Quick Start for maximizing your efforts in Social Media.

First, what are we trying to do with social media or why?  Do we want to increase sales, build memberships, share information, build donors and by how much do we want to grow? What problem are you trying to solve?  Is using social media the right way to reach our goals?  The answer to that question will be the foundation we can build on. It will dictate the specific tools and tactics we will use to achieve our goals. ( a little about Marti.Agency)
First, let’s clear up a misconception. Participation in social media marketing is not free. There is a time commitment to be considered and it is easy to waste time on tasks that don’t advance us toward our goals.  Participating in social media can amplify efforts to nurture relationships long term.  Just as a business owner would cultivate relationships face to face, social media helps to build relationships with a much larger audience. The power of extending reach is the ability to share information and offers, privately or publicly and have those offers shared with other potential customers or advocates of our business. Many people call it going viral. You don’t need a million views to be successful. To reach just the right people at the right time is what we are looking for.
  • First: Perform a social media audit of where we are and set goals (Where)
    • Analyze every component of your Social Media, Website, Reputation, as well as your traditional advertising you employ. Remember, all your marketing efforts need to work together. We have to know where we are starting from to set attainable goals. Which networks are the best to participate in to reach advocates of our efforts and customers.
  • Second: We need to create a strategy (What)
    • How can we leverage social media integrating with our other marketing efforts? The majority of people will research companies on the internet. How can we expand our networks and increase our sales.
    • What social media networks inbound and push marketing  ( paid ) on Social Media or search engine marketing.
      • Have you claimed all your online listings ( Google Maps, Yahoo, others)
  • Third: Create the tactics to support the strategy. (How)
    • What social media – inbound and push marketing  ( paid ) will work best to grow sales.
      •  Should we used paid advertising on social media, search, email, and traditional advertising and how will we employ them?
      •  Directories – how can we leverage the free online directories ( Maps, Yahoo, others)  Have you claimed all your online listings?
    • What is our budget and test what works best. How can we minimize costs and maximize return on investment?
  • Forth: Continually analyze the results and make adjustments on a periodic basis. ( Rince and repeat _
    • Monthly is a good interval.
    • What is working? What needs to change?
Because it is critical to have a comprehensive plan covering everything incorporating all your online efforts including web design, there is no quick fix. If you hear someone promise quick search engine rankings, run. You simply can’t do it. Especially with social media, it takes time to build a rapport before asking others to take an action ( Sign up for your email list, contact you via email, text or phone,  recommend you to a friend etc. I like to use this example, you would probably not walk up to someone you don’t know and ask for a date. You have not built a rapport.
Sometimes companies have all the components to create a great plan. They just don’t know how to pull it all together. We can help.
We work on a retainer starting at $500. We tailor our services to you. My Name is Richard Marti and you will deal with me, not someone who plays on Facebook and thinks they how to connect with your customers. I have worked with companies as large as $20 million in revenue as well as companies under $1 million. It does not cost anything to call or email me. I like to have the opportunity to find out if we would be a good match. I want to know if I can meet our expectations to achieve the goals you have.

Send me an email and we can set a time to talk!

 

Email Rich

 

Or you can call me at 562-726-2784

 

Over the next 4 weeks we will be sharing information each week on growing your business with social media. You can sign up here and we will send you the posts.

 

How do we use social media accounts to drive sales?

Here, we will explore perhaps the most often question we hear from clients, “we have a Facebook business page and an Instagram account but how do we use social media to increase sales?” That is not such an easy question to answer. There really isn’t a cookie-cutter approach that will work for everyone but there are some concepts that apply to most. Social media is first and foremost, social. People generally don’t visit sites to see commercials. People use Social media sites to connect with others.

With so many tools available online,  how can we comprehensive and synergistic way, develop and implement an online marketing plan that works with our existing marketing efforts while creating a return on investment.

Taking stock of where you are, your digital footprint.

One of the first steps is to take stock of where you are right now. Take a look at some key metrics. Look at the number of Facebook friends. More importantly, take a look at how people engage with you on Facebook. You should do the same with any other social media sites.  Next, you can Google yourself to see what people are saying about you. Any marketing effort will be hampered if potential customers find you online only to see negative reviews. We should also look at the metrics on your website. How many people visit, what pages do they visit, how long do they stay on those pages, how did they find you, through search, by referral or directly. Finally, if you purchase any online advertising, is it optimized for the greatest return?

