Top Ten List for Your Social Media “Path to Prosperity”
1. Drive more inquiries, leads and create more sales, “Show me the money!”
Ultimately this is what its all about, how can social media help me make money?
Social Media Marketing:
– Creates brand awareness
– Creates customer loyalty
– Enables personal engagement with your customers through social conversations due to the technical, creative and compelling content you develop.
– Drives business directly to your doorstep
– Adds value to your brand through personal referrals. Articulate your unique selling proposition via social media to drive more inquiries and leads, which ultimately result in more sales.
2. Create a Cycle of Engagement
The Cycle of Engagement is:
– Visitors come to the site to read reviews
– More visitors are attracted to the customer’s content
– Visitors attracted to the customers content become a new customer
– New customer writes a product review
3. Get Employees Involved – Blogs written by your stars!
Your stars can’t advertise on platforms or professional interests that could create a conflict, but they can write SEO-rich blogs using key words. Compelling content bridges the gap through the blog and “steals” SEO for your advertising and helps build brand recognition. Similar to how businesses would advertise on facebook with the understanding that the organic SEO would push them higher on searches.
4. Be the revolutionary company you claim to be.
Be who you say you are! The hard part is done. The app, the website, and the technical content is written. Now is the time to promote in a way that reflects the revolutionary claims of the brand. Be the answer or solution your customers are searching for. Make it as easy as possible for them to find you on Quora. Answer questions with links to your website that backs up your unique selling proposition.
5. Utilize as many free tools as possible.
Facebook, Twitter, WordPress, Google +, by the time you read this list another one will pop up! These are all great sources of organic SEO. The problem is most anyone who is anybody has already got them. This isn’t reinventing the wheel; it falls in line with the fact that even if you don’t know how to use these tools to help grow your business, you need to have the infrastructure in place.
6. Create compelling content for distribution and re-distribution through social media.
Compelling content can be blogs about stars, positive user experiences, or compelling pictures and videos. This content is designed to engage and encourage interaction and conversation. It’s not as easy as it sounds, but it’s a key ingredient in being relative and engaging.
7. Be everywhere (Moving Target, Retarget)
– Create Foursquare and Swarm “Check-ins” EVERYWHERE!! It’s called “moving target” and is usually reserved for food trucks. Their consumers can “check-in” to earn the mobile restaurant’s offerings. This can be especially relevant at airports and vacation destinations; even coffee shops. Business has been going hyper-local for a while (i.e.: Digital First Media buying local papers, AOL launching Patch). The downside to going hyper-local is that infrastructure is expensive. Take advantage of your competitive advantage. Its kind of like “stealing” SEO from your stars, customers, and larger ad networks, except you are stealing storefronts with your Foursquare Check-ins and offers! Beg, borrow or steal!
8. 1000 Facebook “likes”
It’s a mess! Everybody is begging for you to “like” them! It’s pathetic. The route to 1000 likes is paved with money, much like email subscribers. Invest in a giveaway for “likes” ($2700 per 1000 likes ) or use your Facebook as a referral service for your happy customers.
9. Clear Vision Statement
It could be driving traffic to a landing page that captures emails and basic customer information, increase Facebook likes – putting your brand and content in front of more people in their Facebook news feeds and ticker, publishing content on your blog and promoting it on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+ to position your brand as experts. Whatever you choose, set a clear mission and follow through.
10. The Ferri Group LLC is here to lend you our 10-plus years of marketing and sales experience to help you reach your goals.
By: Andrew Ferri, MFA