Is Social Media Marketing Worth the Effort?

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Growth of Social Media is staggering but are the returns worth the effort?

We trailed just using Social Media Marketing for three months.  We dropped Adwords all together and found that our sales leads increased by over 80% and our Alexa Web Site ranking went up 1000% in the same period.

But It Does Takes Effort

Effective Social Media marketing does take effort.  Why because it involves engaging people, its not about SELL SELL SELL.  Its about engagement with interesting content, discussions and even etiquette.

Social Media is just that its social!

Content

People find interesting and informative content appealing.  Rarely do they find 100% sales literature appealing.  Rather they would rather read or view material that informs, explains or entertains.

Generally blogs provide the interesting content and web sites the more specific sales information.  However producing interesting and engaging content articles for your blog does take time and effort.  Allowing 3- 4 hours a week to write articles for the blog is reasonable planning guide.

The type of blog articles you write you should be informative, engaging or entertaining not in your face sales.  For example, if you are a Party Rental/  Hire Company, write articles about how to plan an event , eg a backyard wedding etc.  Or in this case we are writing about social media marketing, not selling our hire and rental business management software that has integrated social media marketing.

One of key point to remember to seed in your key words in to the article.  Blogs are also good for using less frequently used words associated with your business as well.

Let People Know About Your Blog Article

This is the social part of social media marketing.

Having written an engaging article you need to let people know about it.  This is where Twitter and Facebook really come in to play. However you need to invest time and effort in building up your Twitter and Facebook following.  More relevant followers means more people likely to read your post.

However communities take time to build, you need to invest time in listening and responding to what they are saying.  That is being a good community member.  This can take more than a couple of hours per week probably longer realistically if you are serious.

Effort Versus Return

So let us say you spend four to five hours per week on writing blog content and building your social media following then you need to have a return.

Interestingly Nielson cited that around 17% of time on the internet is now spent on social media.

Cost. The cost of your time is not just the salary on-cost it is also the opportunity cost.  That is what else could you have been doing.  Also a consideration is your Ad-words spend.  Social media may enable you to save this money or at least reduce your spend per month.

Return. The return is dependent on what you objective.  For most small to medium sized businesses the primary objective will most often be sales leads.  For us it worked, but for your business it may differ.

Our Returns.  We found that through this process our Blog (content focused) Unique Visitor rate increased from not much to a few hundred per day.  Our web site (product sales focused) increased proportionally leading to an 80% increase in sales leads through the web site.

Key Lessons Learnt

We learnt some critical lessons through our trial, which were:

• Have a Plan;
• Be Disciplined and above and beyond all else; and
• Be Sincere.

We were lucky in that we approached the trial with genuine sincerity in our engagements with our social media community.  We went in with the view of genuinely learning from others in our social media community and we have – it has been brilliant.

For us, yes there is a real effort needed but the returns are greater than just an excellent growth in sales leads – we have gained far more from what we have learnt from others.

If you have any similar experiences or even different views please take the time to add your comments – they are most welcome!

About Us

HireEzy is the complete business management solution for hire and rental companies. Not only does it include digital marketing, web integration it also includes social media marketing tool integration. For more information email us sales@makinglifeezy.com.au

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