Whether you are a small business or a giant conglomerate, it is fairly common to have some hesitations before embarking on social media marketing. From the CEO and board of directors to the single owner of a small shop, the main concern is “show me how this will make money”. It’s a valid question. After all, businesses want to make money. Marty Weintraub talks about some strategies to address the wary business’s concerns about social media marketing and how to see the results it brings in his article “How to Turn Your Social Media Averse Boss into Your Champion”.
Expand your English-speaking market: there are substantial number of English-speaking internet users who are not American, British or Canadian. Social media marketing is a great way to access this international market.
Build a community by connecting with users: Whether your clients are long-time clients or new to your business, there is no better way to connect to them than by building a place to interact with them. Companies like Pizza Hut have employed social media to grow their markets successfully.
Increase your brand visibility: Expanding your community via social media marketing will increase your brand visibility. As Weintraub points out, “We’ve not met a CMO yet who does not understand the benefit of enhanced keyword rankings, traffic or improved presence in universal search verticals. Most business leaders understand the value of creating measurable syndicated content channels to disseminate information if the result is new and retained users. To many it’s not a very far reach to justify the value of 47,000 Twitter followers, compared to the value of a focused customer email list.”
Drive customers to your customer service tools via social media and PPC: Both social media and PPC advertising can be used to drive traffic to various customer service tools. Your company can use “a moderated fan page on Facebook, Twitter community manager or YouTube video FAQs, the only limit is creativity”. And no one will argue against improved customer service for their company! Happier customers come back again and again.
Social branding increases sales: Paid search campaigns through Facebook and LinkedIn ads can target specific demographics, resulting in big impact for low costs.
Measure the results of your social media efforts: There are a number of ways to measure your efforts and prove that social media marketing works. Weintraub provides us with these measuring tools:
• Measure new and retained unique friends at measurable CPUF (cost per unique friend).
• Measure proclivity to become a customer.
• Measure e-commerce lift without branding compared to e-commerce lift with Facebook and LinkedIn Ads branding in different geographic areas.
• Measure SEO prominence as indicated by traffic to social assets and feed from universal organic search.
• Measure customer service usage on social assets.
• Measure engagement in participation threads, both on and off site.
• Measure inbound traffic to and from the feed and divisional site (churn).
• Measure socio-global expansion as indicated by traffic, sales and support tool usage.
• Measure whether users return on any of these nodes.