Rapidly Blow Up Your Lead-to-Sale Ratios by Using This Boring Social Media Strategy.

figuring out how to get some action online by using social media as a honeypot, I came to see the internet for what it is and how there's little to no proof in the pudding that marketing gurus serve to the average marketer. After devouring resource after resource and raking up a massive bill with my internet service provider, it didn't take long to see I was on bridge with no rails.

A fellow cynic once likened this all too familiar process to a booby-trap filled with opt-ins and other lead capture tactics meant to keep you a customer(for as long as they find your credit card attractive). This statement wasn't enough to induce a Eureka moment for me. And it only got worse for me after hearing that.

You've probably noticed how this sort of guff is incredibly easy to find. A quick Google search will get you a front-row ticket to online course gurus, Youtube zealots, 40-page booklet publishers, and all sorts of infotainment peddlers who rely on ad revenue for their livelihoods and disguise their lust for profit as well-meaning servitude.

But when you do subscribe, buy a course, take up the 3-day $2000 internet marketing boot-camp: you are left with more questions than when you started. I won't even try to list them. I will however ask you the most important question of all:

'If any of the grandiose headlines had a shade of truth to them, why is the so called 'insider-secret information' gurus promise so darn easy to find on the inter-web?"

Most of the exclusive content featured on web-pages describing how to implement strategies to leverage this goldmine can be found on several other domains. A flavor of the month situation. And it can go on for years.

You won't find any of that here. Especially if you find that brand of regurgitated information repulsive and deem the published content to have more impact in its white spaces left untouched than it does with its ink.

Did I forget to mention the trend of the post laden with infographics that leave you more uninformed than when you started?. And when they do say something, if anything at all, one is left with no finite map to chart their course. Which brings about the next question.

Isn't social media marketing inherently far from the point of the conversion?

Despite the incessant twiddling of thumbs, annoyingly so by these gurus and profitably so by the masses caught in the rails of the social trend, social media is a well-oiled conversion engine that few have really tinkered with or left with a clean t-shirt to show for the trouble. It has quickly become the new capital of leveraging engagement since it perched its flag on the digital marketing landscape. As a digital native or brand that wants to skyrocket revenue and brand awareness: leveraging its massive user base through customer engagement should trim the expenditure your converged media imperative demands.

Brands/businesses using a social media strategy to reach out to audiences have a significant and instantaneous success rate than competitors using outbound marketing strategies.

You will learn about scaling the benefit of free media associated with using social media channels to promote your brand and/or target your paid search more accurately to maximize your results.

And if you are already paying for your share of online traffic or considering it, the least you will gain from knowing how to implement a solid social media marketing strategy should afford you efficiency and intensify your effectiveness while helping you get more out your prospects.

Why should I use social media marketing to promote my brand?

Social media marketing’s higher conversion rate is alluded to placing a brand in close proximity to its audience and leveraging data gained from brand-to-customer intimacy.

Such a closely knitted environment should, in turn, set the buying atmosphere that boosts your lead-to-close ratios. This is great for gaining a competitive edge from leveraging the conversation that is already abuzz in your market and ultimately making your brand central to it. The great challenge lies in picking a social media channel that will yield the highest ROI and have enough relevancy to keep fueling your future objectives.

Below, I will help you by using an actionable guide on how to choose the right social media channel for your brand, campaigns, and other objectives.

Before you start planning your social media strategy.   

Understanding how your brand is positioned, what your competitors are doing to engage your audience, and what drives customers behaviors is the first step to a successful campaign.

Conducting an audit will give you imperative insights about what to optimize from your current state. You can get these insights from using tools like Google Trends and SocialAnimal to conduct a search analysis that will chart the course of your social media plan.

Auditing will also help you adapt to the constantly shifting digital marketing landscape as well as accustom you to your customers changing behavioral patterns.

3 key-questions brands should be asking themselves before they implement a social media marketing strategy.

Getting a grip on the qualitative and quantitative dimensions of your prospects is the first step. Customers are getting smarter and require brands to keep up with the changes in their consumption.

There are also over 200 social media channels that keep advancing their algorithms and plenty more metrics that impact a social media plan. Asking yourself the next three key questions should help a great deal with putting things into perspective.

• What distribution channel is aligned with the core of my business/objectives?
• Which channel should help me leverage my custom audience to maximum capacity?
• How do I execute my social media strategy to gain maximum returns?

