What does good social media marketing achieve?
Allister: Social media marketing is a way of communicating in the 21st century, that’s accessible to anyone should they choose to use those channels. It’s a good way to fuel conversations and dialogue with your prospects and customers because those channels are open and multi-way of course.
Good social media marketing makes you accessible because if people are looking for you and you’re not there, it’s like you don’t exist. It’s the online equivalent of the ‘we’re open’ sign you would see on the window of a shop.
Does the accessibility of social media complement the discoverability of content?
Yes, they’re similar things. Social media acts as pipes that exist between your mind, your content and the prospects you want to reach. These are the channels we can use to reach people. Content is what you pour into the pipe; what you make to send out to people so they can discover it.
But it’s important to remember social media isn’t the only channel that’s available because there are other disciplines like advertising and live events that are also pipes. It’s not that content is exclusive to social media – that’s not what I’m saying – good content can be used anywhere through any channel.
Is social media marketing cheap?
It doesn’t have to be expensive but it’s certainly not free. We’re largely over this misconception but I would say more than half of the marketers I meet have no dedicated budget for social media marketing. For some reason there’s an expectation it should be free – anyone can sign up, why do you need money?
We have to do organic reach but alongside paid reach. These channels exist to make money and if you want to maximise the benefits from them then you’re going to have to put some skin in the game, so it’s an investment.
If you do it well, then it’s absolutely not expensive, it’s a good investment. But if you’re randomly just throwing money at the problem without knowing why or how best to do it, then you’re not going to get the results you need.
What metrics should you use to measure the success of a social media campaign?
The really hard thing with social media measurement is that there’s loads of stuff you can measure but a lot of it doesn’t actually mean as much as we assume. We might say we’ve got this many likes, or this many downloads, or clicks, or views — those are just proxy metrics. Clearly more is better, but those reports don’t fully give you a sense of the value because if somebody sees a piece of content online and downloads it, you don’t know what they did with it afterwards. Most of the sharing that happens is not measurable because people will print stuff off and give it to a colleague or put it into a slide deck and present it to the board.
A general mistake is we attribute far too much meaning to the low-level metrics and we lose sight of why are we here. So the most useful metric for social media marketing is the thing that measures your primary goal. If your primary goal is to be known as the number one supplier of plumbing materials for Wales, that’s the thing that you need to measure. You’re not going to measure that exclusively via social media, you’re going to have a survey or a qualitative study.
If everything you do is done to support the goal, you should see the metric improving, but I’m not a huge fan of really complicated scorecards that say we’ve got this many likes, shares or clicks because it doesn’t really mean anything. A like is a like – it’s a click. If you read a lot into that you’re a deluded fool. It just means someone momentarily clicked a button, it doesn’t mean they’re going to buy or they’re going to throw all their money at you.
Social media can give you a good quantity of leads but can they be good quality too?
It can give you a quantity of leads but only if you’re recruiting those leads for the right purposes. The quality of leads collected on social media is frankly poor. Part of my training course encourages marketers to be more realistic and honest about what they have got, and the value that actually exists because sometimes you have a ghost town. You might have a following or likes but actually is anyone seeing your content and advocating who you are? Possibly not.
The quality of your leads is a function of the strategy that you follow. If you recruit followers by running a competition to win an iPad, don’t be surprised if those people just want to win an iPad, they’re not going to want to buy from you. If, however, people are partnering with you, participating, showing some interest in what you do because you promoted some really useful content that showed your expertise, then those people are likely to be prospects for the future.
So it’s about sieving through the leads social media gives you?
It’s about collecting and creating prospects and leads with the right purpose in mind, not just through lazy, cheap, gimmicky tactics. I could get a company thousands of leads in a day but none of them are going to buy. It might make you feel good, it might give you a number but it won’t make a difference to commercial results. Less is more in this instance.
I’ve always felt, and some marketers have come round to this view point, that having a smaller following that you actually know is better. You can recognise the names in there because you have time to get to know these people, do your research, get to know where they work and what they’re doing. For many organisations that’s far more valuable than tens of thousands of anonymous names that you can never manage and never convert to sales. So less is more for quality leads.
Is social media a good place for advocacy?
It does give advocates a platform where they can share their views. If people like what you do and you’re active on social media channels then it gives them a place to share their appreciation for what you do. If we look at the ‘zero moment of truth’ [the moment prospects impressed by your marketing go online to research if your claims and reputation is credible], this is where advocacy really works. If people see something like an invitation to a sales meeting and they go online to do their research and all they see is people saying ‘these people are really good’, then that’s a huge win. That’s the sort of stuff that powerfully nudges people towards the next stage which is buying or reaching out to the sales person.
What challenges do you hope the training course will help marketers overcome?
I want marketers to do more thinking, less doing. And that’s what the day is about, stopping people and asking why are they’re here and what they’re trying to achieve with this. So putting strategy behind it; helping them to stop seeing social networks as just another platform, but as commercial businesses that exist to make money.
I really want to help marketers build their presence on social networks on solid ground rather than on sand. Build it on a platform that’s going to be around long term, so you’re using techniques that will be viable for the future because far too many times we’ve seen a feature on a social media platform get turned off, and some people have built their entire business on a social network and neglected other aspects like their website. The social media platform owner can just take that all away, and that’s a terrifying place to be.
Let’s say tomorrow, LinkedIn announces it’s going to charge businesses $10 per post. If you’ve built your presence on LinkedIn, what choice have you got? You better start paying. Whereas if you’ve got a presence elsewhere you can then make the judgement as to what to do, and then that way you’ve not put all your eggs in one basket. It’s about spreading the risk intelligently from a point of knowledge rather than guesswork.
Allister will be training B2B marketers to overcome their social media marketing woes, on 22 January.
