Marketing used to be a process of broadcasting your message, then waiting to see what happens. Those days are over. Now, each of your marketing activities can be accurately tracked, all working together to systematically recruit, activate and draw your customers towards your products and services. In this way, you could choose marketing activities based on how well they can be tracked. Avoid those which promise vague returns and don’t provide much data.
Social media is one of those activities which provides amazing data, and plays a pivotal role in many growth marketing systems. So then why is your social media not helping you sell anything? To start, you could ask yourself if that was actually your intention. And if it was, have you clearly integrated your social strategy into a wider customer acquisition, retention and activation strategy? Have you mapped out your customer’s journey across multiple channels and assigned your social activities with specific roles in the process? Most likely not. Otherwise you’d know exactly how your social media helps you sell and you wouldn’t be reading this article. The fix starts with a growth marketing mindset.
Plug social into your customer journey.
Remember most people don’t see one advert and then go buy your product. They will have been exposed to a sequence of messaging along the way, mostly likely across different channels. Growth marketing requires you to plan out that experience, created by pieces of content and touch points which your customers will be exposed to as they move towards your checkout. This is made possible by our ability to understand what content a customer has seen, how they reacted to it, then follow up with something informed by this insight.
Assign budget to boost posts
Now that you understand the role a social post plays in serving your growth marketing system you can begin calculating how much you can invest in boosting posts. The difference is that your investment is now being tracked against a return. And you are able to justify spending.
Use performance to inform creative.
What was previously informing your art direction, photography and writing of your social posts? Probably post engagement. But ultimately sales are what matter. When social is plugged into a growth system you’ll quickly figure out what content is helping engage and activate profitable customers, and you can use that insight to validate further investment in the production of similar content.
If your social has not been helping you sell, it’s likely you’ve not assigned sizable budgets to the channel and consequently have fairly junior staff members on your accounts. In which case you don’t want to dump this responsibility on them. Instead we can act like your own, in-house growth team, construct your growth marketing system and work with your existing social media people. For most businesses it’s vitally important to actively engage your customer communities on social channels, this is an important function of your social team and we can free up a little more time for them to increase this activity.
Get in touch for a free strategy session. We’d love turn social into an active part of your business growth.
