wrong ideas about social media
marketing. Some think that you only
need to post "viral content" to get
tons of traffic overnight. They actually
believe that if you are able to pump
that much traffic to your target
website, a large chunk of those people will buy whatever it is that you are selling.
Maybe you're selling services, maybe you're selling an event, or maybe you are selling products from an online store, it doesn't matter. According to this idea, you just need to have a lot of traffic; courtesy of viral content on social media, and you will get the conversions you're looking for.
There is an assumption that social traffic, regardless of which platform it comes from and regardless of how you qualify that traffic, converts to sales readily.
Sadly, none of these assumptions are true. In fact, all of them are tragically mistaken.
If you believe in any of these, don't be surprised if you spend a lot of time, effort and money only to end up with a whole lot of nothing. Welcome to the club.
Effective social media marketing can be reduced to one metaphor. Master this metaphor and you probably will make money on autopilot with social media traffic. Screw up this metaphor or remain clueless to it, and you'll continue to struggle; you'll continue to believe that social media traffic can easily be generated through viral content. You might keep running after that unicorn only to get tired and frustrated.
3
It doesn't have to be this way. You just have to have the right metaphor or the right conceptual model to make social media marketing work for you. Best of all, you can make it work on autopilot.
You probably have heard of all sorts of "set it and forget it" systems. You probably bought at least one of these products. Well, they're definitely on the right track as far as their label. Social media marketing can be automated. It can be mastered to the point where it can produce income after you've set it. But getting there is another matter entirely. And that's the price people have to pay.
And unfortunately, most people are not willing to pay that. They're excited about shortcuts, but they're not willing to take the stairs to get to the top. At the back of their minds, they're thinking that there has to be some sort of elevator.
There is no shortcut. You have to work with this metaphor What am I getting at? Well, the
secret to effective social media
marketing is an inverted pyramid.
It looks like a funnel. That is the
metaphor you should have in your
mind when thinking of ways to get
traffic from social networks and
social media platforms and turning that into cold, hard cash in your bank account.
I need you to keep this idea of an inverted pyramid in your mind. It should have a wide base at the top. The top of that pyramid is heavy visibility. It has to be there. You need to be visible on the four major social media platforms. I'm talking about Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Pinterest.
Taken together, the traffic volume you can get from these four platforms is mind blowing. They can potentially pump a tremendous amount of traffic. But that's just part of the equation. That's just the top of the funnel. Potentially, you can push a lot of traffic from the top. That's how wide the top of the funnel is.
4
This training will focus on these four platforms, but you can pretty much use the tips that I'm going to share with you and modify them to market on other platforms since many of these principles easily apply.
You might need to modify them a little bit. For example, if you are thinking of marketing on Instagram, a lot of the things that I will teach you about Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Pinterest, can be tweaked to work well on the Instagram platform.
Now that you have a clear idea of the heavy visibility that you can achieve with social media, keep in mind that visibility does not mean traffic or clicks to your site. This is a myth. The visibility that I'm talking about means visibility on those platforms.
When people share your content within those platforms, you can enjoy a tremendous reach within such platforms.
But this does not automatically mean that when you share content on Facebook, people who see your link on the materials shared by their friends would automatically click them.
Get the idea out of your head that raw visibility, or as Facebook terms it, "reach,"
automatically translates to traffic. It doesn't work that way. Instead, you need to start with heavy content visibility on each platform. People must see your stuff there. You must achieve a wide enough reach.
People may not necessarily click on through to your site, but that's secondary. At this point, you just want your brand to be visible. You just want people to become familiar with your brand.
So what's the big deal about visibility anyway? You may be thinking, since visibility doesn't mean actual visitors to your website, what good is it?
Think about it this way, when was the last time you saw an ad for the first time and automatically clicked it? If you're like most other people, you probably would want to see the ad show up a few times for you to become familiar with it. You might glance at if from time to time, you might read the description from time to time, but after enough showings, you might seriously think of clicking through.
5
>>Click On The Above Image For Social Media Jobs<<
The same applies to your content on social media platforms. Don't expect that just because you come up with catchy titles and nice, attention-grabbing graphics that this is enough for you to expect a tremendous amount of clicks to your website. It doesn't work that way.
People have to be comfortable enough. Your content has to become familiar enough for them to click on it.
