Jumpstart Results with Social Media Marketing Services

As a marketing manager charged with developing strategies for businesses and implementing activities that drive results, I’m frequently confronted with the long-term/short-term dilemma.  How can marketers deliver immediate wins to fill the sales pipeline while developing marketing deliverables that will align with long-term goals? The answer: social media marketing services.

Before moving on to strategy, it’s worth noting that this predicament does not fall solely on marketing agencies like ours. In fact, the long-term/short-term plight is one many corporate marketing managers and directors share when determining how to spend their time, and the time of their teams. Marketing can take you in many different directions. Businesses and marketers need to be strategic and concise so as not to get tied up in unproductive activities!  

Of course, most marketing plans include social media. In fact, most company executives and marketers who engage our services, or frankly, who are reading this article, already do some social media. So what’s the big discovery you want to know? It’s doing it better, and engaging in some backlogging to build momentum and drive leads.

Our agency recently experienced client success by engaging in social media marketing services early during the engagement, while simultaneously working on some longer term initiatives. The client already had published a dozen quality blog posts that were getting some views, but no visit-to-lead conversions. There were three primary reasons for this:  

1. They had been auto posting on social media.
2. They didn’t have Call-to-Action buttons on their blog.  
3. They weren’t maximizing their channel connections.

Here’s how we drove results with social media marketing services:

No Auto Posting – We always remove auto posting when we take on social media services. It’s important to take the time to create social posts for each channel you utilize because customized posts get more engagement. While most blogging tools have the option to auto post your content with a basically written social post, we don’t recommend using this feature.

Team Involvement – Poll key employees on their willingness to assist with social media efforts.  In our case, there were two key players already participating in social media. There are a few ways to expand your social media results with team involvement.

• Have them sign up for your blog and email list. That way, they’ll be notified each time your company publishes something, and they can then promote it on their appropriate channels.
• If you are using a social tool like HubSpot or Agora Pulse, your marketing team can post to your employees’ channels when they are promoting on the company’s channels. This takes knowledge about the channels and the individual employees to do this properly. It also takes extra time to create appropriate posts, but the results are often worth it with the extra exposure.

Leveraging CTAs – Before promoting your content, be sure they include Call-to-Action buttons or links. This is the key to getting leads from your blog post or whitepaper. Need some Call-to-Action design inspiration? Get someawesome CTA examples from HubSpot!

Maximizing LinkedIn Groups – With our example, the participating employees were already members and engaging with some groups. We performed research and recommended they join additional targeted groups. We then chose select groups for specific content we thought was most relevant and would be well received.  Finally, we matched our social post copy to appeal to the group at hand.

Filling the Social Funnel – Now that your content, team and channels are ready, it’s time to promote the great content you already have, improve your profile and start filling your sales funnel!

• Twitter – Write many tweets per piece of content, focusing on different sound bites (powerful sentences, action statements or statistics snipped from your content) or your target buyer personas. Vary the tweets slightly and schedule them out so that you ultimately have several each month for several months. Tweets are short lived, so to maximize exposure you need to post more of them relative to the way you post on other social channels.
• LinkedIn and Facebook – You only want to promote your piece of content on these channels once or twice, depending on how frequently you post via these channels to begin with. The life span of a post on LI or Facebook is a lot longer, so you want to make sure your post encompasses the essence of the content, and that it’s engaging so it gets clicked. If it’s evergreen, you could re-promote it later down the line.

InMail for Targeted Event Marketing – This is an interesting strategy for niche events or audiences. While many marketers use LinkedIn sponsored posts or ads to attract a specific, yet wide demographic, In-Mail can sometimes be more effective if your target market is small and distinct. Think about it: don’t you usually open your InMail? Read more about how companies are killing it using InMail.

Now that you have a full social schedule for the next month or two, you can focus on building the foundation of your inbound marketing program while simultaneously building your lead funnel. Win-win!

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