TotalWeb Partners Blog

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