When audience members click on the content you share through your social media accounts, they get a chance to like your page, follow your Twitter feed, pin your posts, or subscribe to your YouTube channel. They still stay on the platform, but they get a chance to subscribe to your account or follow you.
This is the second stage of the social media funnel or inverted pyramid. You have to develop some sort of in-platform credibility. Your content is not just this random material that came out of nowhere. Even if people don't click on it, they see enough similarity in terms of branding, graphics, as well as other content cues so that your brand stands apart from everybody else's.
Again, they may not necessarily be motivated to click, but with enough repetition through social media channels targeting certain topic categories and hashtags, your brand doesn't remain an unknown quantity.
Once you have people checking your content out through your social media accounts, you can then send them "call to action" content (CTA). This content recruits people to your mailing list. This social content that you're sharing offers some sort of incentive.
Maybe you're giving away a free booklet, maybe you're giving away software—
whatever the case may be, there is some sort of giveaway to incentivize people to click on that link, enter their email address, and join your mailing list.
Whether you use freebies, special content, special free tickets to an online webinar that's pre-recorded, it doesn't really matter. Whatever the case may be, the endgame is to get people to join your list.
6
The Endgame?
When you look at the funnel, the
endgame is to get people to that
narrow end of the funnel. At that
end, you're not necessarily getting
them to click on an ad to buy
something. You're doing
something far more valuable.
Instead, you're calling them to action so they join your list. You are converting your social media reach, meaning, the top end of the funnel, to list membership, which is at the very narrow point at the bottom of the inverted pyramid.
This is where the magic happens. Once people join your list because you have successfully incentivized them to enter their email on your squeeze page, you get a tremendous opportunity to build a long term sales relationship.
That's really the best way to describe it because when people give you their email addresses, what they're really telling you is that they trust you enough to want to have a business relationship with you.
This means you should not abuse that relationship. You should not send them garbage. You should not send them spam. And by spam, I'm talking about material that is not related to the topic of your list.
Stay on message. Because if you are able to do this, you would have a tremendous opportunity to shape the conversation and continue to sell and convert your list, not just once, not just twice, but over the long haul.
There are many successful list marketers who make seven figures every single year, and all they have is a mailing list. It all depends on how you build that list, who is on that list, and what you are selling on that list.
7
Regardless of how you cut it, you can turn what would otherwise be a huge amount of social media reach into a loyal list. This is the secret to effective social media marketing.
You probably haven't heard this before. I would not be surprised because the vast majority of social media marketing books out there try to trick you into thinking that you just need to harvest all this traffic from social media so people can click like monkeys on the ads on your website.
Maybe that worked when Facebook 1st launched nationally. It definitely doesn't work today. Sadly, this is where too many marketers fail. They screw this up.
Now that you know the secret, here's some bad news. This is precisely the point where too many marketers screw up. When they're sending social media content, they promote their squeeze page directly. Although the squeeze page gives away freebies and incentivizes people to sign up, this is too much too soon.
And, not surprisingly, a lot of these marketers burn through a lot of exposure just to get people to their list. Worse yet, when these people join their mailing list, they're completely unprepared. They don't know what to expect, they're not properly conditioned, a lot of them are not even fully qualified to become list members.
So what do they do? They end up doing a whole lot of nothing. This is actually the worst kind of list member.
It's much better to just have a very tiny list because if you have a huge list and almost everybody doesn't do anything to put money in your pockets, you're going to be paying for those list squatters month after month.
Alternatively, you might attract list bouncers. These are people who join your list just to get whatever premium you're offering, download it, and then promptly unsubscribe. They have effectively bounced from your list.
Effective Social Media Marketing
Effective social media marketing
means using your social media
8
traffic and highly effective content
shared on social media to build
successful relationships. Your email
list is going to be the platform you
will use to convert the relationships
made possible through all that social
media traffic.
You're essentially creating highly targeted mailing lists using content shared on targeted channels on social media. This is the secret to effective modern social media marketing.
9
Chapter 01 - Social Media Marketing –
An Overview
There's a lot of misconceptions
regarding what social media
marketing actually is. In fact, when
you come across people who call
themselves social media marketing
consultants or practitioners,
chances are very high that they will
give you different definitions.
Part of this is due to the fact that there are many different points of emphasis when it comes to social media marketing.
Some people focus on the content, others pay more attention to the network that the content is going to be addressed to, others give more of their focus to social engagement. Naturally, to the lay person, social media marketing is a big question mark.
