Ep.3 – Strategic Social Media Marketing

 [00:00:08] Hi everybody. I’m Chris. I’m the CEO of Social INK. And we’re here with a brand new episode of All About Digital Marketing podcast. Today I’m joined by Gareth Alvarez, Head of Content for Social INK. Anna Simmons our Head of Social Media at Social INK. Today we’re gonna be talking a little bit about strategic social media marketing. I’m going to hand over to Anna to start us off for this episode. But the main focus of what we want to do for you guys today is to really get a feel for why social media marketing is so important no matter what business you’re in no matter what industry you’re in no matter what size we think it’s something that’s really really valuable. Anna, do you want to start us off.

 [00:00:53] Yeah I mean so social media is obviously one of our core services. Social INK. Clue is in the name as it were. But in particular we have to emphasize that it has to be strategic. So in terms of social media marketing what we see a lot of businesses do and most businesses do use social media. They you know they’ll post now and again they might have a page. It’s likely that if you’re listening to this know if you’re listening to podcasts you’re very likely to be the type of person to be savvy enough to have a couple pages related to your business. But what most people do is they don’t use it in the right way or, they don’t use it enough or they focus too much on the wrong things that don’t actually get results. So this is something that Chris was actually talking about on a webinar recently. So it was all about how to build a social media strategy and you know question yourself do you even know what’s working. Do you know if your social media is working. Chances are that if you’re like most of the people we work with. You don’t have any clue if it’s working. You just know that you know quite happy with it. You don’t know if you’re getting results from it. You don’t know if it’s worth your time. But ultimately social media is huge and it is. It does work. It is worthwhile if you use it. If you use a strategy that works. But ultimately people online they’re using social media and they’re they’re going to be using social media more than they’re going to be doing things like creating blogs. They’re going to be watching videos more than they’re gonna be doing things like listening to podcasts for example. So social media in terms of your overall content marketing, because it is just a piece of it, is the part where you can reach people people on a public platform and also talk to the people that already know about your business. So twofold you can reach a new audience and you can keep, you can stay engaged with the people that already know about you. So that’s a great starting point.

 [00:03:19] I think what’s really interesting about what you’ve just said there as well is this at the beginning how do you know if it’s working for you and the amount of question the site all its clients and I’ve said Okay so what’s the goal. What’s what’s the objective from your social media. At best the answer is sell more. OK. At worst it’s well we’ve got to be active on social media. And you say OK well I get you you have to be active on social media but what are you trying to achieve. What’s the actual end game. And I think this is something like you mentioned we have done a webinar about it recently. We do talk about this a lot because it’s something that we feel is so important for clients. If you can’t identify what the goal is what it is you’re trying to achieve. It’s very easy to get lost. So you might be posting 15 times a day but actually is it taking you towards your goal. Well if you don’t have a goal or if you haven’t set a goal how would you know. How would you know if you’ve achieved. How would you know if you’ve exceeded that goal or whatever else it might be. So I think that’s the real starting point for my side of things will always be. What’s the strategy. So you want to build a newsletter list. Perfect. All right let’s now create content posts with that purpose in mind. And now we’ve got a real measurable goal that we can actually go against so we can say look we did 100 posts. And our goal was to try and bring a new Web site sorry, new newsletter sign ups from those hundred posts we’ve brought in a thousand new email sign up. Okay great. That’s worked. But so many businesses are just doing for the sake of doing so the occasional picture the occasional post the occasional reshare or some motivational quote without actually taking into consideration what the end goal is.

 [00:04:56] Yeah I think that stems from. I’m sorry. I guess I think that really stems from the fact that we all to some degree have a personal social media presence.

 [00:05:10] We’re all on Facebook or Twitter or Instagram or whatever. Some of us are on multiple platforms and so we use social media socially, at a personal level. And when you’re using social media in this kind of social way it is more sort of a reactive approach whereby you are reacting to people’s posts that you see on your timeline or you’re reacting to something that you’ve experienced by making a post about it or you’re reacting to a piece of news by sharing it. So at a personal level our social media interactions are very reactive.

