LinkedIn. The site also kills it when it comes to social refer­ral traf­fic. It is respon­si­ble for close to a quar­ter of all social refer­rals.

Pho­tos and videos rule on Face­book, but you have to be care­ful about how much you share. You might want to share con­stant­ly, but one to two times a day will bring in the most engage­ment. Out of the two, video con­tent is pre­ferred by Face­book and tends to per­form bet­ter. You can learn more about the ben­e­fits of video here.

Instagram

With over 500 mil­lion month­ly active users, you can’t count Insta­gram out. Users share around 95 mil­lion pho­tos a day, so this site has a ton of action. The site attracts peo­ple from all over the world, with 8 per­cent of users locat­ed out­side of the Unit­ed States.

The best brands know that gram­ming around five pic­tures a week is the sweet spot. They also under­stand the impor­tance of con­sis­ten­cy, right down to the fil­ter. Six­ty per­cent of the top gram­ming brands use a con­sis­tent fil­ter for all of their pho­to shares on the site.

Engage­ment is impor­tant on Insta­gram, and you can increase it by adding a hash­tag. That will boost your engage­ment lev­els by close to 13 per­cent. Just don’t go hash­tag crazy.

Twitter

Do you have a huge inter­na­tion­al appeal? If so, Twit­ter is right for you. It sup­ports more than 40 lan­guages, and 79 per­cent of the users are locat­ed out­side of the Unit­ed States.

It’s also real­ly pop­u­lar with mil­len­ni­als. There are more mil­len­ni­als than any oth­er age group on the site, but peo­ple aged 65 and over are almost nonex­is­tent. Keep that in mind when devis­ing your social media mar­ket­ing strat­e­gy.  

You can use Twit­ter for any­thing, but it real­ly stands out when it comes to cus­tomer ser­vice. Check for tweets direct­ed at your brand and respond prompt­ly for good cus­tomer ser­vice.

Snapchat

Over 100 mil­lion peo­ple use Snapchat each day, and those users watch over 10 bil­lion videos dai­ly. They also send 400 mil­lion snaps and share close to 9,000 pho­tos.

This plat­form is main­ly used by 12- to 24-year-olds, although some old­er peo­ple are also hop­ping on the band­wag­on.

The most suc­cess­ful brands use geofil­ters when deliv­er­ing snaps. If you use a geofil­ter and deliv­er your snap to a nation­al audi­ence, you can expect it to be seen by around half of the dai­ly users. You can also use Spon­sored Lens­es and get your snaps out to around 16 mil­lion view­ers.

YouTube

Every brand, be it big or small, should have a YouTube chan­nel. On aver­age, busi­ness­es pub­lish 18 videos a month, and since over half are less than two min­utes in length, it is easy to churn them out. Busi­ness­es tend to stick with the basics, which are explain­ers, demons, how-tos, and tes­ti­mo­ni­als.

LinkedIn

If you’re engag­ing in B2B mar­ket­ing, LinkedIn is a must. Eighty per­cent of B2B leads come from this plat­form. You don’t need to be a B2B mar­keter to ben­e­fit from this, though. Over 90 per­cent of mar­keters use LinkedIn to dis­trib­ute con­tent.

LinkedIn is a great way to estab­lish your­self as an expert, so come up with a sol­id social media mar­ket­ing strat­e­gy and start post­ing.

Pinterest

Mar­keters often for­get about Pin­ter­est, and that is a shame. It has more than 150 mil­lion active users each month, so you need to pay atten­tion to it. Those users are ready to buy. Almost 90 per­cent have pur­chased a prod­uct because of some­thing they have seen on the site, and 72 per­cent active­ly use the site to find things to buy. That means you need to get to pin­ning.

Determine What Social Media Marketing Services You Need Today

How do you intend to use social media mar­ket­ing to your advan­tage? Add some impor­tant social media mar­ket­ing ser­vices to your adver­tis­ing cam­paigns so you can reach peo­ple on var­i­ous net­works. You can also try a Web Design Blog Direc­to­ry to get some expo­sure as well. After this, you can enjoy the ben­e­fits that come with this form of mar­ket­ing. If you are look­ing for a pro­fes­sion­al team or agency to help grow your busi­ness through the lat­est dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing tech­niques, email hello@swiftlydigital.com to get a free con­sul­ta­tion.

Also pub­lished on Medi­um.