Once you know where you are, it is time to take a look at where you want to go.

As I said above, you need to know where you want to go, what you want to achieve. Does increasing your Facebook followers really create value for you? We won’t know until we decide on our objective.

  • Do we want to increase our sales? By how much and over what period?
  • Do we want to increase the number of donors ( Sometimes it is easier to get more donors at a lower commitment in order to reach out to them in the future for other donations)
  • Do we want to increase awareness of a special issue? How much do we want to expand that reach and in what areas of the world?

How are your going to get there?

Some online tools you probably already use. Your website, email, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are some of the most common. Then there are search engines, directory sites, review sites and many more that without a plan, they can end up being a giant time waster. So, are there ways to maximize our efforts and minimize the time we spend? Yes. The good thing is that business owners already know the difficult part, how to handle customers/visitors. The easier part learning the tools to leverage our efforts.

One of the ways I like to think about Social Media sites is like a social event like a dinner party. At a social gathering, you probably would not pitch your company. You would probably share stories and information of value. If someone else brought up the topic of your business, then you and your business might be the solution that others are looking for. In those instances, it would be appropriate to talk shop. Also sharing your expertise with people is another way to add value to conversations. You build credibility and establish yourself as an expert.

Why does this work?

Building relationships and trust have power in a couple of ways.

  1. Your efforts in social media reinforce your other promotional efforts.
  2. Your efforts also build trust in your communities for the times that you might want to create an offer, they are willing to act on.
  3. By having a presence online, you help people in communities to refer you to others. Referrals are one huge benefit of social media if you plan for them.

Social Media marketing efforts are not instant.

It takes time to build influence, and create trust. There are ways to streamline the process of both sharing in social media as well as listening to conversations about you. Listening to conversations is as important as sharing. People want to be understood as much as to understand.  By doing so, you make deposits in your relationship bank account.  Social Media does not need to be time-consuming.  Two-way communication is what separates inbound marketing from traditional outbound messages of traditional marketing.

Maximize the use of your website.

By making your site the hub of communications, you create additional traffic to your site. Traffic sent to our sites from search engines is vital and it is why there are so many people out there trying to sell SEO (search engine optimization).  There really isn’t any simple way to increase your rank in search engines. Google uses very complex algorithms that they do not share. We do know of a few; numbers of inbound links from sites of authority, Structure of the content, does the content answer the searchers’ query, how often the site is updated, How fast is the site, etc. One other criterion that is very important is how the site performs on a mobile device. All of these items are related to the users’ experience.  These many factors along with others show us that there is no shortcut to SEO.

Social media messages you share help drive people to visit our site.  Generally, we like to create content on our site and then share a snippet of that content on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn etc so if people want more information they can follow the link to back to us. It is sort of like a loss leader in a grocery store. We go in for milk and we get to see everything else.   It Increases traffic and suggests to search engines that your site is a popular and therefore a good site to move up in rankings. The content you build on your site will naturally help build your search engine traffic. If your site has the answer to the visitor’s query, you are probably getting a good idea the role social media helps grow sales

 

Are there ways to make managing this easier?

Besides the workflow we described above, to help manage social profiles, sharing and listening, there are a few tools help the process. Social media dashboards are one tool that helps.  Social Media dashboards allow you to connect multiple social media accounts in one place. They make cross-posting, managing followers, and scheduling post much easier. We will explore some of the social media dashboards in another post.

 

Analyze your results to make adjustments in the direction of your goals.

Taking measurements on a regular basis is critical. We need to know if we are making progress toward our objectives or do we need to make adjustments. Not doing so will waste time and money. ( plus it is fun to see progress).

A word of caution, There is often a temptation to look in on the metrics too often. Any marketing plan, Inbound, outbound or any combination will take some time to accurately judge. Monthly evaluations can indicate trends but generally not concrete facts. We usually suggest giving a plan 3 months to really get an idea of the efficacy.

 

So that is a very quick overview of how things are connected. I left out a lot. We didn’t cover listening to what people are saying about us and reputation management but we will cover those in more depth later.

We are local and different from the plethora of sites online that tons of content that takes forever to sift through. We work to build a strong long-term relationship with our small number of clients that we maintain 100% focus on.  We decided to start sharing information here to give others good information without all the sales hype. We are committed to delivering results for your company. We treat each client with comprehensive plans and solutions with measurable results.