- Grow your company’s revenue and profits with new insight from Milwaukee’s premier product and company branding experts at Chameleon Communications.
- Through careful planning and execution, your business can achieve greater ROI through social media marketing than what was ever possible through traditional marketing channels.
- Use the following guidance to build your brand without the cost of using outside experts.
Believe it or not, you are in the broadcast business. Think of your social media channels as akin to TV broadcasters. Every TV broadcaster tries to know who their audience is, provide a benefit to that audience, and finally attempt to understand where to syndicate (distribute) their shows for maximum impact and revenue. Like a TV station, you can make the most of these 3 essentials to boost your social efforts.
However, unlike traditional TV, you have tools available for understanding your audience unlike anything possible just a few short years ago.
As you’re probably well aware of, managing and developing a social media presence is not an option for companies wanting to stay current with their competitors, much less increase their revenue and market share. At Chameleon Communications we look at social media as a key component of our digital marketing services.
Let’s examine some key components and marketing strategies that you can use today to reach your marketing objectives:
- Knowing Your Audience
Ask yourself, “who is my target market?” You may want to cater and focus to a specific vertical market that fits your company’s target market. The key is taking the time and care in identifying who you want and need to reach. One strategy to find your primary market may be to use the 80/20 Rule and research the top 20% of clients from your current financial sale reports.
Chances are, if your company is similar to many I work with, these are the same clients who currently generate 80% (or more) of your revenues. When you know who you are reaching, you can also understand what they are looking for in content. Which leads me to our next social media marketing “essential.”
2. Knowing What Content to Post
Identify the best content for your audience. In his acclaimed book Youtility, Jay Baer asks “What if instead of trying to be amazing you just focused on being useful?”
Let’s say for example, you’re a retail shoe store – a business-to-consumer (B2C) company – who sells shoes to a younger generation.
To identify with this audience, you may create blogs, articles, and content on your site, as well as various social media websites to help them understand how to buy the best basketball shoes. You may talk about the 3 Steps To Identifying The Shoe That Fits You as a blog article or pseudo whitepaper/download. If it is a succinct eBook you could create a PDF and have your audience download it in exchange for a name, e-mail, or contact information that can be used as a follow-up and continued marketing.
The key here, it’s all about providing value to your client/prospect. However, remember this vitally important take-away, do NOT just post content about yourself (or services/things you want to sell), use the 4-1-1 rule.
The 4-1-1 Rule
At Chameleon Communications, we especially appreciate the 4-1-1 rule. This rule says that for every one self-serving post, tweet, or shout-out, you re-post or re-tweet one relevant snippet and then share four pieces of relevant value-adding content.
Again, germaine content is marketing content that your intended audience will benefit and arrive value from. Who is going to be interested in a social stream filled with non-stop commercials for your company? (hint – NO ONE, and it’s why we see so many that come to use struggling to realize a ROI on their marketing efforts).
In order to find success, you need to give it as much Youtility as possible while keeping your own business offering in the mix. You may even what to do live video talking about a key topic. Recently, LinkedIn launched a live video option that we discuss in our blog article about LinkedIn Live Video.
For those new to the term Youtility, in essence, it’s the difference between adding value and helping your audience, instead of trying to “sell” them. youtility is a much better marketing model because it allows you to become engaged with your prospects and clients without the uncomfortable sales pressure from traditional marketing.
3. Knowing Where to Post
Finally, finding out where your prospects troll the Internet is key. Below is a good breakdown of the social landscape on a few potentially relevant channels.
YouTube delivers over 3.2 billion user experiences on a monthly basis. While this is impressive, more importantly, it’s one of the most (and increasingly so) popular search engines. In other words, if you don’t produce video content on YouTube, you’re passing on some of the most valuable FREE marketing available.
Through YouTube, your company can post videos highlighting your products, educating your prospects, and engages your client base in ways no other marketing medium can at a comparable cost.
And… More importantly than how much TOTAL traffic YouTube provides, if you target your videos correctly (either through your own efforts, or commissioning a service such as mine) your video views will be watched by the very people you WANT watching, creating a greater opportunity to move forward in moving prospects into the client category.
Facebook also delivers billions of page impressions on a monthly basis. By using the built-in tools of filtering the demographics of a Facebook ad, your company will only show your ad content to those you believe will be most receptive to your message/content. While it’s beyond the scope of this post to describe in detail, know that Facebook ad tools are some of the most sophisticated in the marketing industry. In fact, unless you have the resources to fully comprehend the ins and outs, you’re likely leaving money on the table, or missing your full potential in the world’s most popular website based on pageviews.
Like Facebook, Instagram also delivers over a billion impressions a month and serves a distinct demographic that Facebook doesn’t. In other words, while Facebook and Instagram may appear to an outsider as similar enough to only use one, if your target market is predominantly on Instagram and not Facebook, your company’s efforts may not reach the full potential simply because the wrong platform was selected.
In other words, understanding not only the amount of traffic, but what and who is consuming the traffic content is paramount to winning in the social media marketing race.
Other important social media properties include Twitter and Linkedin. Again, it’s beyond the scope to fully dive into each, and your key piece of information here should be knowing each has a place, and could mean the difference between your phone ringing with the right prospects, or not…
As stated, for a company wanting to grow its business through social media marketing, it’s ideal to narrow your channels to match the demographics of your target. Also, knowing the best frequency for posting helps to reach out with the proper amount of posts. For those embracing the do-it-yourself marketing model, I suggest using a platform for at least a couple of months as a good trial using an editorial calendar and marketing response measuring tools to determine your impact.
One great example of knowing the effectiveness of a social media marketing campaign is through the use of forwarding phone numbers. The idea is you have a dedicated phone number for any given platform, and use that number exclusively during the marketing period. with the low cost availability of dedicated phone numbers (along with email addresses and dedicated web landing pages), you can really dial in your ROI for any given marketing strategy.
As I mentioned previously, gleaning quality leads and e-mail contacts in exchange for quality content is the best way to use social media. If you go to our services/video-communication page you will see an example of this with our Brand Video eBook PDF download. We use the 4-1-1 rule and then offer a value-packed PDF to connect with our prospects. The idea is finding out what your target wants and in this example, we are helping those looking into video and YouTube for advertising.
As Jay Baer says “creating marketing that is truly, inherently useful, is the first big umbrella marketing platform of the age of social and mobile connectivity.”
Tony Meister is affectionately known as the “Chief Lizard” of Chameleon Communications – a creative digital marketing agency located in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.