The web seems to be full of articles of hints, tips and tricks on how to get your message re-tweeted, your posts liked on Facebook and ways to win business on LinkedIn.
But in the world of B2B marketing does any of it consistently generate new business?
No it doesn’t. Which is why I hate social media marketing.
The problem with social is that it’s a money pit. It’s a money pit because there is too much noise.
Marketeers need to get smarter on how they cut through the noise, and that means going back to basics.
There’s a great definition of social media marketing on Wikipedia and the crux of it is the ability influence via word of mouth.
Savvy marketeers get this. They become channel agnostic and instead of burning budgets by creating separate strategies for the individual social media channels, they have a ‘create once, publish everywhere’ philosophy, delivering a clear and consistent message (to read more check out the Saddington Baynes article in this month’s Contagious).
By focussing on quality content you slowly build up ‘brand superfans’ who engage across different channels and come back time and time again as they like the content and find it useful.
But here’s the problem: it relies on prospects ‘finding’ the content in the first place.
It’s slow. It’s ineffective. And it’s expensive to execute.
This is all changing. The latest thinking mixes social media marketing with push marketing in a new way, allowing you to email your latest social content directly to prospects on a personalised, 1-2-1 basis.
Pushing your content into prospects’ inboxes is far more effective in creating a two-way conversation, building rapport and, most importantly, generating leads on a consistent basis.
Most importantly, this happens at speed. In an effective way. And at a lower cost.
By consistently generating leads, social will generate a measurable ROI for the first time.
And if social does start paying for itself, what’s to (really) hate?
To learn more about our take on social, drop us a line at falon@ideas-industry.com