 [00:05:58] However when you’re looking at social media from a business perspective for your brand. Yes there are moments when you need to be reactive as in replying to comments and so on or sort of responding to things that are happening within  your sector or your industry or whatever. But by and large your social media for business needs to be proactive and needs to be considered needs to be thought out needs to be planned and the needs to be a strategy behind it, a reason for you being on social media. What’s the purpose of your social media presence. And you know at times it’s very difficult to divorce our personal social media behaviour from the business or the brand social media behaviour. And I think that’s a very important distinction to make before you actually are able to fully come up with a strategy a plan a reason a purpose for your business’s social media presence.

 [00:07:04] Exactly. That’s that’s exactly it.

 [00:07:06] It’s the fact that it does need a proactive approach is you can’t overstate just how important that is. And it’s something that some people will take that too literally as well and they’ll think that. OK well I have to get all corporate or use content that might not be actually what you would personally engage with but you think oh well I’m a business now I have to post business stuff. So it’s not to say that you can’t post things that are, obviously on brand, but you can still be conversational. You can still use social media in a way to be entertaining. Like absolutely. That’s what most people are on social media for so that’s what you should do but you should do it proactively. So if you’re going to be if you’re going to an event or something, if you have a launch coming up, if you want to grow your email list those those sorts of things by having that goal then you can plan for it because it’s you might get some results on you know by chance. But otherwise what a lot of businesses end up doing without having an actual purpose in mind is they just end up focussing on the so-called vanity metrics. So it’s the easiest thing to look at. If you don’t really know what your purpos is on social media you’re probably just looking at how many likes you have or how many followers you have you’re not looking at stuff that actually matters.

 [00:08:32] So we got a lot of people that come to us and they’ll be like oh hey you know I have this Facebook page and I want XX amount of followers. And and then we ask well OK! Why? What do you want these followers to do? Who are these followers going to be? Who are they going to be? What is the purpose of that and having a smaller engaged audience is much more effective than having huge amount of followers and a lot of businesses make the mistake of pushing their follower count and what they what they end up losing focus on is the people that actually care about their business and actually want their products or their services. And so what you might end up doing is attracting entirely the wrong people and then you wonder why even though you do get comments or likes or shares why nobody’s actually buying and at the end of the day it’s a business you want to convert people at some point. So you need to have those goals in mind so that you stay focussed.

 [00:09:35] I think Gordon said it best. I wonder if I’m pronouncing his name correctly or not. And he said basically you can build a really successful business with just a thousand people. A thousand real fans. A thousand real clients. A thousand people that really buy into what you’re doing why you’re doing that create a huge business and what you just mentioned there reminds me sort of ten years ago I was setting up socially. We were just getting started really. And somebody said to me turn over for vanity profit for sanity and the same thing is true with social media. It’s the vanity metrics like you mentioned there are your follower count and everything else. I’d rather have one hundred people. That get involved so that want to be involved that buy, than have ten thousand people of which only 50 60 maybe would actually get involved because you’re diluting the presidential diluting the reach you’re diluting everything about what you’re trying to do as opposed to having that core audience that’s really engaged and building that core audience.

 [00:10:37] Yeah. What he calls it is the smallest or the minimum viable audience I think. And basically we’re saying that you know at the point where you’re trying to engage with everyone you’re rarely delighting anyone and you can’t be all things to all men and effectively if you niche down if you focus specifically on it on a small active engaged enthusiastic audience people who actually really want your product or like what you have to say like what you do they’re infinitely more valuable to you than trying to target other people who are perhaps not interested or not as interested or not as firmly focussed on you know what what you want them to do.

 [00:11:22] I think that’s probably a great place to end. Building that minimum viable audience that real audience is always going to trump everything else and also remembering if you don’t know what your goals are on social media that’s a huge mistake and something that you really want to start identifying and you can find loads more information about this on the Social INK website and we offer strategy sessions as well to help businesses with this. But the key thing is to start focussing on what you actually trying to achieve. If you’re not doing that then nothing else matters because you won’t know what you’re doing well what you’re doing badly what needs to be improved and what you need to change. So I think thank you very much guys for joining me on this episode again.

 [00:12:01] And let’s let’s keep going and keep giving as much value as possible. No worries.

 [00:12:06] Thanks guys.