Debugging Social Media Marketing Myths| CXL Growth Marketing review 6

Continuing the series on Identifying growth channels I will be sharing on learnings from Sophia Eng from the CXL Institute of marketing.

One of the benefit of being at a start-up or early stage or smaller company in marketing is being able to look at what the giants are doing and play around, you have the speed to be able to take a look around, your identifying new channels, experiments and testing. You're going to move a lot faster than the larger competitors or your competitors that are already out there, who feel like they've already identified their channels and who are already target focused on the channels that are working for them. So, if you are a start, small company, take a look at the under-utilized channels because, you know, these channels are places where you won't see a larger company play in but you could find incredible growth for your company there. If you're in a business that's fairly new market, most likely you still have competitors and if you have competitors, take a look at what they're doing, take a look at what their keywords are and take a look at the articles that they are writing - the blog post, the content marketing and take a look at those keywords, then leverage the attraction that they've already built.

In a place where you may be looking at optimizing your marketing budget as a start-up or small business. Social media is one area that could be harnessed. There are a couple of common myths about social media marketing that if overlooked maximum ROI can be achieved.

The first is that social media marketing ROI is difficult to track and it's hard to put a real dollar amount value to the value of social media. Actually, Google Analytics now allows you to see where your traffic is coming from and what the users are doing on your site and including if visitors are coming from social media as well. You can track the response of different social campaigns and see which are more successful at moving users to and throughout your site as well as tracking specific conversions. And this is important to have within your website the UTM tracking as well as the pixels. You can essentially treat the social media campaigns like any other paid campaigns with the UTM tags. And now almost all major social media sites provide an on platform analytic. So for example, Facebook, Twitter and just recently Pinterest and they'll tell you how many users are clicking on your site and how many conversions your ads are generating. However, because of this, you should still be tracking your social media activity including ad campaigns with Google Analytics.

Another common myth is that social media is just fluffy impressions and branding and that it's not actually used for sales or conversions or acquisition. This is not true as not only can it help you generate new leads, it allows you to build, create and engage deeper relationships with your existing clients. E-commerce businesses will use social media channels as one of their top drivers for growth, such as Facebook or Instagram, rather than the traditional channels because that's where their users are. One example is the MVMT Watches. It's a very simple watch; saw exponential growth on Instagram by leveraging all of the social media influencers and infiltrating the hashtags. Another good example is a subscription-based company called Cocowhite for coconut water teeth whitening subscriptions. Also saw exploding growth. They have over 300,000 followers within a matter of months on Instagram.

So what is social media marketing actually about? In a maturing organization, social media marketing fits into the demand generation teams to bring in leads. There's obviously for social media marketing, there's obviously the organic and the paid, but they both fall under demand gen. It's less about building followers and impressions, which are the vanity metrics rather than the actual metrics. So if not impressions, then what should you track? What does success look like? There are some misleading metrics that people commonly track, such as vanity metrics and you'll see these on Facebook and Twitter. But likes and loves, shares, downloads, followers, those are not actual metrics that you can say let's double down on a content piece like this.

The actual metrics are defined as what metrics are tied to your business objectives. So for example, you can A/B split test a test on a single Facebook promo post let's say for different copy for different geographies and monitor which performs better at increasing traffic to your site and then you can do this on different days and monitor how many more sales you can make in the immediate aftermath, like an hour or so after your post goes live. So now you have essentially connected a social media post directly to sales and revenue and you can start to take action on this. Now you have the data that shows you what you need to do to enhance your campaigns. So once you have this data that connects social media to sales and revenue, this makes it exponentially easier for you to have the conversation with senior execs on doubling down or having the conversation on investment into your growth channels. Execs want to have a clear idea on how to improve their sales and revenue with social media. So being able to explain that social media gave us for example $20,000 worth of the amount of clicks this month is something that execs can take action on and would also help them understand the value of social media marketing. A good social media marketing team is go focused, always trying to pursue what that true north goal is.

Whether it's finding what converts best on which channel rather than thinking about tracking how many social media posts that you're doing that day or taking a look at how many likes and shares for each post. So social media marketing should be treated as any other channel in that you can still track from the first touchpoint to LTV and take a look at exactly what your users are doing throughout the journey. It's not unlike PPC.