So, in my last post I covered not pushing people away from you, but instead making sure that all marketing motion was in the direction of real, honest to gosh sales.
Where I left off was the importance of having a real pipeline. Deciding exactly what the various steps you can move people through should be and how you’re going to work to get people from being strangers who see that you exist all the way to happy customers that rave about you online. Really, don’t just imagine it, really work out how it can happen and start striving in that direction.
Social media may seem like a chatterbox’s heaven to a marketer who is used to hard-selling. Yes, social media is a bad place to indiscriminately yell out your sales pitch. But that doesn’t mean you can’t lob the pitch if you do it the right way.
In broad public promotion, first contact, rather than giving people your website’s link, you can use that initial contact to ask people to friend/follow/fan you for access to unique content (specials, deals, advice, whatever). This makes it so that rather than asking them to visit your site (where you get only one shot to give them your message), you create a connection, however slight, that you may be able to use to place your message in front of that person several times, or get them to connect with you repeatedly in the future.
Perhaps use polls, quizzes, surveys and questionnaires to your followers to generate new names to your mailing/texting/mail list.
Sometimes, if you’ve been “real”, (you’ve developed a rapport with your social media circle, and you’re using the right tone and demeanor) you can get away with a lot of “sales-y” stuff without losing their interest — including coupons, specials, secret deals.
“Psst! The next 12 people who walk in the door and say “marvelous Marvin’s mirage” three times fast get 20% off. Don’t tell anyone who can get here faster than you can!”
“We’re testing out a new product here for only you, our customers and friends, to try first. You can find the secret link here…”
All of these direct people to their “next step” or beyond… which is what you want.
However, there is another kind of marketing on social that you should be doing. Notice the difference between the above and this:
“Post a story to your page about how you use our skin care line and how it works for you, and we’ll automatically enter you into our “Win a year’s supply!” contest. (50 words or more to qualify. Don’t forget to tag us so we see it!)”
This is different. This is a list building action, a word of mouth marketing action. Using your happy customers to promote for you by word of mouth is good, because the initial trust factor that you otherwise have to build is there from day one. Sometimes you’ll even get new customers right off the bat from the engagement with older customers simply because you’re responsive and there for existing customers and their friends see that.
Both the above are important kinds of promotion to place in social media.
Any time you can, you should work to turn your happy customers into reviews. Send an email after a sale asking your customers to spread the good word. Ask for a review of you in Google, bing, Angie’s list, or yelp. It’s smart to customize it and ask your gmail contacts to leave Google reviews (they’re already logged into Gmail when they get the email, so it’s a simple process. Ask your hotmail users to leave reviews on bing – they’re already logged in. Etc… And everyone else to leave a review in a place of your choosing such as Yelp! And don’t be afraid to bribe them with a discount or freebie for their trouble. Happy customers aren’t as motivated to leave reviews as unhappy customers. And so giving them an incentive is not unethical, it simply evens out the motivation level some.
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I know it’s not specifically about social media, but some of you answer me when I start talking social media. You cut me off and say “But we don’t know what to do with these people once we’ve got them. In case you’re having trouble figuring out what your pipeline should be, here’s a good basic list of tools for you, to help you bring forth a new idea or two. Draw it all out and figure out how your products and services fit into each of the available tools.
Marketing Avenues include:
- Search
- Local Search
- Video Search
- Directories
- Shopping Search
- Audio Search
- Photo search
- Article (News) search
- Television
- Radio
- Social
- Forums
- Mini-blogging (twitter)
- Other people’s blogs and websites
- Phones
- Snail Mail
- Social Profiles
- Affiliate networks
- Your blogs
- your website
Decide which avenues to use by finding out whether your market or even your existing customers are there.
Marketing Tools to mix and match include:
- Cold contact
- Pay-per click (PPC) ads
- Per per thousand ads
- Click to Call ads
- Individual product listings
- Video ads
- Directory listings
- Friend-gathering and list building offers
- Direct conversational engagement
- Blogging and Articles
- Advice
- Answering questions
- Quizzes and Surveys
- Plain old advertisements
- Contests
- Polls
- Podcasting
- Posting videos
- Posting photos
- Coupons
- Discount offers
- Limited time offers
- Friendly direct communication
- Re-sign actions for existing customers.
- Reviews from existing customers.
- Upsell offers to existing customers.
- Requests for word of mouth from existing customers.
- Technical Support. Yes this is a marketing action when done publicly and well.
You can figure out which of these to use by considering whether your message can stand out and be interesting to your market in that setting at a cost that remains profitable to you.
There are hundreds of subsets of ways to do all of this, and more than just this list, obviously, is available to a smart business person online. Just look it over and see whether there are ways you can implement these into your marketing pipeline.
By marketing pipeline, I mean series of actions you’re taking to turn people every shade of interested between “no contact ever” and “ravingly happy customer”. Every shade of interested in between those two needs an action to turn it into the next shade of interested and retrieve the ones that you may have lost along the way. Work it out, drill it, figure out how you’re going to be consistent and then start doing it all. (I don’t care whether it fits on a napkin, personally.)
And then really look at your website. Front end and back. Take a look at your website’s stats. Is your website forwarding each of these actions and making it easier for you and the visitors to walk the path you’ve laid out? Don’t ever make it hard, or make it more than a few actions to get from being at one stage of interested to the next stage of interested.
Once you’ve gotten someone to the point where they’re ready to contact you directly and sign up or buy, do you make it easy to do so? Are you making it easy to do so in the exact way that the person will want to at the exact moment they’ll want to move to the next step with you?
If this is a service where people generally want to call in and speak to you, do you make it easy or hard to contact you by phone? Don’t make it hard – open the floodgates and make calling you really simple.
If you want people to request a quote online, is it easy to get them to a place where they can easily see how to give you the information and get a quote from you?
You’d be surprised how often I find that the quote form is buried deep in the site, or asks 800 questions instead of three. Sometimes the option to call is hidden because the business phone number is also a personal phone number… I understand that as a small business, you may have to do this – and that’s fine. If you have problems with getting calls off work hours, then use a Google voice number on each campaign separately, like we do at Matlock Web. You can track effectiveness of an online campaign, but you can also set very specific times of day to send to voice mail/email, or to forward to a cell phone, or forward to someone else’s cell. Really, the options at Google voice are VERY flexible. Even a small shop can be professional in their first phone impression by using Google voice well.
The point is: don’t ever close up a contact method that is the preferred method of contact for your clientele. And don’t make anyone have to think too hard to become a lead – you lose all but the most motivated buyers if you make it too hard.
I’ve seen people invest thousands in search engine optimization without really looking at what they’re doing with their existing traffic, and without really working out who their market is and what their pipeline is.
If you’re getting a thousand website visitors in a day and converting none of them, it won’t help you any to do SEO, so that you can start getting a hundred thousand visitors that don’t turn into customers. Because at that point you’re still not making sure your pipeline runs in the right direction and has the right people on it.
I know I covered a lot of ground here, but I hope not too much. And I sincerely hope this helps.