A few weeks back I published ‘How to get leads from Social Media‘ over on the Tempero blog. It listed 5 ways to turn your online communities into actual business.
It was a really satisfying post to write because it challenged me to turn all we’ve learned with the online marketing at Tempero into tried and tested practical steps you can take.
Why is this important? Well, I have a worry at the moment that with all the mistakes and old fashioned, badly executed ‘hard selling’ that’s happening on Social Media we’ve gone too far towards the idea that you can’t sell with social media. Of course you can.
I think we need to get more realistic about why we are doing Social Marketing. I too often see briefs that say company X wants to invest Y dollars to’ grow community’ and ‘brand fans’. That’s fantastic. But why? Surely the reason anyone invests money into marketing is to make money in return - the elusive ROI.
ROI can be elusive in Social Media because the reasons for investing are often not stated in advance.
For example, having brand fans isn’t a bad thing of course but it couldn’t hurt to get a little more realistic and say that we want brand fans because they:
- Buy more product, more often
- Promote products and services to other potential customers
Once you break it down like this you realise what metrics you need to put in place to measure success and value in dollars and cents.
The bigger challenge? Working across the business to get the data you need. Lead Generation isn’t just a sales & marketing function anymore. It might take the help of Retail Staff, Customer Service and Product Managers to establish just how the selling part of Social Media is going.
[Image Credit: Images_of_Money]
