No doubt about it, if you’ve been a part of the digital marketing world over the last decade, social media has been one of the most dominant topics of conversation. With the proliferation of social networks like Facebook and Twitter; and more recently Snapchat and Instagram, online marketers have placed heavy reliance on using social media to reach customers. And with good cause — most of these networks have the ability to reach and engage people at scale.
Something that we’ve noticed a lot more of are brands that have become obsessed with social media. In fact, we see a lot of brands that rely heavily on social media as a complete marketing strategy. We see this in the inordinate amount of time spent trying to grow follower counts (in some cases buying followers and likes), the explosion of content on social media platforms, and the large fees paid to social media-only agencies.
While social media is an important component of a comprehensive marketing strategy, pursuing social media as the ONLY component of your marketing strategy is a mistake. Here are a few reasons why:
At Tobe Agency, we believe it takes a village to build a great digital marketing strategy. This includes social media, SEO, content marketing, email marketing, analytics, PR, and paid digital media.
All of these components need to work together in order to generate awareness of your brand, capture a customer as a lead, nurture that lead, and then eventually position your brand to make the sale of your product/service to the customer.
While social media can accomplish many of these steps, very rarely can social media accomplish all of these steps in one swoop. Social media is a marketing channel, not an entire marketing strategy. Social media is fantastic at generating brand awareness at scale, but in terms of capturing leads, it breaks down.
How do you get a customer to give you their contact information so that you can nurture them with additional content? For example, if you’re able to get a customer’s email address, you can push content to their inbox.
Promotions or specials are only seen by a small percentage of followers on social media accounts at any given time. So combining Social Media with Email Marketing might be a great way to capture a lead and provide a more consistent and reliable way to nurture that lead with content.
The point here is that social media cannot just act in a vacuum. The content you post on social media needs to link up to a greater digital marketing strategy in order for it to generate some sort of return on invested marketing dollars.
When social networks like Facebook first hit the market, they were amazing sources of traffic. This was because you were getting real organic reach with your content on Facebook.
For example, if you had 100,000 “Fans” on your Facebook Page (now referred to as “Likes”), there was a good chance that Facebook would show your content to most of those 100,000 Fans. Back in the day, this was an amazing source to drive almost FREE traffic to your website, landing pages, or online assets that you own.
Because of the explosion of content on social networks, as well as the need for these networks to monetize their users, organic reach has fallen dramatically.
This means that social media is no longer one of the best places to get FREE traffic to your website. In today’s day and age, the primary purpose of social media is to drive engagement: shares, comments, and likes.
Social media has effectively shifted to driving engagement and opening discussions with your customers, not necessarily driving clicks to your website. This is very different from the early days of social media, where marketers were using the platforms to drive traffic to their sites.
You can continue to leverage the enormous power of social media, but you’re going to need to be using paid social media (i.e. buying Facebook ads) to get that traffic to your online assets.
Purely investing in growing your social media following has drastically less value today. While social media might have been a significant source of traffic for your brand in the past, diversifying your traffic sources through activities such as SEO and Paid Digital Ads are now even more important to building out a comprehensive digital marketing strategy.
We know social media is a great place to generate brand awareness, but it's also a great place to humanize your brand in a non-salesly way.
That’s always been one of the strongest suits of social media: it allows you to present your brand in a way that shows what goes on behind the scenes.
It allows you to “talk” with your customers through comments and chatbots. But one thing is for certain, social media shouldn’t be considered a giant billboard where you only post sales materials.
According to Sprout Social, nearly 46% of respondents to their study stated that they unfollowed a brand on social media because they posted too many promotional messages.
This means that if you rely heavily on social media to drive sales, you’re most likely going to be driving your followers away. So what do you need to do?
Use social media as a channel to push useful and helpful content to your customers, find a way to capture their lead information, and then nurture those leads with quality content. Once you’ve built this level of trust with your customers, you can start to slowly drip out sales or promotion-related content.
Social media alone is not a comprehensive marketing strategy for driving sales. If you’re trying to drive towards that conversion/sale, you need to fully integrate content marketing, email marketing, social media and other digital marketing channels together to drive toward that sale.
Trying to grow your social media following while neglecting all the other channels that contribute toward that conversion is putting all your eggs in a leaky basket. Which is why…
We hope that you haven’t read this post and think that we’re against social media. When we build out inbound digital marketing campaigns for our clients, we spend a lot of time crafting a proper social media strategy that fits within the greater digital marketing strategy.
Generally speaking, we see social media as a great “top-of-funnel” channel to distribute content.
Yes, organic reach on that content is almost nothing these days, but because certain social media platforms have such great paid social tools (i.e. Facebook Ads) we can use a little bit of ad spend to amplify the reach of our content on social networks.
We also see social media as a fantastic way to engage with customers, while also presenting brands in an authentic way.
But this doesn’t mean you can neglect the other equally important marketing channels and tools.
Significant traffic is still generated from search and paid search. So you’re going to need to invest in an SEO strategy.
Content is still king, so you’re going to need to invest in developing and publishing content that aligns with each stage of the buyer’s journey to purchasing your product or service.
You’re going to need to find a way to capture leads, so you’re going to invest in landing pages and integrate those landing pages into lead capture tools.
Then you’re going to need to have the right analytics to see if that lead is ready to be sold so you can automatically send out sales/promotional content (or trigger your sales team) to try to convert towards that sale.
At the beginning of this post, we stated that it takes a village to build a proper digital marketing strategy. Social media may be the chief of the village to some, but there are a whole bunch of other supporting characters that also contribute to making that sale. Don’t fall into the trap of just relying on social media to get there.
How do you use social media as a part of your greater marketing strategy? We’d love to hear about how heavily (or not) you rely on social media to drive conversions with your customers. And check out how our favorite B2B companies are using social media to their advantage.