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19/12/2012 by
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5 Ways To Ensure A Boss Buys Into Your Social Media Campaign

Social media is making the world more transparent and interconnected. You can now track phone calls, web visitors and see which of your marketing streams is most effective and creating ROI. 2013 is the year every business should be social, here is how to tell your boss: Lead nurturing is the new lead generation.

5 Ways To Ensure The Boss Buys Into Your Social Media Campaign

Image: ShutterStock

Everyone loves being nurtured, right?
Getting that warm fuzzy feeling inside when someone takes extra special care of you, it is enough to make you tell all your friends and family. It is time to stop treating visitors as either a lead or a nobody and start treating every visitor as someone who would like to buy, but they just don’t know it yet.

5 Ways To Ensure A Boss Buys Into Your Social Media Campaign

The online marketing funnel shows the way that all of your online activity gets people interacting with your content and website. Building awareness if the first step to getting people interested; content plays an intrinsic part of the cycle, and using social media to promote it is essential.

LinkedIn offers you the chance to nurture your potential leads down the sales funnel, working in partnership with the sales team to make the all-important conversions.

Recent statistics published by the Marketing Sherpa suggest 27% of B2B leads are sales-ready when first generated. On the flip side, 73% of the leads are not ready, and may not even be in the market for your product yet. Social media can keep your customers informed and aware, encouraging them to come to you when they are ready.

Show facts, figures and ROI
CEOs and heads of departments love the numbers…don’t they?

Put simply, the easiest way to convince your boss social media will be effective is by show the return on investment. With the evolution of Google Analytics, you can monitor the flow of people passing through your company’s website from finding your blog on Google or social media websites, and how many of them convert.

As technology advances, it has now become possible to monitor your offline leads too. Response Tap offer visitor level call tracking which allow you to monitor exactly where your phone calls are coming from, and which are your most valuable marketing channels for phone calls.

Putting figures in front of your boss makes it difficult for them to argue. By breaking down exactly how much it is costing to run the social media campaign and how much money it can make will help you win your boss over.

Remember, if you work in a large company, you have to give your boss the ability to sell the campaign to his boss too.

Make your own message
Become a thought leader.

Releasing content and using your social media presence to push it out is no easy feat. Managing your boss’s expectations will be key to ensuring your first year in the social realms is seen as a success. Remember never to promise anything hard numbers and encourage them to buy into the idea, not just the increase in revenues.

Creating thought provoking, worthwhile and intuitive content is not easy. Managing multiple social media accounts, making sure content is different on every one, whilst still telling the brand story is the magic mix that you need to build a community and an online presence.

Response Tap - 6 ways to make great content

Keep up with your competition
Build a barrier to entry.

There is a good chance that your competitors will have tried their hand at social media, and unless you do too, how will you ever catch them? Social is becoming bigger every year, with some companies stopping email newsletters altogether and simply turning to Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook to tell followers about news and updates.

Your boss may talk about high profile cases where social media has led to a PR nightmare for your competitors or other industries. However, it is important to remind them that not being transparent with you customers is no way to avoid public relations issues, and if you have an offline PR disaster, you have no way to assure your customers that everything is ok and deal with issues as and when they appear.

Engage audiences, build trust, earn advocates
What ever happened to good old word-of-mouth?

Don’t start your pitch with ‘Offline is dead’, because it simply isn’t true. Although revenues for traditional adverts are falling, customers, clients, businesses, everyone still lives in the real world, talking to real people about real experiences.

Social media plays a big part in a lot of people’s lives, therefore getting in front of them, sharing your message will encourage them not only to share online, but also offline with their friends.

Brand advocates are your best friends. It is like having a marketing department on the ground, gorilla style. Make them feel special and they will reward you with good old fashioned reviews of your products and services through word of mouth.

My closing thought?
I’ll leave you with a great article I recently read about the post-consumerism generation. In the age of total transparency, your customers who are aware of marketing techniques do not want to feel like they are getting ripped off.

They want to reward good advertising and pay back for content they enjoy. Each dollar, pound and euro is a vote of confidence. Don’t build a brand, build a stand.

What About You?

Have you had to convince your boss to buy into social media? Share your experiences by leaving a comment below.

About the author

Jonathan Dempster is a digital marketer interested in how social media is developing into more than a marketing tool, becoming an all-encompassing backbone to your business.

 

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