There is a direct correlation between the success of your inbound marketing and the reach of your social media network. In short, if you have more people liking you, following you, connected to you, you get more leads when you create compelling educational content as part of an inbound-marketing effort.
If you think about it logically, it makes sense. Here are examples of two companies with the same amazing educational content and inbound-marketing program but with very different social media networks.
Company 1 is an IT services company that has about 500 visitors to its website each month. It recently created a new eBook and a series of related blog posts. It has 37 likes on Facebook, 15 followers on LinkedIn and 4 followers on Twitter. It doesn’t have a YouTube channel. It has an internal e-mail list of 1,200 clients, prospects, partners and friends. It has 21 blog subscribers.
The company publishes its new eBook, tells its friends, family and peers, posts it to its social networks, blogs about it and -mails its entire database announcing the new e-book. (read more…)
Inbound marketing is the methodology innovative CEOs, business owners and marketing professionals are using to help their companies get found, get leads and drive sales. Inbound marketing, by definition, is the process by which you create educational content, leverage that content to help your business drive visitors to your website, convert those visitors from anonymous lurkers into leads and then nurture those leads through the sales process turning them into new customers.
While this is a bit more complicated than traditional outbound or interruptive marketing, it is much more efficient and much more aligned with the way today’s prospects want to be marketed to. People don’t want to be sold to, they want to be guided through a process to a point where they feel safe making their purchase decisions. Buyer behaviors have changed, and businesses need to adapt to survive.
Social media is one of the secret ingredients that help us crack the code to inbound marketing, helping businesses drive discovery and increase sales. (read more…)
Blogging provides your company an opportunity to share meaningful knowledge with potential clients and customers, which in turn gets them to know, like and trust you. Once they know, like and trust you and your company, the sale isn’t too far behind. But blogging without social media is like peanut butter without jelly, fluff without the marshmallow or thunder without lightning. It’s just not the same.
If you are implementing or managing a lead-generating inbound marketing program, blogging without social media is like trying to run your high-performance marketing machine on lighter fluid. It’s going to sputter to a halt sooner than later.
First, people have to subscribe to our blog to get access to your brilliance. This takes time, but by pushing your educational blog content out via social media, you introduce your thought leadership to an entirely new audience of perfectly targeted prospects.
Here are a couple of ideas to consider then blending your blogging and social media efforts together to improve the performance of your marketing program:
- Build your reach.
When Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., reached for a bottle of Poland Spring water during his response to President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address, it quickly became a social media meme.
That incident could have been exploited in the moment by Poland Spring or parent Nestle, a real-time marketing amplification to match the “Oreo standard” from this year’s Super Bowl power outage.
Instead, it was a day later when Poland Spring posted a picture on its Facebook page (which still garnered an impressive response). Ah, what could have been.
Some argue that not every marketing opportunity is worth pursuing, and that is certainly true. However, there’s a big difference between choosing not to respond and not having the capability to respond.
What’s missing from the analysis of the Oreo story is that the event on which the brand capitalized occurred during the Super Bowl. The brand already had a command center set up. (read more…)
Social media is here to stay, so how does a restaurant utilize it properly? First, social media is not a replacement for traditional marketing; it is only another tool in your marketing toolbox. You might ask the reason you need to engage with social networks at all. Some statistics on social media and purchasing habits:
- Consumers are 71% more likely to make a purchase based on social media referrals. (HubSpot)
- 49% of consumers use Facebook to search for restaurants. (Mashable)
- 58% of Facebook users expect offers, events or promotions when they become a fan. (HubSpot)
- 81% of U.S. survey respondents say friends’ social media posts have directly influenced a purchase decision. (Forbes)
- 15.1 million consumers go to social media channels before making a purchase decision. (Knowledge Networks)
What does one take from all of this? First, you do not control your brand anymore, not in the traditional sense. Consumers are talking about your brand (your restaurant) whether you like it or not, so it is up to you to engage the “community.” Even if you are not using any social media channels, check out your business listing on websites such as Yelp and Local.com. (read more…)
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