There is a direct correlation between the success of your inbound marketing and the reach of your social media network. In short, if you have more people liking you, following you, connected to you, you get more leads when you create compelling educational content as part of an inbound-marketing effort.
If you think about it logically, it makes sense. Here are examples of two companies with the same amazing educational content and inbound-marketing program but with very different social media networks.
Company 1 is an IT services company that has about 500 visitors to its website each month. It recently created a new eBook and a series of related blog posts. It has 37 likes on Facebook, 15 followers on LinkedIn and 4 followers on Twitter. It doesn’t have a YouTube channel. It has an internal e-mail list of 1,200 clients, prospects, partners and friends. It has 21 blog subscribers.
The company publishes its new eBook, tells its friends, family and peers, posts it to its social networks, blogs about it and -mails its entire database announcing the new e-book.
The results are 15 downloads and a handful of additional shares through social media. There is a small increase in website traffic a few days after the release of the eBook, but most of the new activity settles down to normal after about 24 hours.
Company 2 is a similar IT services company with similar website traffic, but it has been working to build its social media network for the past few years and it has 1,956 people who have liked it on Facebook, 450 followers on LinkedIn and 600 followers on Twitter. It set up its YouTube Channel, posts videos and typically gets about 100 views a month. Because the company recognized the importance of building these networks it has 4,500 e-mail addresses and 156 blog subscribers.
When it publishes its new eBook there is an immediate and significant (40%) increase in website traffic. It picks up 60 new leads during the first two days and notices that its new eBook is being shared across social media, allowing for the traffic and lead flow to continue for the rest of the week.
Two companies — similar products, similar educational content — but the one with the more significant social media is able to leverage its content across many more potential prospects to drive people back to its website, turn those visitors into leads and put sales opportunities into its pipeline.
The key takeaway is that social media is the superhighway for your educational content. Start building the roads, bridges and tunnels today so you can take advantage of them tomorrow.
Encourage your sales people to make connections via social media. Actively engage your target prospects on social media. Start a conversation and get them to include your business in the conversation. Answer questions and share your knowledge. In exchange, people will connect with you, follow you, and share your knowledge with others. Set goals for increasing your social media reach. Start small and as you achieve your goals increase them. Before long you will have a substantial network that will help you get results from your content marketing and inbound-marketing effort.
Do an inventory of your social network connections. Start with Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube and Google Plus. Add your e-mail database and blog subscribers to those numbers, too. Set goals for your business to increase those numbers by 10% to 20% each month. Give your people some specific ways in which they might attract new people to your networks. Posting content online is a great first step — like us on Facebook and get access to our new free report or view our video on YouTube and sign up for our YouTube Channel for regular updates every time we post a new video.
What gets measured gets done.
For more information on how social media supercharges your lead-generation efforts, download the free report “4.5 Ways to Drive Leads With Social Media” or click on the image to download.