I understand if you're confused at this point. In fact, you may be so confused that you try to simplify things in your head and end up focusing on how to get as much traffic for as little effort as possible.
That is precisely how a lot of online entrepreneurs and marketers approach social media marketing. Sadly, that is a one way ticket to failure or disappointment. It's not just going to work out sooner or later. With any kind of project, you have to have the right definition, otherwise, you are making things harder on yourself.
Depending on the definition you go with, you might have all sorts of expectations, and if these outcomes do not come to pass, your resolve and your motivation levels start to suffer. You have to work with the right definition.
10
A Winning Definition
With all of the above said, what is social media
marketing for our present purposes? Well,
since this training uses list marketing as its
main vehicle for converting social media reach
into cold, hard cash, social media marketing is
all about content-based audience relationship
building. Let me repeat that, social media
marketing is all about content-based audience
relationship building.
You need to use content in a strategic way. You need to speak to certain audiences and build a relationship with them. This relationship is not this broad word that makes people feel good, but ultimately doesn't mean much of anything. Instead, this relationship has a tangible form. And I am, of course, talking about your mailing list. Once you get people on your mailing list, that's when the fun begins.
Everything else is just a work up or a preliminary prior to that point. You need to get people on your list. Social media marketing is going to be your primary vehicle to get people to your list. Everything has to revolve around that list. And this must shape, inform and guide your social media actions.
Managing Your Expectations
A content-based audience relationship
approach to social media marketing
sets different expectations compared
to other ways of defining this type of
marketing. When you read the typical
social media marketing book, for
example, "How to Dominate Twitter,"
the focus in on
traffic.
11
>>Click On The Above Image For Social Media Jobs<<
Unfortunately, if that is your main goal, you end up with a "the more the better"
mindset and you feel really depressed at the end of the day because the traffic doesn't come. Even if it does, there's not going to be enough of it. You have set yourself up to fail.
When you use a content-based audience relationship building approach to social media marketing, your focus is on getting the right content in front of the right eyeballs to build the right levels of trust.
This is a long term game. It is definitely a marathon and not a sprint. Since that is your expectation coming in, you position yourself for long term victory. You're not going to be the typical failed social media marketer who jumps into the game with both feet only to find out that the traffic simply isn't there. So what do they do? That's right, they quit.
Manage your expectations by focusing on the right definition and you will be okay. The worst thing that you can do right now is to sabotage any chance of future success by defining the problem the wrong way and filling your mind with all the wrong expectations.
Social Media Marketing can Build Brands If...
Now that we've defined social media
marketing, the next step is to focus
on the end result of this content-
based audience relationship building
approach. If you do everything right,
you walk away with a brand. Let me
tell you, that is the best asset you will
ever have.
Now, in terms of real world traffic, you may get a low to moderate level of traffic.
But if you build a solid brand, that traffic is all you need. That is qualified traffic.
These are not random people just blindly clicking on links out of curiosity. These are people who are actually interested in whatever it is you are trying to sell.
They want to truly learn more.
12
They want to build a relationship with you because they want to know what you're about, like what you have to offer, and eventually trust whatever it is you are pushing. These are real people. And this is only possible if you build a solid brand. You have to deliver solid value.
I wish I could tell you that content marketing is enough to do it. I really wish that I can say that, but that is not true. That only explains part of the situation. Sure, you have to deliver content that people truly are interested in, but at the end of the day, when they join your list, they are expecting and deserve value.
That's how you build a solid brand. When people join your list, they will quickly find out that they did not waste their time because you send high quality updates that actually add value to their lives. Social media marketing can explode the rate at which brands are formed. That's why a lot of people are ranting and raving about social media marketing, but a lot of them are clueless as to how to build a solid brand. Most of the time, they just stumbled into it.
I've let you in on the secret. It's all about content-based audience relationship building. There are many different parts to that equation, and I'm going to walk you through them in a practical way in the following chapters. In this section, I just want you to wrap your mind around the definition and the expectations that flow from it. This is how we tightly define the project that you are going to embark on.
Anything less, chances are, you're going to beat yourself up unnecessarily because you just had unrealistic expectations. This is not one of those get rich quick schemes. This is not one of those overnight success stories. This requires real work. This is the real deal. Are you ready for the journey? Great. Let's go on to chapter 2.
