Is your social media marketing covering your bottom line?
A vain emperor who cares about nothing except wearing and displaying clothes hires two tailors who promise him the finest, best suit of clothes from a fabric invisible to anyone who is unfit for his position. The Emperor's ministers cannot see the clothing themselves, but pretend that they can for fear of appearing unfit for their positions and the Emperor does the same. (Illustration by Vilhelm Pedersen for the original Hans Christian Anderson story.)
First, if you get my analogy, I'm sorry. Ouch.Why do you do social media? What’s your strategy?
Here at Coombs we do lots of painstaking social media work to successfully find qualified leads for our customers. We are particularly fond of LinkedIn.
But we wonder why lots of companies spend the time and money they do with social media marketing?
Of course, social media kind of looks good... right?
"a fabric invisible to anyone who is unfit for his position."
But really… do you have ANY integrated strategy or measures for bottom line success in your social media? Recent research shows that most companies do not.
And let me pile on here: Likes and followers are almost worthless in most business categories. Facebook has recently drastically reduced the organic reach of business pages. Your business “friends” do not see your posts. And twitter has a tiny reach.
While there are some notable category exceptions (sports fans, arts), in most business categories customers do not want to “engage” with the brand socially.
Likewise, social signals as a keyword SEO ranking or link building scheme is also questionable without a specific and coherent full content and SEO strategy. I'll listen to a Google + effort for SEO or a Pinterest strategy for certain kinds of products, if there's a tangible goal to measure that gets close to some bottom line metric.
But if web ranking is the reason you do Facebook, you would probably get better ROI from investing in creating more useful longer form content on your website pre-sale, and better real customer service post sale.
First, create a coherent strategy to make ALL your web properties and digital efforts serve your audiences better than the competition.
And I like social media. We do it for hire. The various social tools often do fit into specific strategies and campaigns.
But social media succeeds as ONE tool in a larger strategy or significant campaign.
Too many companies just "do" social media because... well... because the other guys do.
Most CEO’s and smart marketing directors (rightly so!) do not value things like “engagement”, likes etc. etc. The numbers and influence simply isn't there.
I highly recommend this blog post by Augie Ray.
Stop Social Media Marketing
http://www.experiencetheblog.com/2014/10/stop-social-media-marketing.html
In the post, Mr. Ray argues convincingly that Marketing organizations are about to invest LESS in social media because of it’s “inability to deliver trust, acquisition, or purchase conversions”.
The post quotes a 2014 survey of 1200 CEO’s and CMO’s:
“74% of CEO’s think Marketers focus too much on the latest marketing trends such as social media-but can rarely demonstrate how these trends will help them generate more business for the company”
There’s the bottom line. I too love the latest trend, when I can use it to be an effective bottom line marketer. But it is really difficult to attribute sales or even "influence" to social media alone.
Inbound Marketing (including some social media!) works strategically with sales to measure and improve bottom line results across the entire marketing budget.