1. What distribution channel is aligned with the core of my business/objectives?

There are many ways to cut through the clutter of finding the right channels for your brand. Most social media platforms offer insight dashboards and other data-analytic overviews to help match brands with their desired audiences. This is called social listening.

Major social media channels are adding surveys as part of their 2019 algorithm changes to boost marketers targeting efficiency. Surveys and reports give marketers insights on how to segment audiences effectively to refocus their marketing efforts.

Groups & influencers.

Deploying influencers in your niche can cover most of your heavy lifting in leveraging trustworthiness & authority to your targeted group. There's nothing like an expert/authority shouting praises about your brand from the tallest building in your marketplace. Such credibility can increase your perception of value or solidify it when done right.

This helps determine whether your ideal customer uses the channel, what is of interest to them, and what formats of media are made available by the channel to reach them. Filtering for the next points should give you an angle to build/match your online profile:

• Interests & event triggers.
• Engagement.
• Geographic location.
• Personas.
• Gender.
• Education.
• Buying behavior

Going beyond analytical data.

Your online strategy can benefit from transforming metrics into tangible results. Cumulative overviews are vital for avoiding unsatisfactory PPC campaign results brought on by generic targeting.

Brands & business owners can look beyond analytics to survey whether they have found their ideal audience/channel by using opt-in pages and advertisements as lead-magnets. This should give insight into what sort of engagement rates & scale of exposure they can look forward to. This optimization based on tangible KPI's is the 1st step to social media marketing risk-management 101.

TIP: You can also use this opportunity to collect leads for your email list for future campaigns. 

2. Which channel should help me leverage my custom audience to maximum capacity?

It is one side of the parallelogram to understand your audience. Also understanding the nature of your business/offering may help determine which social media channels you should employ.

A company looking to capitalize on engagement from a B2B audience may be best-served marketing to potential prospects on Linkedin's business-centric platform than if they were distributing their case-studies to Instagram's visually stimulated audience or Twitter's audience who lean more towards entertainment value. Don't rule out a channel for not being a match just yet.

Flexible implementation of content exposes your brand to vast follow-ship.

Another side of this social media marketing parallelogram is flexibility. An injection of creativity to tell interesting brand stories or highlighting company culture through engaging stories/visual overlays can work well for brand awareness or gathering exposure from such channels followers.

Getting familiar with new ways to reach your ideal customers can help you tailor your outreach specifically. You will learn more in the next section about the benefits of mixing up different forms of your content in your outreach.

3. How do I execute my social media strategy to gain maximum returns?

Once you have interpreted the data you get from the aforementioned social listening techniques; classifying and acting on your insights is the anticipated step. Tracking the effects of your content development & distribution is where your attention should be focused on.

The 3 main components of a social media strategy include the following:

• Planning
• Action
• Management

We assume you have taken action and have successfully made it to the 3rd and last step: management. You don’t have to worry if you haven’t done so yet, the last two bullets are reliant on each other.

Engagement analysis is a never-ending process that can be made easier by conducting the proper management of your overall social media engagement brought on by optimizing your actions.

A social media strategy can yield much more than presence and awareness. It can also factor in other areas such as customer relationship and brand management. Which is why a strategic framework must be set in place by your brand to keep a managerial perspective of all social media activity.

Creating a solid social media strategy requires employing consistency in your outreach plan. Although mastering one channel at a time is highly advised, it’s not hard to see how running A/B split tests on multiple channels can paint a broad spectrum of the variance of your content's impact.

Multivariate Testing.

Multivariate testing platforms can produce maximum results with the right channel and content set in place. This will require proper implementation that includes posting frequently enough and providing updated content in relation to your audience.

You can also use different formats of media to communicate your brand from different angles and to also pinpoint which of them get the most response and optimize from your findings. An article on Linkedin, an image on Pinterest, an engaging video on Instagram, and a paid promotion on Facebook is just one example of this.

Automate your content distribution & scheduling.

Maintaining a brands social media community requires monitoring and scheduling of posts to be distributed around the clock. If there is a discord between the content and the delivery time: a brand can incur losses.

A content marketing calendar can come in handy by scheduling content across multiple channels at different peak hours associated with a given social media channel. You can stay ahead by scheduling future posts to manage the content demand vs supply. This should give you valuable insights on measuring your input VS output to tailor your distribution, manage your time-expenditure, and predict your budget.

It is wise to have a community manager monitor this process just in case event triggers affect your content's impact. Stop reading and start planning. You can thank me by sharing this with your community.