13
Chapter 02 - 8 Reasons Why SM
Marketing is Essential
Just to be sure, if you are in any
way, shape or form unclear as to
the value of social media
marketing, here are just 8 reasons
why it needs to be part of your
comprehensive online marketing
plan. Maybe your current plan
puts more emphasis on search
engine marketing, maybe you're
currently focused on outreach—
those are all well and good.
But to really round things out and add a lot more value to your current online marketing campaign, social media marketing has to be part of the equation. It doesn't have to take center stage, it doesn't have to be your overarching priority, but it has to be part of the total mix. Here are just 8 of the thousands of reasons why your company, regardless of its size, needs to do social media marketing.
Reason #1: Social media's huge direct and viral reach If you build a solid page on Facebook,
you develop a direct reach. This
means that a certain percentage of
people who like your page will see
your updates. While it is true that
Facebook has been reducing the
organic reach of Facebook pages
14
recently, there's a workaround to that. When people go to your page, you can instruct them to like your page and then click your page's setting to show your updates first.
You might want to show a video that teaches people how to do this. You might even post an animated gif. Whatever you do, clue people in that they can fix their settings to see your updates first. Now, for people to take the time and bother to do this, you have to offer content that is really valuable. This puts the onus on you. There has to be real value on your page for them to want to do this. But you can increase your direct reach by instructing people.
On top of that, when people like your content, they can share it on their wall.
Since people on Facebook have friends and their friends have friends, this can easily have an exponential effect. In fact, even if your page only has a hundred likes, but these are real people with real friends, don't be surprised if one of your posts gets really viral and spreads all over the place.
Social media enables you to have a large direct reach. It also provides you with a tremendous opportunity to enjoy an exponential content coverage.
Reason #2: Social media is habitual
While different demographics have
shown softening or weakening of
social media usage on a daily, weekly
or monthly basis, this still doesn't
take away from the fact that a lot of
people habitually use social media. In
fact, a lot of people do
this the first thing in the morning.
When they wake up, they go their mobile phone or tablet and check their updates. It can easily become a habit. This gives you a tremendous opportunity to get your content and brand in front of many interested eyeballs.
Reason #3: Target audiences use different content formats 15
The great thing about social media
marketing is that you're not restricted
to just one content format. You're not
restricted to video, pictures, links,
blog posts, text, or audio files.
Instead, different platforms specialize
in different formats. And when you
create content for one platform, you can
easily make different versions of it in
different formats to spread out to other
platforms.
For example, I write a blog post and post it on Facebook. I create a very attention-grabbing graphic for that blog post. So when I post it on my Facebook page, a preview of the image shows up and it grabs a lot of attention. People click on it, and they end up on my website.
I can take that graphic and share it on Pinterest. I can take the text of my blog post or article and create a slideshow video out of it and share it on YouTube. I can also take the video and embed it on my blog post. I can strip different parts of the article or post itself and feed it into Twitter along with the link to the full post or article.
Do you see how this works? You get access to the different audiences of those different platforms by simply re-purposing or recycling the same content that you made for one platform and sharing those other formats on other platforms. This increases your potential reach.
Reason #4: Most social media platforms can be segmented If you've ever been to Instagram,
you know that when you see a
picture, it usually has many
different tags. If you've been on
Twitter, you'd see that a lot of the
hot tweets also have hashtags.
16
Those tags are very valuable.
When you use a tag with your
content, you are essentially categorizing your content. People use those tags to search for content. This is a very powerful segmentation tool.
People who are looking for cute Chihuahua puppies will use certain hashtags that are different from people looking for libertarian political posts. If you have a very tightly defined audience, social media platforms' built-in segmentation tools and features can definitely help you.
You probably already know that huge audiences that are not very targeted are essentially worthless. Thanks to social media marketing's segmentation features, you can get a smaller volume of people from many different platforms, but you can rest assured that these people are actually interested in whatever it is you are saying. These segmentation tools go a long way in helping you build a very refined and well qualified audience base. This, in turn, increases your likelihood of making a sale.
Reason #5: Sharing content on most platforms can be automated
Thanks to tools like Hootsuite and
SocialOomph, you don't have to worry
about manually going to Facebook or
Twitter and copying and pasting
materials from a document or
spending hours setting up your
scheduled posts. You can automate
your posts to publish up to six
months on Facebook. This means that you can set up your Facebook account to post six to ten or more times every day, but you don't have to babysit it because you have fed the content in.
