Identifying and amplifying growth channels

Suppose you are a scrappy startup or a small company competing against the David of your industry. WIth a limited or non existent budget to splurge on PPC (pay per click) and SEO and social media how do stand a chance to overpower your competitor? How do you make sure you outsmart them skillfully navigating through the crowds of well funded large companies and not only surviving but also thriving in the ecosystem? We will explore more into these questions as I dive into the minidegree by CXL.

The answer lies in identifying and doubling down on non traditional growth channels.The benefit of being at a startup or early stage or smaller company, 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, you are identifying new channels and experiment, 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,who are already target focused on the channels that are working for them. So, if you are a startup, or a small company, take a look at the underutilized channels, for example Reddit is a place 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, the leverage, the attraction that they've already built.

Emerging channels are important for growth because, if you are a small start up and you're in stealth mode, you want to be able to look at all the new channels that--and actually even if you're a large company to be able to look and stay above the competition. It's harder when you're a larger company than it is being in a smaller company. But being able to identify those new channels that are coming up, for example, mobile was a new channel just a few years ago that has exploded exponentially and there was even a Mobile day that Google declared where the mobile views beat out the desktop views and from there, all the advertising, marketing has shifted over to mobile first. Most of the website designs have to be designed for mobile first now because that's where people are and that's where our audience is. Other emerging channels like Augmented Reality (AR) like the game Pokemon Go and Virtual Reality wherein Facebook was in news for buying the VR startup Oculus are also emerging channels.

There are a couple of common myths about social media marketing. 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. But 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 will 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, but it also allows you to build and create and engage deeper relationships with your existing clients. eCommerce 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 which 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.

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 social media marketing and 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 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. 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 connected a social media post directly to sales and revenue and you can start to take action on this. You have the data that shows you what you need to do to enhance your campaigns. Once you have this data that connects social media to sales and revenue, this makes it exponentially easier for you to explain that social media gave us for example $20,000 worth of the amount of clicks this month which is something that you can take action on and would also help them understand the value of social media marketing.

So a good social media marketing team is 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. 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.