All posts in Social Media Marketing

In their book No B.S. Guide to Direct Response Social Media Marketing, business coach and consultant Dan S. Kennedy and marketing strategist Kim Walsh-Phillips show you how to use direct response marketing principles on a variety of social media platforms to drive real results and profit. In this edited excerpt, the authors offer some on-point advice about how to best use social media to create effective marketing campaigns.

Many direct response marketers think social media is complete fluff — and for a lot companies, it is. That’s because most marketers do not apply any direct marketing tactics to their strategic approach (if they are even strategic at all).

Anyone who either doesn’t know if their marketing is working and/or thinks the focus should be awareness building and not revenue generation could make some small but significant tweaks to their efforts and drive huge results.

Let’s cover a few key business principles as applied to social media:

Read more: 6 Principles That Must Be Applied to Social Media Marketing

When two out of three Internet users across the world is active on social media, you don’t need much of an introduction to how all pervasive this medium has become in the last decade. The average American spends 2.7 hours every day on social media. Need I go on?

Most businesses today have wised up to the power that social media has to influence and build one on one relationships with users. Which means most businesses have a presence on the social media networks that matter to their users. However, in spite of all the ballyhooing about the medium, social media marketing is still limited to posting an update or two every day and replying to customer comments as they roll in.

The fact is there’s so much more that you can do with this versatile medium with so little effort. Here’s a look at some of the things that you can accomplish through social media that you never could otherwise.

Read more: The 4 Easiest Ways to Supercharge Your Social-Media Marketing

When retailers and other marketers talk about social media marketing, they’re really just talking about marketing, says Nate Elliott, a Forrester vice president and analyst. “Social networks’ ads aren’t social,” he says. “They’re just ads.”

What he means is that social networks like Facebook, Pinterest and Twitter are increasingly focused on delivering ads that seek to drive direct actions via remarketing or other advanced targeting options. rather than focused on building relationships or driving engagement with shoppers.

Despite the social networks’ strategic shift, most companies let the team responsible for producing and overseeing their social content handle their advertising on social networks. And that doesn’t make sense, says Elliott, who recently wrote a report that suggests marketers instead let their media buyers handle their social ad budgets.

“Social marketers might be great at social, but that doesn’t have anything to do with the advertising they’re running,” he says.

Advertising is where marketers are devoting the majority—83%, according to Forrester—of their social spending. That spending is on the rise; more than two-thirds of avid social marketers say they’ve increased their social ad budgets this year, including 29% who say they have added significantly more money to the channel. That’s because the ads are enticing; social media offers advertisers a ton of inventory—Facebook alone is expected to account for at least 25% of all U.S. display ad impressions this year, according to eMarketer Inc.—and those ads are far less expensive than ads on other platforms, Elliott says.

Read more: It’s time to take social media marketing out of the silo

Have you tied your social media efforts to a positive ROI?

Or, have you heard claims that social media marketing just isn’t worth the effort for B2B companies?

B2B social media has gotten a bad rap in the marketing community, with many marketers claiming a low ROI and seeing a lack of interest from prospects. A 2014 report from Forrester found that 26 out of 30 B2B companies failed to create compelling content that engaged their audiences, losing sales and buyers to competitors in the process. With such dismal numbers, it’s clear that B2B companies need to rethink their content and the way they interest potential customers via social media.

With an increasing number of B2B companies adopting social media marketing, a number of myths about it have spread as well. These misconceptions can be laughable at best – but also damaging to your marketing and sales efforts at worst. In this article, I’ll dispel five myths about B2B social media marketing once and for all, and show you why a robust social media strategy is vital to increasing sales, expanding networks, and growing revenue.

Read more: 5 Myths of Social Media Marketing

The idea of using celebrities as a means to promote a product isn’t anything new. Remember the Wheaties box? Thirty years ago, getting on the Wheaties box was the pinnacle of celebrity endorsements. I still remember sitting at the kitchen table when I was eight or nine years old, eating my cereal and staring at a cardboard box with Michael Jordan’s picture staring back at me. Later, when I was a teenager, the celebrity “Got Milk” ads became my favorite part of flipping through any teen magazine. Do you remember the Backstreet Boys milk ad? I do, and so do thousands of other digital natives. From TV, to radio, to print, celebrities ruled the marketing world.

But now, with the rise of social media, celebrities don’t even need a photo shoot or TV commercial to become a company’s new spokesperson. All they need is an Instagram (or YouTube) account, free product samples, and a dab of creativity. If you don’t have the money to launch a big advertising initiative, it’s no problem. For companies that are looking to reach a certain user base, there are plenty of famous Instagrammers out there who will tweet a picture and an endorsement for a few bucks. They get to build their brand name and you get to dip a toe into the world of celebrity spokespeople. Not a bad deal, right?

In the last couple of months, though, it’s become clear that not all celebrities are savvy advertisers. While sometimes the product pushes are innocuous enough, recently one “celebrity” posted a poorly vetted endorsement that caused quite a bit of fall out. A few weeks back, a pregnant Kim Kardashian posted an Instagram photo of herself and a bottle of prescription morning sickness pills from Duchesnay USA. She raved about the drug and urged her followers to talk to their doctors about using it. The problem was she failed to mention the half-dozen side effects of the pills-a faux pas that wasn’t only misleading, but against the law. Thankfully, the Food and Drug Administration took notice and demanded she remove the post.

While Kardashian removed the post quickly, her actions initiated a hot debate across the web, leading many to wonder who should be responsible for monitoring product endorsements on social media sites. Should the FDA be scrolling through hundreds of thousands of posts looking for offenders, or should the social media site itself be responsible for censoring such content?
Read more: Virtual Wheaties Box: The New Era of Social Media Marketing

If you have a business, you need to be on social media – it really is that simple. A business without a social media presence is like a driver cruising down the street at night with no headlights. It’s dangerous, and it significantly lowers the probability you’ll end up where you want to be (and even if you do, it’s going to take you a lot longer to get there).

There’s no question that social media is a key factor to success in business these days. But how do you pay for it? How do you find the time to manage your accounts?

First, let’s get one thing straight. There’s a lot you can do on social media for free. You can set up a Facebook account and start posting, just like you can set up a Twitter feed and start tweeting. The problem, of course, is your reach. Because so much information is being shared on these social platforms, the networks themselves have no choice but to filter out some updates to be seen by their intended recipients and to let others go unseen.

Facebook, for instance, states that, “Of the 1,500+ stories a person might see whenever they log onto Facebook, News Feed displays approximately 300. To choose which stories to show, News Feed ranks each possible story (from more to less important) by looking at thousands of factors relative to each person.”

Read more: How To Start Investing In Social Media Marketing The Right Way