The best part is that a lot of these automation tools use bulk feeds. Meaning, you can format your content in an Excel file and convert it to CSV and plug into 17
these tools. You don't have to input the materials one by one. Talk about saving a lot of time while also maximizing your reach.
Reason #6: You can run a two-track marketing
campaign using mailing lists
The heart of a content-based
audience relationship marketing
campaign on social media is to build
a highly targeted mailing list. Now,
this is not what you think. A lot of
people are thinking that once they
build the list, they're on their way to
becoming millionaires. Absolutely wrong. There's a missing step.
When people join your mailing list, it really is a "general" mailing list. By
"general," I'm not saying that it talks about all subjects under the sun. I'm not talking about that. Instead, I'm talking about general interest in the specific topic. You really don't know yet at this point who is a buyer and who is a person who is simply looking for information and is still trying to make up their minds whether they trust you enough.
You create a general list and then eventually you try to upsell them to a buyer's list.
How do you do that? Well, you sell low cost items on your general list. You can sell a booklet for $1. It doesn't really matter what the price is. It has to be very low because what you're really trying to do here is that you're trying to give people a means to identify themselves as a buyer and you want to make it a s smooth and easy as possible. A dollar is almost an afterthought to most people.
They won't think that it's too painful to buy your product. But once they get to your buyer's list, you eliminate them from your general list, and now you have a 18
pure list of buyers. That list, my friend, is a goldmine. That's where you send your money making updates. That's where you get people to check out your case studies and get them to pay top dollar for whatever affiliate programs or original products you are pushing on your buyer's list.
This is called a two-track marketing campaign. It's extremely powerful and it has made a lot of people rich. But you have to step away from the very common mistake of thinking that once you get a lot of people to your mailing list, you have it made.
Absolutely wrong. There is another step that you need to take.
Reason #7: Your brand gets natural repetition through multi-platform marketing
Assuming that all your social
media accounts on all four major
platforms look similar to each
other, you get many bites at the
apple. You really do. When people
run into your brand on Facebook,
there's a chance they might run
into your brand on Twitter.
If there is enough graphical similarity between your brands, then they can see that you're all over the place and they can converse or engage with your brand regardless of where they are on the internet.
Eventually, this builds a tremendous amount of familiarity and people might become so comfortable that they join your mailing list when you call them to action. The best part to this is that it happens naturally by you simply creating accounts on all the major platforms. Your brand speaks to people who are interested in your niche, regardless of where they go.
Reason #8: Save money through content re-purposing 19
Make no mistake about it, content
generation is expensive. Even if you
hire highly qualified, talented, skilled
and experienced people from
countries with huge numbers of
people who speak English as a second
language, you can still be out
thousands of dollars every year. High quality writers from places like India, Pakistan and the Philippines may be cheaper than American writers, but their costs still add up over time.
One of the things about social media marketing that really excites me is the fact that you can create content and re-purpose it into many different formats. This reduces your cost.
If I hire a writer from India and pay that person $1,000 a month, I can get a fixed amount of content. At this point, I can choose to pay that person another $1,000 to get even more content, or I can take whatever content he or she produced and turn them into videos, infographics, or strip them down into questions for tweets.
I can turn them into diagrams, I can take the voice-over of the video that I produced and turn it into a sound file. I can even make a slideshow of these materials. Once I have all these re-purposed content, then I can share them on format-specific platforms. For example, I can share the slideshows on Slideshare.
I can post the infographics on Pinterest.
I can post the product shots or general product pictures on Instagram. I can post the questions on Twitter. I can also post the videos on YouTube. Best of all, I can post all the formats on Facebook. Do you see how this works? When you do this, you buy content once, re-purpose it, and share it so you get a higher chance of getting traffic or visibility with that re-purposed content.
You're not creating content constantly. In fact, the name of the game is to produce as little content as possible, but market these high quality pieces widely.
This is how you maximize their value. The old idea of constantly publishing 20
content just to get a few eyeballs here and there is dead. Seriously. That's a one way ticket to the poorhouse.
Your better approach would be to make that content work for you by converting it into many different formats.
You then share these different formats on platforms that specialize in those formats. I hope the 8 reasons above are clear and that you are pumped up to do social media marketing right. In chapter 3, we're going to talk about picking a social media marketing campaign that is most likely to produce results for your type of online business. See you there.
21
