Hypothetically, let’s say you’re the average business owner working to generate interest online. You’ve been blogging, you have a business website, and you have social media accounts. This is a very common business model online. And it can work really well. But not when you’re rowing backward.
When you set up the social media accounts, your expectations for social media were high! You wanted everyone to friend/follow/fan/like you. So you added links to your social media accounts to all of your sites. Cute sparkly, noticeable links and you encouraged people to follow you.
And maybe that’s where you left it. Or maybe you do a lot of tweeting, posting to Facebook, etc, and you’re engaging people in social relationships. But probably, you are also wondering why this isn’t resulting in more customers.
That’s because you’re routing customers further away from you, not toward you.
The ability to accurately control the process of turning visitors into leads requires understanding how your marketing pipeline is working and getting everything coordinated properly. You possibly integrated your social media accounts alongside your marketing-to-sales pipeline (aka funnel) without thinking about how they might clash.
So here’s what to do so that you don’t undermine the need for truly effective control over the sales cycle. Your social media accounts should be sending traffic to blogs, and those blogs should be directing people to your business website. Not the other way around. Stop working hard to route people to your social media accounts from your company site, Stop trying to route your blog’s visitors to your social media profiles. All routing, at least in marketing form, should be from Social Media (where you control little of what they can do) to your blogs (where you control more of what they can do) and then to your site (where you control everything they can do).
The proper order of things is important.
So, use social media to engage and interest in blog content or the business site. Use blogs to engage and interest in products and services on your site. If people don’t want to buy from you, they should also be given an option to give you their contact information directly, and then if they don’t choose to do that, they should be able to find ways to connect on social media. But if you intentionally route potential customers to your social media accounts without first trying to make them become something with a more tangible value to your business, you’re minimizing effectiveness. Otherwise, you can end up with thousands of friends/followers/fans and lots of great activity on social, but without a single profitable social media campaign.
Review your social media accounts to ensure they really do work to drive traffic closer to the goal, and that any blogs do the same. The idea is to make sure every part of your funnel is rowing in the same direction. That’s how to win the race.
And after you’ve made sure the structure is set up to allow forward motion, then make sure every team member communicating on these lines understands the correct priority