The Inbound Growth Blog

The Inbound Growth Blog covers all topics relating to an integrated marketing strategy. We write about inbound marketing, social media, integrated marketing strategies and the sales process.

Transform Your SMB Company With Social Media Marketing

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Posted by John Beveridge on Aug 21, 2013 4:04:00 AM

Transform your SMB Company With Social Media Marketing BlogThis blog post is a preview from our new eBook, How To Transform Your SMB Company With Social Media Marketing. This comprehensive eBook will give you a step-by-step guide to managing a social media marketing program that will grow your company, including chapters on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and Google+. 

Social media has become an indispensable part of life in America. If you don’t agree with that statement, consider these statistics:

  • 27% of internet time in the US is spent on social networking sites – source: Experian
  • 46% of online users count on social media when making a purchase decision – source: Nielsen
  • 52% of all marketers found a customer via Facebook in 2013 – source: HubSpot
  • 43% of all marketers found a customer via LinkedIn in 2013 – source: HubSpot
  • 36% of all marketers found a customer via Twitter in 2013 – source: HubSpot

If you’re reading this eBook, you’ve probably come to the conclusion that social media marketing is important to your business. Congratulations! Read the rest of this eBook for a guide to setting up and managing a social media marketing program that will help grow your business.

Social media marketing for SMB companies

In many ways, the environment for growing your SMB company is challenging. The continuing aftermath of the great recession has changed the corporate purchasing process. The C-suite looks for broad agreement among their staff and they want meticulous research conducted on all major purchase decisions. Gone are the days when CEOs bought from their golfing buddies to the exclusion of anyone else.  

Turbulent times create opportunities for nimble, agile competitors. Unlike our enterprise and corporate competitors, we have our ‘ears to ground’ and know what our ideal customers want. We’re lean and nimble and we can turn on a dime to provide what the market wants and needs, unlike our big corporate competitors. While their front-line people are engrossed in corporate politics and wondering if they’ll have a job next week, we’re out hustling to grow our companies.

Social Media for SMB Blog Image

An integrated social media marketing process propels you to the top of the list when buyers are researching options. A recent study by the Corporate Executive Board found that the average buyer completes 57% of their purchase process before they have any contact with a sales person. They conduct research with search engine queries and through social media referrals. If they don’t find you when they’re performing their research, you’re toast!

Although I don’t recommend you give up telemarketing or unsolicited email marketing, you’re much better off with an inbound marketing approach integrated into your existing sales process. In fact, HubSpot’s 2013 State of Inbound Marketing Report found that social media produces almost double the leads of telemarketing, trade shows and direct mail. What’s more social media is a great way to drive leads for your seminars and other offline lead generation activities.

Social media is most effective when integrated with a broader inbound marketing strategy

Social media is not an end in itself. It is most effective when used to spread your marketing content and drive leads to landing pages on your website. Remember, your prospects and customers are performing research about solutions to their problems and pain points. What do they look for when the conduct research?

  • Blog posts
  • eBooks  and whitepapers
  • videos
  • webinars
  • case studies

Most, if not all, of this content will reside on your website. Social media lead generation occurs when a potential buyer clicks through to your website from your social media post and exchanges contact information for your content offer.  Here is a graphical depiction of the lead generation process courtesy of HubSpot.

inbound lead generation process

In addition to lead generation, social media can be integrated into your other marketing efforts. For example, you should include social sharing buttons on your marketing emails, landing pages, eBooks, whitepapers and blog posts.

There’s no better endorsement for your marketing content than when a third-party shares it on social media. In addition, social media shares, likes and +1s help with search engine optimization. For example, when someone “likes” your blog post on Facebook, Google interprets the “like” as a positive signal on the quality of the post. These social signals are now part of Google’s ranking algorithm and help you get found by potential buyers.

The Essential Guide To Inbound Marketing

 

3 requirements for an effective social media marketing effort

Social media requires a focused, daily effort. Period. If you’re not prepared to invest the time and resources necessary to do social media right, you won’t get the business results you need. If you can’t do it internally, outsource your social media marketing to a consultant that can deliver results.

It’s also important to understand that it takes time to get results. You need to develop domain authority for your website and increase the reach of your social media accounts. You’re not going to start a Facebook page and have 1,000 likes the first week. If you invest the necessary time and resources, you will build up a following for your company and generate business leads.

Here are three prerequisites to an effective social media marketing program.

Management support and buy-in

Probably the most important predictor of success for your social media marketing is the support and direction from your company leadership. As a leader, you need to buy in to the potential of social media marketing and embed it throughout your company. You need to emphasize the importance of social media to your long-term businesses success throughout your organization and implement processes to make sure it supports your sales and customer service delivery. If you don’t see social media as an essential element of your business, you shouldn’t waste time or resources dabbling in it.

Social media manager

Many people think social media marketing is free because it doesn’t cost anything to create profiles on the social networks. What they don’t understand is that to get results from your social media marketing, you need to invest significant time resources from someone who knows what they’re doing. At a minimum, you will need 25% of a full-time equivalent to run your social media marketing. Depending on the content you’ll be creating, the 25% FTE could quickly expand into a full-time position.

LinkedIn Page for Blog

The biggest mistake many businesses make when they start social media marketing is to make the receptionist the social media manager. After all, she’s in her twenties and is active on Facebook, so she's perfect to run the social media marketing program, right? While she may be a good social media manager (probably not), it’s important that your social media manager:

  • understands your sales process and how to ingegrate it with social media marketing
  • knows your corporate culture and embeds it into your social media marketing
  • understands and uses social media best practices
  • understands you customer service process and how social media can support it

Many small businesses outsource their digital marketing (which includes social media) to maximize the return on their social media investment. As a rule of thumb, Gartner found that businesses spend an average of 2.5% of revenue on digital marketing. That percentage is generally higher for new businesses and businesses with smaller revenue bases.

Social media software

The beauty of internet marketing strategies like social media is that you can measure everything you do. This lets you optimize your results by doing more of what works and adjusting or jettisoning initiatives that aren’t producing. Social media software is the tool you need to measure your efforts. Social media software will:

• let you schedule social media posts for maximum reach
• monitor mentions of your company or industry by others on social media
• manage your social media community
• analyze relevant metrics for your social media marketing

We use and recommend two software products:

HubSpot is an all-in-one internet marketing product that manages all aspects of your internet marketing including keyword research, SEO, blogging, social media, lead generation, lead nurturing and marketing analytics.

HootSuite is social media marketing software that manages all aspects of your social media efforts. While HootSuite is a great product, it doesn’t include the complete internet marketing functionality that HubSpot does.

So now that you know what you need to produce results, let’s talk about developing a strategy.

How To Transform Your Business With Social Media

Topics: Social Media

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