Social media marketing carries many benefits. One of the most important is that you don’t have to front any cash for most social media services. Of course, there’s a downside: Most services require a significant time investment to initiate and maintain a social media marketing campaign, and many limit distribution of unpaid posts, charging for advertising and distributing posts to your desired markets.
As you read the following sections, think about whether each benefit applies to your needs. How important is it to your business? How much time are you willing to allocate to it? What kind of payoff would you expect? Figure 1-6 shows how the CPM (cost per thousand impressions) of social media can be as low as $2.50, which translates to at least four times less than what the same attention costs using traditional marketing methods.
Created with data compiled from Lyfe Marketing
FIGURE 1-6: The cost of social media compared to other marketing tactics.
Casting a wide net to catch your target market
The audience for social media is huge. By the first quarter of 2020, Facebook claimed 2.6 billion monthly active users worldwide, and a whopping 96 percent of active users accessed the network via their mobile devices. Furthermore, 90 percent of Facebook’s traffic comes from outside the U.S. and Canada.
When compared to Google, this social media behemoth is in tight competition for the U.S. audience. In the first quarter of 2020, Facebook tallied about 253 million unique monthly U.S. visitors/viewers, whereas Google Sites barely squeaked by it with almost 260 million visitors. Keep in mind, of course, that visitors are conducting different activities on the two sites.
Twitter tallied more than 33 million U.S. visitors/viewers in the first quarter of 2020 and toted up about 500 million tweets (short messages) daily worldwide. A relatively small number of power users are responsible for the majority of tweets posted daily. More people read tweets than are accounted for, however, because tweets can be read on other websites.
Even narrowly focused networking sites claim hundreds of thousands of visitors. Surely, some of the people using these sites must be your customers or prospects. In fact, one popular use of social media is to cast a wide net to capture more potential visitors to your website. Figure 1-7 shows a classic conversion funnel, which demonstrates the value of bringing new traffic to the top of the funnel to produce more conversions (actions taken) at the bottom.
Courtesy of Watermelon Mountain Web Marketing: www.watermelonweb.com
FIGURE 1-7: The classic conversion funnel shows that only 2 to 4 percent of funnel entries yield desired results.
The conversion funnel works like this: If more people arrive at the top of the funnel, theoretically more will progress through the steps of prospect and qualified lead to become a customer. Only 2 to 4 percent, on average, make it through a funnel regardless of what action the funnel conversion depicts.
Branding
Basic marketing focuses on the need for branding, name recognition, visibility, presence, or top-of-mind awareness. Call it what you will — you want people to remember your company name when they’re in need of your product or service. Social media services, of almost every type, are excellent ways to build your brand.
Building relationships
If you’re focused on only short-term benefits, you’d better shake that thought loose and get your head into the long-term game that’s played in the social media world. To build effective relationships in social media, you’re expected to
Establish your expertise.
Participate regularly as a good citizen of whichever social media world you inhabit; follow site rules and abide by whatever conventions have been established.
Avoid overt self-promotion.
Resist hard-sell techniques except in paid advertising.
Provide value with links, resources, and unbiased information.
Watch for steady growth in the number of your followers on a particular service or the number of people who recommend your site to others; increased downloads of articles or other tools that provide detailed information on a topic; or repeat visits to your site. All these signs indicate you’re building relationships that may later lead to, if not a direct sale, then a word-of-web recommendation to someone who does buy.
In the world of social media, the term engagement refers to the length of time and quality of interaction between your company and your followers.
Improving business processes
Already, many clever businesses have found ways to use social media to improve business processes. Though individual applications depend on the nature of your business, consider leveraging social media to
Promptly detect and correct customer problems or complaints.
Obtain customer feedback and input on new product designs or changes.
Provide tech support to many people at one time; if one person has a question, chances are good that others do, too.
Improve service delivery, such as cafes that accept to-go orders on Twitter or Facebook, or food carts that notify customers where and when their carts will arrive.
Locate qualified new vendors, service providers, and employees by using professional networks such as LinkedIn.
Collect critical market intelligence on your industry and competitors by watching content on appropriate social media.
Use geolocation, tweets, and mobile search services to drive neighborhood traffic to brick-and-mortar stores during slow times and to acquire new customers.