Why Your Agency Needs Better Social Media For Inbound Marketing
Having worked with several inbound marketing agencies in the past 4 years, I’ve learned a lot about how agencies work, what they focus on and how they get results.
One thing I’ve noticed time and again is many of these agencies need a hefty push to start using social media effectively with their inbound process.
Even though the software programs that promote inbound often push the social aspect, many agencies just do not.
Honestly, the reason is they don’t fully understand how much social media can do to assist them in achieving their goals.
They might also look at it as a crap shoot when there isn’t any formal training for guaranteeing results, like there seems to be in SEO, Blogging, etc.
My plan for social media for inbound marketing does provide results.
First, here are some of the results I’ve produced for the various clients accounts I’ve worked on with inbound marketing agencies:
Webinar registrations
– after our email campaign only produced 9 registrants for an upcoming middle of the funnel webinar, I was asked to push it on social media.Within 3 days we doubled the registrants to 18 and finished the campaign with 31 people signed up to attend. All of the additional 22 sign ups were through unpaid social media advertising.
Immediate blog traffic
– when new blog posts were written several clients would not see any traffic to their posts for weeks. While older posts were receiving views from search engine traffic, new posts would take weeks to months to produce any results.By employing their social media accounts, and actively distributing their blog posts to relevant communities, every blog post immediately saw traffic, social media shares, and lead producing activities from the day of publication.
Sales from social media
– even with years of investment to grow fanbases on Facebook, many clients were not seeing a return on their investment. Fans would like pictures, but engagement was low, and there was virtually no traffic coming from their social media accounts.With a few promotional ideas, and heavy content efforts on social media channels to reconnect fans we were able to generate leads straight from social media, and increase sales in just a few months.
Secret- Social Media Is Awesome for Lead Generation- IF, done correctly
The Problem- most agencies are not doing it correctly
For example
: In your agency you might have clients who have social media accounts listed on their websites. You may or may not do anything with them at all because the client doesn’t believe it will help, or you use their marketing budget for other purposes.Occasionally, when you want to see some results, any results, from your efforts as quickly as possible, you throw a link on their Facebook, Twitter and maybe Google+. If you get visits, the numbers are low and this just verifies the fact that social media doesn’t do much for them on the marketing front.
Why You Aren’t Getting These Results?
Social media accounts need to be handled regularly, daily even. Fans follow a company to hear more from them, but with several marketing agencies, they are just ignored, and occasionally sent a spammy update- much like building an email list and never contacting it but to tell them about a sale you are having.Content is a MAJOR part of social media, combined with persistence in posting regularly and patience in seeing results (depending on your goals) social media can work wonders for your campaigns. But the commitment is vital to producing results.
Here Is What You Need To Do:
Update The Accounts Daily
Constantly work on providing the accounts with content, a social media manager who understands inbound marketing, should be familiar with your buyer personas.I suggest posting a minimal of 1 time per day to each account Mon-Fri with the occassional self promoting link (out of 5 updates- 1 should be promotional). If you want to promote every blog post- you need a lot of updates!!
Curate Content
This is the easiest form of sharing content, and it is done through a variety of tools. As little as 10 minutes a week could produce enough content for all social media accounts if done correctly. There will be set up time for the tools, but after set up, the 10 minutes a week should work.
Automate Promotional Posts
Updates about newsletters, older landing pages, and even regular promotions your client has can be automated through tools like Tweet Adder, Social Oomph or Hootsuite, make sure you hire someone who understands how to use these tools effectively.Hubspot does have an interesting social media tool that allows for reposting the same message often, it just takes a little bit more time than others.
Think Outside of Company Profiles
A tool like Oktopost gives the company a place to collect social media accounts of employees, CEOs, and others who want to promote the company on their social channels. With changes on Facebook, profiles and groups are far more helpful in providing social media reach than a fanpage.Additionally groups can be used to get even more reach for content and promotions. Be careful to check Facebook, Linkedin and Google+ groups to see what their rules are, then participate (check daily on these accounts as well) and post.
What Is The Investment For Your Agency?
Several client accounts should be able to be handled by one person. In my experience I was able to handle about a dozen clients (and all of their social and content distribution needs) in about 30 hours a week.
Is It Worth It? Yes!!
In most cases we were able to get up to 80% more traffic, and regularly increased quality leads by up 100% or more.
Getting Started-
It might be difficult to change your social media plans and get started but I can help. I provide training for your staff or social media team, or I can handle the changes myself, along with setup and implementation. I want to help you produce more results, contact me today to learn how we can work together.Or simply post your questions below- I’ll answer them as soon as I can.
