As I wrote in this blog post The ONE Flaw with Using Social Media for Business, your business needs its own internet presence and email list, that banking on “organic” social media is like a dog constantly getting distracted by squirrels.
Avinash Kaushik backed this up with data and facts (as he’s prone to do) in his latest blog post: Stop All Social Media Activity (Organic) | Solve For A Profitable Reality
Like that dog constantly distracted by squirrels we tend to gravitate to the free and easy. The lure of free traffic keeps us working on SEO and posting to social media LONG past the point of diminishing returns. Both are important, especially SEO, but they have their place, and limitations, which must be understood.
The facts are that to succeed you need to use paid advertising. Paid advertising on social media, Facebook for example, can be targeted like a laser to your ideal audience. Metrics can be used to make intelligent decisions on where to spend more and where to not tread at all. The effort, energy, and dollars you put into this will pay off (if not, like I said you can analyze the results and make adjustments to correct).
On one hand, we despise the data gathering behemoths called social media, except when it comes to advertising – all that data they gather on us makes advertising efficient and effective.
Organic social media is like putting a few drops of food coloring into a fast moving stream: it’s gone from view as soon as it hits the water. While YOU may look at your business or personal page on a social media platform, few others do. People look at their stream of information and when you post something they may or may not see it. Only a select few have enough gravity to pull people to THEIR timelines to check if there’ve been any updates, etc. The rest flow by in the stream and they’re gone from the masses’ consciousness forever.
Therein lies the success of paid advertising: it gets placed in front of your audience over and over.
Even with all the knobs and dials on the social media advertising engines, nothing, I mean NOTHING beats the effectiveness of your own direct contact via a mailing list. This is verified by the data in Avinash Kaushik’s blog post. Circling back to my blog post referenced in the first paragraph, our big picture should look like a huge funnel with every effort aimed at getting a one to one connection with our customers and potential customers. It’s like fishing but there’s no fishing line, we have to lure people with our ads, then move them through the funnel with our content and communications.
It used to take a lot of expertise to setup and create complete and interconnected systems to do this: no longer.
I HIGHLY recommend Kartra, they’ve done a great job bringing ALL the parts and pieces together that we used to cobble together to create an integrated system. YOU CAN LITERALLY DO IN HOURS WHAT USED TO TAKE DAYS OR EVEN WEEKS TO SETUP.
One word of advice I will offer: don’t be afraid to get professional help. We all think we’re experts in everything from SEO, to website design, to copywriting. We’re not. Even a perfectly setup system will fail if the bait (copy) is bad. Copy is not just the paragraphs on your landing page; it’s also the one sentence of text and headline on your ads, and the selection of images – all so incredibly importing in getting traffic into your system. No traffic in = no success, no matter how good the funnel.
Don’t set yourself up for failure by paying for advertising, but being TOO CHEAP to get help creating the bait (copy)!
You may be saying, geez Fred, every article and email has an affiliate link for Kartra. Well, yes. IT’S THAT GOOD! You may be thinking that you can do the same thing with free sites, plugins, and tools and you’re sort of right: which also means you’re sort of wrong. It takes a great deal of technical expertise to link all the parts and pieces together (if even possible). Even if you do, you still will not have across the board control and metrics in one place. It will be difficult to use and due to human nature that means it won’t get done. Having all the tools in one easy to use place, along with good training, goes a long way towards insuring success, and that is worth the cost (which is less than all the parts and pieces separately by the way).
See my post Social Networking Common Sense
Until next time,
Fred
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