3 Reasons Not To Do Social Media Marketing
Social Media Marketing can be intimidating and confusing as heck, but if you give it time and approach it correctly, it can be extremely rewarding for your business. Then again, if you don't take the right approach, it can completely ruin your brand. I've seen many marketing departments (or owner/founders) jump into social media with both feet only to land on their face. The question is, why aren’t your social media campaigns working? What went wrong? We broke down three reasons why you may need to pump the breaks on social media and when you should take a step back and look at the big picture. Once you address these issues, then and only then should you do social media.
YOU HAVEN'T DEFINED YOUR GOALS
It’s easy to jump right into social media without looking at the 10,000-foot approach. You start posting to your various channels and things are going great. You have a huge amount of content and people love it. But then, three months down the line, you find yourself relying on #ThrowbackThursday or Googling every upcoming holiday. By month four you have nothing worth while to talk about and you have completely lost your way. Your followers are no longer engaging with your content and you have nothing left to throw your Thursday back to. Do you know what happened? You never defined your goals. If you do not have a clearly defined goal for social media, you’ll be posting aimlessly until the end of time.Your goals drive your strategies, your strategies drive your objectives, and your objectives drive your tactics. Without these four steps, in that order, you are completely wasting your time doing social media.Here is an example of the social media goal we established with a Napa Valley client:Increase brand awareness within our defined target market. Nurture our defined audience with creative Facebook ads and lead the audience down our sales funnel for an eventual website visit, email sign up, call to the winery, and tasting room reservation.By establishing our goal, we were able to then define our primary, secondary, and tertiary audiences. Once our audience was set we were able to create our strategy, which was to drive our audience down a sales funnel. We used the basic awareness, consideration, intent, and decision funnel and each step of the funnel had clear measurable objectives. By establishing clear objectives, we then knew what the best tactics were to drive our objective and the content that would support that objective. We never ran the risk of running out of content to post.It is imperative to define your goal for social media. Otherwise, you’ll have no way of knowing if it’s working or not.
YOUR WEBSITE SUCKS
Back in March, I wrote a blog about Why Your Website Is The Most Important Part Of Your Social Media Strategy. I highly recommend you check that blog out because more than five months later this has been reinforced in my experiences time and time again. Most brands should be concerned about how they can move their social media followers from social channels to their website. The only problem is, if your website sucks you are missing out on an enormous benefit of social media marketing. Did you know you can target the top 5% of your website users on social media? You can also target people who haven’t visited your website in six months, or target people who have viewed products on your website but didn’t purchase. If your website isn’t giving you this information or is skewing the reasons people leave by not having a good user experience or being mobile friendly, then you are shooting yourself in the foot. Your relevance score will tank, your PPC campaigns will increase and you will be a sad miserable social media manager. If your website sucks, stop everything you’re doing on social media, update your website and win.
IT'S A DISCONNECT FROM YOUR OTHER MARKETING CHANNELS
This is probably my biggest pet peeve when it comes to social media marketing. I see it a lot, especially on Instagram Stories. Super high-end brands with a very particular brand voice absolutely blowing up their brand on social media. It’s ok to be buttoned up on social. If you are a b2b organization that is buttoned up across the board with your website, marketing, and voice then using emojis and LOL’s on social media is a terrible idea. Yes, each touchpoint and channel is unique to its users but don’t go off the rails with an entirely new brand voice. Being consistent across all channels, including social media is crucial. If you have a disconnect between social media and your other marketing channels it's time to put together a brand essence deck and make sure your voice and message is aligned across all channels.If you take the time to really understand your audience, set measurable goals, create a functional and convertible website AND speak the same language on social media as you do on any other channel, you’ll see tangible results from your social media campaigns. If you decide to ignore our advice, then you should retire the twitter fingers and quit social media altogether.