My twitter thing is broken

Are you a business twitter junkie victim?  Did you or someone you love get bullied into setting up a business twitter account promising millions in followers, so many hits your site will crash, and millennials knocking down your door and all you had to do was use the pound sign thingy in front of every other word you post online…  This chronic abuse of miss information doesn’t begin to describe social media marketing. 

Online marketing consultants would have you believing that it’s all a proprietary compilation of complex algorithms, physics, perfect timing, and placement while telling you that you need more analytics to find out what it all means.  In the end, they’ll tell you that you didn’t do enough, or didn’t post at the right time, in the right venue, or to the right audience, maybe your site wasn’t optimized for traffic or your content lacked appropriate triggers.

So now it’s time for an intervention followed up by some long evenings off line in the dark curled up in a ball with that sinking lonely feeling of being disconnected jitters.  All to find out you were never connected in the first place, not to an interested audience anyway.

Social Media isn’t something you can conquer with a bit of content, a keyword or two, maybe a hashtag, and some meta tags.  This online audience is just slightly smarter than the average bear.  Unless it’s free food of their very finicky liking accompanied by free delivery in a pretty picnic basket they aren’t buying, they aren’t even looking.

So now that I’ve trampled on your social media plan to take over the world, let’s not check ourselves in to rehab just yet.  Let’s look at what does matter – some good old fashioned common sense.

What comes first in any marketing plan?

What do you have to sell and who is most likely to buy it.  If you don’t know this the last place you want to start is online.  You might as well be in a ghost town without ghosts.  I have to assume you do have a product and a fairly decent idea of who your average customer is.  Once you know who your customer is you should spend some serious time doing some deep down customer information discovery.

When was the last time to asked the potential customers you lost – why they didn’t buy?  This essential, yet small, piece of information can be the pinnacle in your success or failure in any marketing or sales effort.  Was your product too round, too square, too expensive, maybe something as simple as bad breath or the plaid jacket was a little over the top.   Identifying your target and getting your pitch fine-tuned off line is exactly where you start your online campaign from.

Online campaigns only fall into 2 categories – sell something or brand something.  It’s important to understand they are completely separate objectives.  Yes, they both end up in sales but from two different directions.  Don’t know which you might be?  That’s easy – money is the primary differentiation. If you have a ridicules unlimited marketing budget there’s a high probability you’re a brand something campaign.  If you have a shoestring budget with dire dependency on increased sales to continue the next month’s campaign you are a sell something campaign.  

Branding Campaigns;  the primary goal is to simply build name recognition in hopes that it will influence product acceptance within your already established market.  Your goal is to steel a bit more market share from your competition. 

A branding campaign requires a little less focus on “who” and more focus on “what”.  Because it’s all about image right.  Your image is only as good as your message.  This is where a branding campaign can be a bit more fun and creative in its overall content makeup.  A successful branding campaign is either; informative, educational, or entertaining.  All areas in which a general audience plays well into.  If there’s nothing to sell other than an idea or concept it feeds well into the social media culture.   

Good examples of branding campaigns are large recognized brands, celebrities, political organizations, charities, events and large venues.

Selling Campaigns;  the goal is to move product fast.  You have inventory and it’s taking up valuable space and if it doesn’t sell you won’t be able to afford that space anymore.

The selling campaign is all about audience targeting.  “who” you message gets in front of is much more important that what as long as the who is qualified.  A good well thought out campaign places the product service in front of a qualified buyer at the right moment when the want/desire is at its highest.  If you’re thirsty in a dessert you don’t care about the label on the water bottle, its packaging, and in many cases its price point.

Online product sales require ready to buy tools and customer resources.  This is where having a plain and simple landing page comes in handy and where many try to make the process way to complex and overwhelmed with marketing nonsense that often kill easy sales.  Customer killers are;

• Pop up boxes that ask “how did you feel about my page”
• Product landing pages that don’t spotlight the product
• Broken links and forms that don’t work
• Forms that ask too much. What’s too much? – anything more than where to ship and how to pay!
• Hidden prices or call for price
• No direct contact phone number

Lastly if you have a selling campaign social media fans and page likes are not your goal – they are an addictive waste of marketing energy and resources.  Your goal is to sell, there is no check out button on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or LinkedIn, why would you send a potential customer there to buy your product.   You want to drive traffic to your product/service landing page that should double as a simple purchase now page.  The only purpose of your social presence is to drive traffic back to your website where all content is indexed by primary search engines which are still used substantially more than social media to find products and services.

Where to spend those social marketing dollars?  Common sense tells us it is where conversations related to our product/service are most likely to take place.  But it’s not always reflected in how we’re often advised on how to spend those dollars.  According to the Social Media Examiner companies are gambling big on facebook over all other online marketing venues.  But its all about who you ask that question to; according to Trellis the average company will spend 70% of their online marketing budget on AdWords before dispersing the rest to social media.

This substantial variance in information on online spending might be a result of another statistic; Gartner estimates about 50% of all digital marketing activities are Outsourced.  I think this plays true in that most companies consider online marketing a specific skill set that only until recently was primarily outsourced. This is not to indicate everyone is a scammer selling Social Media but there is a large social service industry that is fresh off the ship literally.   I’ve seen social media marketers boast 1 year of industry experience as a selling point for their services…

Google indexing management is not a simple off the shelf self-taught skill set resulting in most online marketers treading in the shallower waters of plug and play social venues that were setup for quick marketing dollars with little accountability in an already confusing ROI marketing segment.  This leaves the complexity in search engine optimization and more accountable services to larger and longer established IT firms that have specialized in online marketing for years but are being drowned out by sheer numbers of new up and coming online social media experts.  I’d estimate 200 or more online self-taught Social Media professionals to every one SEO educated professional.  Who you get your numbers from is greatly going to reflect the influence over your marketing dollars.

If you're “Selling a product” I’d stick to an online marketing strategy that results in accountable sales numbers.  This doesn’t exclude the value of social media it defines it.  Social Media should be leveraged just like a search engine – to drive traffic to your product/service purchase page.  If we stick to this simple rule “drive sales”, then that makes online marketing dollars easy to access towards an accountable ROI.   But how do we distinguish between sales that result from an online presence and sales that occur online?  If you fall into this concern your product/service might be a complex sale.  Social media might not be a good marketing venue for complex buying processes without a very well thought out buyer experience process.   This might require a redesign of your webpage and/or onsite check out process to track the success of each online campaign.

What is my social presence worth?  This is what is all comes down to.  What is the value of all that effort you put into your social presence and how much should you invest into maintaining and building it?  Social Media is a complex evolving cultural experiment.   I wouldn’t suggest investing too much directly into any one social venue unless you are in that branding category with a very large disposable budget or you are confident about your ROI.  A social page should simply be a reflection of your website, a general taste of what you have to offer.  Place your investment into bringing traffic to your webpage or online presence where your customer can actually purchase your product or service – Social media sites will come and go but your website for the most part, less about a dozen renditions, will be your foundation online.

David Raine
[email protected]
www.ailign.com