4 strategies to maximise business results from social media marketing

The KPIs social has to answer to

Social. Media. Marketing. Depending on your role, and the day of the week, those three words produce a mixture of excitement and dread in anyone responsible for commercial growth. Even seasoned social marketers have days when they are stumped for a way to get better results. As businesses become more growth-focused, marketing has to think strategically to outperform competitors and keep the demand generation funnel topped up.

The challenge for social marketers is that they must show tangible results from both owned and earned channels, measured against specific KPIs. The most measurable are:

• Reach: how big your audience is, and who it is made up of
• Engagement and interactions: how engaged that audience is
• Leads and enquiries: how interested they are in doing business with you
• Sales and bookings: how ready they are to do business with you
• Revenue: how much they are spending with you

If you cannot show month-on-month growth across those metrics, tied directly or indirectly to social effort, the honest question is whether the activity is being done right at all.

Marketing automation platforms make the link between social activity and revenue traceable in a way it was not a decade ago, which is what makes social marketing an accountable discipline rather than an act of faith.

Who to trust

The rise of social networking has also produced a great deal of noise about how to use it. Some of that noise comes from people who bought their audiences rather than earned them. More of it comes from platform vendors, whose advice is not always objective and is often unattainable for a resource-constrained SME, particularly when it depends on an expensive subscription.

The four strategies below are the ones that survive that filter.

1. Target networks with return on social in mind

Contrary to popular belief, you do not need to split your time equally across every platform you have an account on.

The benefit of the broad-appeal sites is sheer volume: over time you will find prospects among the suspects, especially if you find the niche communities and groups they frequent. The benefit of narrower networks is the opposite, fewer conversations but more specific ones. The more specific the conversation, the longer it tends to continue, and the better your chance of starting a business relationship.

On a high-traffic mainstream site you may have far more interactions per day, but the quality of each is generally lower and only a small percentage will become viable leads.

Surprised that Instagram beats LinkedIn on monthly users, or how far down the list Twitter sits? It is a useful reminder not to infer your audience’s habits from your own. Preferring one network does not mean your buyers do, which is why it is worth having a presence on the networks relevant to your offer even after choosing one or two to focus on.

Work smarter by:

• Using scheduling tools to publish consistently rather than when someone remembers
• Building a library of evergreen content on your own site that you can link to and rotate through the schedule
• Picking one or two networks to go wide and deep on, and keeping a light presence on the rest

2. Generate leads by sparking engagements

Sparking an engagement means starting a conversation or exchange that lets you convert a social media user from a suspect into a prospect, and then into a customer.

Buying cycles in both B2B and B2C move faster than they did two decades ago, and that pace leads to one of two problems.

The first is too much interaction, so opportunities are overlooked or accidentally ignored. It is a good problem to have, and it is solved straightforwardly by adding capacity, as long as whoever you add can recognise a good prospect.

The second is too little interaction, and that takes longer to fix. If your organisation has previously avoided social marketing, or you are starting from a small following, building an audience that produces reliable engagement is a matter of months rather than weeks. Going viral early is the equivalent of winning the lottery, not a plan.

Producing and distributing your own content is the most dependable way to set off sparks. Infographics, status updates, case studies and success stories all work, and anything genuinely worth sharing will do.

The other way is to take a conversation somewhere. “Thank you for your comment” is a start; a follow-up is what makes it useful:

• Ask a question: “Have you seen our new…?”
• Add a point or a fact: “Did you know that…?”
• Compliment them on something specific their company has done
• Suggest a relevant resource or article
• Ask them to take an action: read the guide, watch the video, book the table
• Offer to arrange a call or a meeting
• Offer something of tangible value

With the last few you have moved the conversation from a spark to a result for you and your sales team. Even a decline plants the seed of a more transactional exchange later, and that is where the return on social media marketing lives.

3. Generate leads through social and content

With a large share of marketing budgets wasted on average, and Proxima putting the figure at up to 60%, it matters that SMEs shift resource towards the campaigns that generate quality leads within their cost per lead and cost per acquisition targets. That argument is set out in full in where SME marketing budget is wasted.

Social combined with content marketing, sometimes called inbound, has proved a powerful engine for many SMEs, and it does not require expensive automation software to work.

Storytelling is the part most businesses under-invest in. The posts that travel on professional networks are almost always the ones that read as a person talking clearly to a specific audience, not as an announcement. Without copying anyone’s style verbatim, since your own voice is the point, it is worth considering:

• A first line that earns the second one, and short paragraphs after it
• A story with a challenge, an action and a result
• A regular schedule, so the audience gets familiar with your voice and your perspective

Mix up what you share and keep it from becoming self-promotional. A common rule of thumb is one promotional post to every three that inform, entertain or tell a story.

That does not mean a non-promotional post cannot carry a call to action. It should. But the call to action does not always have to be “call us for a quote”; it can be to watch a video, listen to a podcast or read a guide.

Once someone takes that next step they are a better-qualified prospect than they were, because they have shown interest in your content and either left an email address or opened the door to further conversation on the network where they engaged.

Creating an asset that people will trade an email address for takes real work, and it only works once you have built some credibility. Which is precisely why consistency, and stories your audience recognises, matter so much on social.

4. Close the deal on social

You have had a post travel, generated interest with a guide, and started conversations with qualified buyers. What next?

Two options. If the prospect is not ready, continue to nurture the relationship with content that is personalised as far as you can manage, on social or by message. If they are close, move them along: for a B2B seller that usually means setting up a meeting, and for B2C it means encouraging the sale.

Closing on social is well established in consumer businesses. Restaurant groups turn interactions on their pages into reservations, sometimes converting a complaint into a repeat customer with a goodwill gesture. For many leisure operators social sits alongside growth marketing, because their audience is more receptive there than by email, which makes loyalty and repeat business easier to build.

Individual results vary. But for many organisations social is now close behind email and paid search as a driver of new business, and a more cost-effective one.

Sources

• Statista: monthly active users by social platform, January 2020
• Proxima: research on waste in marketing budgets