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Social Media Marketing for Companies With No Money
August 4, 2014 |Estimated reading time: 3 minutes
“Traditional marketing and advertising is for people with money and no brains. Social Media Marketing is for people with brains and no money.” -- Guy Kawasaki
Why do people use social media marketing? Because the rewards outweigh the costs. There are no capital costs to using social media. You can put money into sponsored posts, advertising, and premium memberships, but they are not necessary to be successful. The three main cost areas in a social media marketing program all have to do with the time and attention needed to make the program work:
1. The Cost to Create Content
To be successful with social media, you need to create content that is relevant to your prospective customers jobs. If I were a PCB manufacturer, for example, I would run to my engineering department and ask them for a list of all the design mistakes they see over and over and start writing those up as content for my social networks.
2. The Cost to Distribute Content Over Social Media
If a company is going to use a LinkedIn company page to disseminate it’s contents via status updates on that page, someone needs to create and set up the page, and someone needs to post the content being created on that page.
3. The Cost to Monitor the Social Networks
This is pretty easy. Checking the social networks to see if someone has commented on a post only takes a couple of minutes.
Let’s me use myself and LinkedIn as an example of these ideas. I post a blog post as a status update on LinkedIn every Tuesday morning. It takes me an hour to write a blog post (create the content) and a couple of minutes to post it on LinkedIn (distribute the content). I check LinkedIn a couple of times a day specifically to check for comments. This takes a couple more minutes each time. So monitoring takes around 20 minutes a week. That’s 80 minutes a week. Those are my costs for posting content on the LinkedIn social network. But what rewards can I get from that?
Increased Visibility
If there's one real advantage in social media, it is that it acts as force multiplier. One piece of content can be posted so that your modest 80 followers can see it. But one of them may like it enough that they make a comment. This, in turn, exposes your piece of content to all of their followers, and they may have 3,000. And if one of those 3,000 likes it enough, they could share it with their followers (and this is what makes a post viral; enough people feel the urge to share it that the piece of content seems like it is everywhere). The bottom line is that a company’s social media content can easily be passed around and seen by new prospects.
Increased Credibility
Sharp, focused content that provides helpful information to prospective customers makes the company that writes it look like a leader. Companies that excel at social media are seen as resources, as the companies with the answers. Who do you want to buy from? Someone you trust. Who do you trust? Someone who knows all the answers.
Sales Leads
Good content creates conversations. People that a company is targeting read the content and either have questions or want more content, and they make this known to the company. Someone pre-qualifies themselves as someone who has an interest in what a company does, and wants to know more. That sounds like a sales lead to me.
In my own case, my LinkedIn posts create visibility for me with people I would never know otherwise. They create credibility as they showcase my expertise in my field. And people wind up calling or e-mailing me with questions and those can lead to, as we like to say, “mutually beneficial business relationships."
In the end, you must weigh your cost against what you would expect your reward to be. But one thing I hear from a lot of companies is that "What we have always done just doesn’t seem to be working anymore." If what you're doing right now isn’t working, and there is no capital outlay for trying social media, what do you have to lose?Bruce Johnston is a sales consultant specializing in social media and especially LinkedIn. He has over 25 years experience in high-tech sales and management. He can be reached at brucej@practicalsmm.com or through his profile on LinkedIn.