Internet Marketing Audits for Small Business Owners Part 4— Social Media Connections
Small business owners who adapted during the global pandemic may have learned a valuable lesson about marketing in the 21st century. Change is inevitable and business must adapt to change in order to survive. Conventional methods of bringing in prospects are still around but are growing more expensive than ever.
In the good old days, local businesses could depend on direct mail or newspaper ads to get consistent prospects to come through the doors. Costs continue to go up in traditional media although the return on investment continues to fall. For example, the latest statistics show that the cost of reaching a small audience (2000 prospects) would dig deeply into a local business marketing budget.
The cost of reaching that audience through broadcast radio would be $16.
Newspaper advertising to reach that same number would be $64.
If you chose magazine ads to reach that audience block, it would cost you $50.
For my favorite form of old-school marketing; direct mail, the cost would be $700.
Now consider the Internet. Digital marketing platforms can reach a highly targeted audience for pennies on the dollar. For example, depending on how you structure your market research, it is possible to reach an audience of 2,000 for less than a dollar.
The Social Media Explosion Won’t End Soon
Facebook has 1 ½ billion monthly active users. You can create an ad campaign in minutes and have it running. Of course, there’s more to it than simply buying ad space. There are other costs involved. Still, when you factor cost per impression, you can afford to do a lot of testing and tweaking to get the best results.
Minimum daily ad spend on Facebook is just a buck. For $30 a month, you have the potential of reaching 120,000 prospects. You don’t even have to get it right the first time around. You can stumble your way into lead generation and still be cost effective.
I may focus on Facebook here, but the truth is social media marketing all around can be highly efficient and cost-effective when done with purpose and intelligently. I wouldn’t recommend jumping in without some experienced help. You can still burn through a campaign budget if you don’t know what you’re doing.
Social media users are currently 3 billion strong. As a small business owner, you may not really want to appeal to that many people, but you want the ability to sort through the population to find the right prospects for your products or services. Just as important as finding prospects is knowing what prospects are finding out about you.
If you are Internet savvy, you know people can find you on the web easily if they know your business name or one of your brands. However, you may also know how you’re perceived on social media may not be in line with your marketing goals.
Another problem you might face is being buried under too much competition. If your business depends on local search traffic, you’ll want to be in first place for all the profitable keywords. If you are creating social media ads, you’ll want to be seen by all the right people.
Therefore, a social media audit is important to your bottom line. Whether you conduct the audit yourself or use the service, they will need to be some benchmarks established. If you’ve never had an audit before, then consider this first round as the establishment of your baseline.
For those who are serious about tracking the numbers, it’s recommended that a simple spreadsheet a set of metrics be established. For example, you can log follower count, posts, engagement and subscribers. Track the metrics that are appropriate to your strategy.
It’s not recommended that you try to engage in all the social media outlets that exist. That would be counterproductive. You could spend a lot of money and time building a social media presence; but miss the overall goal of lead generation and brand establishment.
I recommend you capture your brand wherever possible. Create an account with each of the social media platforms, even if you don’t contribute to them. This ensures that your company is represented. If you decide in the future to publish material on them or use syndication software, you are covered.
Go where your prospects and customers congregate. For example, if you find that YouTube videos bring a lot of clicks to your website or landing pages, focus your efforts on videos. You can follow that up with your secondary medium; tweets or posts on your Facebook page.
The point is to be accessible to your core audience where they consume their content. If you use a service to connect your articles, and videos to multiple social media accounts, check to see if you can get reports from the app. This could save you a lot of time.
Start the auditing process by listing all the platforms your business is currently enrolled in. Have a column for usernames and one for passwords as well. Add a column for number of friends, followers or subscribers.
Each platform is unique and may have its own way of classifying your connections. Be sure to include the unique aspects of a platform; such as likes, up-votes, in order to track your progress. This will help you identify network-specific metrics that you feel are important.
Some folks like to track on a monthly basis. Others prefer to do this quarterly. The frequency will depend on how relevant social media marketing is to your overall plan.
Let’s take an easy one. Twitter, for this example. Inspect average tweet performance. Check your average performance by going to the Twitter analytics dashboard. Look at the averages.
Check the average re-tweets, engagement rate, and shares. Review the data on your audience type. You’ll get some insights into the audience for your content. This will help you structure future content for them.
Focus on engagement rate. Twitter will show you when followers are linking to your content. They will also display retweets, favorites, follows and replies. Also check for use of your brand hashtag.
You’ll want to get a bit more details on the type of audience reaction you’re getting from your posts. Likes, re-tweets and comments aren’t created equal. Your customers and followers who engage your tweets in depth are more likely to be the loyal fans and advocates of your brand.
The engagement rate for each of your company posts will be Twitter Analytics page. The percentage result represents the rate of each post. Click on any tweet to get more performance information. Check the impression to engagement stats to determine if the responses to your posts are of marketing value.
You can get a picture of how fast you’re developing your base of followers. Be aware that a higher amount of likes with few engagements could show that the content needs more work. Your audience might not be broad enough.
Monitoring follower progression allows you to recognize the impact of your message. A monthly audit can improve your messaging and improve your aim. After all, getting your content to the right audience is the priority of the marketing.
Keep your eyes on impressions stats to monitor how many people are checking your account day to day. The daily rate will offer some insights into monthly traffic patterns as well. You can adjust your posting content and schedule to maximize impressions with a few tweaks.
Create an Integrated Social Media Strategy.
The goal of your social media audits is to improve your audience engagement in order to convert more people into customers and clients; then into advocates for your brand. In order to do that, you’ll need to identify your goals, values and objectives in order to solidify your message.
You absolutely need to build an avatar of your ideal clients or customers in order to understand their needs. Communicate to them one-on-one to let them know you are more than a faceless corporation. You are human, just like they are.
Get them to share your information by consistently producing valuable content. Share a link of your profile to your website. Connect your social media posts with links and optimize them. Finally, share your posts with everyone.
Small business owners can reap the benefits of social media marketing if they treat the process seriously. That means getting quality content out to their target audience consistently. Integrate your advertising, social media marketing and lead generation to keep everything consistent and congruent. Your efforts will be rewarded.
