Galaxy Ninja

Everyone’s talking about Social Media for online marketing these days, and most people know it rocks. Yet for most businesses, artists and activists, the question remains – how do you turn your efforts on the net into hard, trackable results? The secret is to understand your goals, and your Social Media Pipeline. First things first (and this is what many people forget when starting their campaign)… Your Social Media strategy needs to align and with your organization’s current goals. Your goals can be as specific as you want them to be. For example, if your company makes and sells cars, one of your goals could be to increase consumer interest and to sell a new car model you’re about to release. If you don’t have specific goals like these worked into your social networking plan in the first place, and you aren’t using your networks to help you achieve them, it’s difficult to asses how well you’re doing, because you don’t have a target. Your “big picture” strategy should still be based around building your brand, and interacting with your fan base with great, useful content. But you CAN “lean” your activities to make sure your networks provide a good environment for the facilitation of customer action steps by encouraging interaction. The establishment of this environment will make running mini, goal oriented, campaigns within your larger strategy a more fruitful activity. Additionally, this structure will give you a chance to assess the achievement of your specific goal, and how well you’ve primed your followers to take action in general. Once you’ve got your goals ironed out, you need to understand where Social Media most effectively fits into the achievement of your goals if you’re going to make your campaign successful. To do that, you need to understand your and craft your marketing and sales pipeline. Understand your Social Media Pipeline. A sales and marketing pipeline, or sales tunnel, refers to the steps an organization will implement in order to convert an interested prospect into a customer. Here’s a graphical representation of an old school pipeline: You can think of the Internet as your marketplace, and everyone on your Social Networks as a lead prospect. Since very few prospects will take all the steps at one time, it’s in your best interest to keep them hooked into the pipeline. This is where Social Media comes in.

Your goal on the Social Networks is to build trust and offer incentive so that leads become stronger leads, so that they can be handed off to the sales team.

Our new Social Media Pipeline looks a little more like this:

Here is one example of how you could apply this system to your Social Media campaign: Say you want to sell cars.

• Craft some articles based around some features included in a new car model you’re about to release, such as the importance of fuel efficiency. Release the articles on your site, share them from your Social Media accounts and start some conversations. Immediately, you get an idea about who cares, and what they care about.

• Once you start preparing for the launch of your new car, start some major hype with banners and such, then use all the feedback you collected earlier, to write some more articles about the new car. These should include some of the features you’ve been setting up in your previous posts, and by suggesting some alluring action steps that give added benefit to readers who are already members of your community - such as signing up to be the first to receive insider info, enter a contest, etc (these are called irresistible offers) - you can start collecting stronger leads that can be entered into your CRM (Customer Relationship Management System) and followed up on.

Track your success. To track your progress, simply set up your system so that every time someone signs up for more info, a contest, test drive, or whatever, they end up on a “Thank You” page that tells them they have successfully signed up. You can then use analytics software to get a good picture of how many leads you’re generating by tracking how many people end up on your Thank You page. Check out Google Analytics Goals for a good way to start tracking using Thank You pages. If you’re keeping track of your conversions, and have a good customer relationship management policy, you should know how much these leads are worth to you. This way, you can actually estimate how much money your social media campaign is making, based on how many people sign up for your promotions. This isn’t even taking into account how many people just decide to call a dealership, or send an email separately after seeing their friend comment on your new car. The merge of old-school and new-school Essentially Social Media Allows you to attract and capture extremely high quality leads. You can think of every one on your networks as someone who has just walked into one of your dealerships, and signed up for more information about something that interests them. In fact, if you’re doing your job properly, you would find that this type of lead is actually MORE likely to convert, due to the social nature of this technique.

Filed under: Social Media by Joey