The Ultimate Social Media for Small Business Survival Guide, Part 2

Outline your expectations for your social media platforms

It’s absolutely impossible to have any real advertising success without first establishing your expectations for what a successful campaign would look like on social media. This is the lead reason why you have to spend as much time as you are able developing goals, outlining exactly what you want your individual campaigns to do, and then work on creating advertising and marketing across social media that helps make all of that possible.

For example, if you are looking to build or grow your business as rapidly as possible you may not be all that interested in squeezing every drop of profit out of your customer’s initial purchases the way that you would be if you are looking to maximize profits on future purchases from those same customers.

This is a real savvy approach to marketing and advertising that a lot of people struggle with (unsurprisingly) simply because it looks like you are giving up a lot of “easy money”, breaking even, or even losing money on your initial transactions when in reality nothing could be further from the truth.

This is where return on investment comes into play, but also where your Lifetime Customer Value figures come into play as well.

Understanding that the hardest thing you are ever going to do in business is convince a complete and total stranger to hand you their hard earned money for your products or services that they may never have taken advantage of before, it’s easy to see why so many smart and savvy marketers are more than comfortable breaking even on successful social media campaign – or even losing money up front.

For example, let’s say that you advertise on social media a front-end product or service that only costs about $50 but you spend $50 or more on advertising to get a single prospect to move all the way through your marketing funnel and place that initial purchase.

Most “regular” marketers are going to hit the panic button, freaking out that they are breaking even or even losing money.

But strategic marketers understand that if they can convince someone to place that first order they are likely to purchase $1000 worth of orders over the next year, you’re only paying $50 once to get your hands on that customer in order to make (on average) $950 in profit later down the line.

This is the kind of social media marketing faux pas or mistake that a lot of newbies make, and a big reason why those that understand just how much a competitive advantage they have marketing online at breakeven or even losing a little bit of money up front to make more money in the long run enjoy so much more success.

It’s all about optimization

At the end of the day, the name of the game when it comes to success with social media marketing – or any form of modern advertising or marketing, for that matter – is that it all comes down to tracking, measuring, and optimizing each and every one of your campaigns.

There isn’t a marketer on the planet that hits a homerun with every single campaign every single time up to bat, and the sooner you realize this the more success you are going to enjoy as you build your business online.

While a social media assistant, a social media marketing manager, or the best internet marketing company will definitely help you avoid a lot of stumbling blocks and a lot of early mistakes that can be easily avoided with a little bit of experience, at the end of the day any marketing company or professional that doesn’t test, that doesn’t measure, and that doesn’t optimize isn’t someone that you should ever feel comfortable moving forward with.

Thanks to today’s incredibly advanced technology and the nature of the Internet in general, small businesses have access to more information and more data than literally ever before.

Tools that used to cost multinational businesses millions and millions of dollars to develop all on their own now will cost you next to nothing (if they aren’t completely free to begin with), but for one reason or another small business owners don’t lean into these tools or optimize them as much as they should.

A social media assistant or a social media marketing manager will make all the difference if you are serious about optimizing your campaigns.

You will be able to handle the heavy lifting of the creative side, coming up with different pitches, different authors, different campaign ideas, etc. while handing that work off to the manager or assistant so that they can run all of your ideas, track and test each of them with live social media traffic, tell you the winner of those tests, allow you to continue tweaking and optimizing as you go along.

THAT’S how you build successful social media marketing campaigns today.

Sure, you might luck into a homerun every now and again. And you might be able to enjoy some pretty crazy success right out of the gate (particularly if you understand your market and nail your messaging on the right social media channel) but you can bank on the effectiveness of incremental optimization in a way that hitting home runs sporadically would never allow.

Should you look to take advantage of the services of a social media outsourcing operation. There are a couple of things you’ll want to look for.

We’re talking about:

• A proven track record of marrying social media and small business marketing approaches effectively
• Successful campaigns that you can independently verify
• Clients with businesses like yours (even if they aren’t in the same industry) that you can interview for inside information about working with those professionals
• Regular reports that track and analyze all of your campaigns (and, even better, tools to give you a live look at the raw data of your campaigns)

… And that’s just the tip of the iceberg!

At the end of the day, social media represents such an important part of modern business success that you’d have to be at least a little bit crazy not to take advantage of the leverage that it makes possible.

All the same, you might not be comfortable handling all the heavy lifting on your own (and that’s easy to understand as a busy entrepreneur with plenty on your plate already) which is why working with a social media outsourcing firm is so smart, so strategic, and (usually) so successful.

Enjoy this social media guide?

Read Part I where we learned about building a master plan before you dive right in to social media advertising. Then. follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn to get more helpful tips and tricks for your social media advertising.

Looking for a local social media expert to guide you through the steps of a successful digital marketing campaign? Contact UNIFY marketing & technology solutions! We’d love to sit down with you, maybe over coffee, to discuss your next profitable marketing campaign. We are conveniently located in the Toledo, OH area, but serve clients nationwide. Reach out to us TODAY! 419.740.1010 | info@UNIFYmts.com.