G’day everyone!

Over the last, probably two years, I’ve seen a lot of social media and in particular Facebook and Instagram, marketing campaigns that don’t work and basically they’re doomed to fail from the start as the strategy is wrong. So I wanted to make a video about how you can create a Facebook marketing campaign, not advertising, I’ll create a separate video about advertising and social media. This one’s specifically around the production of content and posting on business pages and that kind of stuff. But how to create a strategy that’s actually going to work.

And by work what I mean is that, you know social media in a marketing sense, is still about marketing, that’s one of the things that people really get wrong. It’s not necessarily, unless your strategy is about engaging clients that are already your clients and using social media to help with, dealing with client feedback and issues like that. If that’s your strategy that’s fine, that’s a different sort of video.

But this is particularly about using social media as a means of marketing your business. As you know, I see a lot of wastage of marketing budget, particularly in small medium-sized businesses which is terrible, because marketing budget for this level of business needs to be about client acquisition. It doesn’t matter if you’re doing search marketing or social media marketing or telemarketing or referral marketing or networking. You know it’s got to be about client acquisition. And this is the one thing or where one area where social media so often, I think has missed the point because it’s… you know, social media experts and agencies quite often say, “Well you know, it’s not you know…let’s get you your social voice, let’s get you your business voice in social media.” And they talk about engagement and they talk about reach and they talk about likes and that kind of stuff.

You know while those interesting concepts, they are vanity stats. You know, social media marketing needs to be about the return on investment you’re getting for your dollars invested in the marketing. So return on investment means that for every dollar you spend in social media, you should be getting $10 back in profit and that’s the focus that you need to be having with social media.

And look, I get it’s not perfect right because quite often people will find you in social media but then go and buy off your website or meet you personally whatever and you might not hundred percent get that actual lead came from social media originally. But you know that whole sort of process of understanding, that’s called attribution modelling and as you get more sophisticated or may already be a sophisticated enough to do that. But you can build that kind of modelling into your analysis of marketing results.

But this video is about your strategy and your concepts behind social media, doing the marketing and the content part if. So definitely a lot of it about it’s about,. So let’s get back to the basics, right.

What do you want to do? What do you want to do with marketing? No matter what the platform it is, you want to put your core benefits in front of your prospects or your defined target audience, in a way that makes them over time become familiar with what you’re offering, familiar with the benefits you’re offering them, start to trust you through a nurturing phase, and then hopefully at some stage when they’re ready to buy from you, because you’re top of mind, they’ll buy from you.

You’ll get the inquiry, or you’ll get one of the three inquiries so you’ll have a chance, so that’s what marketing is about.

The second thing you need to consider is “What’s this platform that I’m using? What are the core features of that platform and how that going to fit in?” And I think with any online marketing or digital marketing strategy, we can always go back to traditional marketing concepts.

Now the idea with social media is, that the traditional marketing parallel universe for social media as a marketing channel is networking. So what do we do in networking? What we do is we go into a room where we believe our prospects are going to be. We start a dialogue with them, we build some trust then we take the relationship out of the room and try to build the relationship externally to the networking event. And then through the development of relationship and partnership, that’s how we develop business. That’s how social media supposed to work.

So one thing you need to also consider is with social media, is what the actual platforms want and what’s really clear in social media is that the platforms, none of the platforms in any social media channel, really care about business pages. It’s something you really need to be aware of. You know, business pages interrupt conversation on social media so they never really get the exposure that pays for the investment in them. So that’s something you got to be aware of because that’s got to be a core part of your strategy on how you’re using your business page.

So yeah, so we’ve got that, so you need to understand that the business page isn’t really cared about by the social media platform. But the goal is to start generating those relationships and then take them away from the platform and further develop them and then make the sale elsewhere. So that part of the equation, what you can ask yourself is… to get the part of the equation right, it’s simple. What you need to ask yourself is “In my business today, where am I making my sales? Is it at the office? Is it in a shop? Is it on your website?” So once you answer that, once you understand what the, understand you’re going for return on investment which means client acquisition and profit, once you understand what you’re supposed to do on this platform and what that actual platform wants and how it works, then you create your strategy next.

The third party of the strategy is trying to send your prospects to where they’re most likely to buy. One thing that I hear a lot is “I don’t believe Facebook works because I never see any conversions on Facebook.”

Facebook isn’t supposed to convert for you, you know Instagram isn’t supposed to convert for you. What’s supposed to convert for you, is the place that’s converting for you today. Is it your website? Do you have an online shop? Is it someone ringing in your office? Is that how leads work? Is it someone filling out a form on your website and then you give them a call or you have an e-mail nurturing strategy.

So when you answer that question, the next step is, get the flow right in social media. So you put people, or you put your message on social media in front of the right people and you have some nurturing there, obviously it’s not all about sell, sell, sell, but you know, people talk about the 1, 2, 3, hook; or the jab, jab, jab, hook that kind of thing. So at some point in your content, you have to sell, you have to send people to where you make your best sales.

So if you’re making your best sales on your website because you’ve got an online shopping cart, you have to send people there. If you make, if you generate leads which you need to nurture and turn into sales, you need to create a landing page that’s a high conversion and use your social media to send people there.

And then track that in Google Analytics so you can see the performance on how many people are getting to that page from your social media and how many converting into leads and then try to track who they are. So that you know the quality of those leads over time and how they’re converting into real business and whether it’s profitable or not.

And the point I made before about, you know, that social media platforms not really caring about business pages, that’s really important too. And the most important thing about that is, don’t waste budget which is finite for us in small medium-sized business, trying to build an audience on a platform or on a structure that’s in a platform that’s not really supported by the platform. So don’t build a “like” audience on a business page in Facebook, you know, there’s no long term value of that and you have no control of that every time Facebook change the algorithm business page reach seems to drop, that’s historically what seems to happen.

So with that in mind, build the database external, use these as tools to help build a database external to this platform that you have control over and can nurture and you own. So a great example is an e-mail database. Use your Facebook marketing and platform to build an e-mail database so you can nurture and have control. You know with E-mail, MailChimp or Aweber, or Ontraport or whatever, at least when you’re sending your e-mails you know that they’re going to get to the e-mail account of your prospects, you’ve got a chance.

You know, with social media pages these days you do a post, it gets to what? 1% of your audience?  You don’t really have a chance here. So try to, I mean if  you spend money boosting posts have a real defined purpose. “I’m gonna boost this post because that’s working well.” Let’s boost it with the idea that would send people to a lead bait landing page, where they can leave me their e-mail address and their phone number so I can nurture them down the track. That’s how you do marketing using social media platforms.