SOCIAL MEDIA
We've already covered the steps to follow to run an effective social media campaign. Just as a reminder, these three steps are: Research, Publish, and Generate Reports.
Of course, for any post or campaign you want to run on any social network, these steps will be necessary throughout the campaign process. However, when you want to include them in the Inbound Strategy your company is running, you need to keep the stages of Inbound Marketing in mind, so you understand: How can social media help us in each of them?
In this post, we want to give you some tips you can use to apply social media in each of the four stages of Inbound Marketing.
THE INBOUND METHODOLOGY AND SOCIAL MEDIA
Let's quickly recall the 4 steps we use in Inbound Marketing:
- Attract visitors to the website, in order to generate more traffic and have more opportunities to create Buyer Personas.
- Convert visitors into sales opportunities, so that you can get enough information from them for them to become your potential Buyer Personas.
- Close your sales opportunities, and turn them into customers.
- Delight your customers, so that they themselves become promoters of your brand and you can attract more customers to your company.
In each of these steps, you can use social media like this:
ATTRACT
The attract stage is when strangers become visitors.
85% of “buyer personas” are in this learning stage. Therefore, there is a huge share of the market to reach.
The main tip is: Include much more than commercial information about your brand that people can find every day.
All of your creativity should go into testing messages at this stage, so you can test which types of content your followers like.
Although Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook are the most widely used networks in Inbound Marketing, WhatsApp, Snapchat, Instagram, and Pinterest are growing at an astonishing rate, and it's not a bad idea to experiment in those arenas as well.
Your content strategy should spend a lot of time “listening” to what your buyer personas are talking about on social media: on your channels, on your competitors' channels, and on others where you know they spend time every day.
It never hurts to remember that content is about what interests them, worries them, and what they need, not you.
CONVERT
Once you have interested visitors, it's time to convert them using calls to action (CTAs) to send them to landing pages, where you offer them premium content in exchange for certain information.
It's very important that all your social media posts include a link to those landing pages.
In fact, many graphic variations of CTAs are being used today, so your social channels don't give the impression that you're always offering the same thing.
It's also very important that you focus on making sure your quality content answers as many of your buyer personas' questions as possible, to stay relevant in your Inbound strategy.
LinkedIn and Twitter are the most recommended for this stage.
CLOSE
Have your efforts paid off, and has all your work finally turned into a new sale? Congratulations!
OK, but it's not all joy for everyone: Many people watch their buyer personas move through the sales “funnel” but never close.
It's extremely important to follow up on every post, every interaction, and to adjust your social media approach if things aren't working.
It doesn't matter how many tools there are to measure social media activity (of course you should take them into account). But it's very important that salespeople, who are in contact with prospects, learn to identify what's failing.
Many people fail at this stage because they take intuitive actions instead of properly using the available information to truly understand what questions users have.
LinkedIn seems like excellent ground for going deeper at this stage, considering that it holds a lot of information about what your leads do and need in the professional arena.
DELIGHT
It's absurd to believe that the interaction ends when the prospect becomes a customer.
Quite the opposite: If there is a moment to reassure them that they've taken the right path, that they can buy again or recommend that others do so, this is it.
Social media is key for extending customer service, offering special promotions, and inviting customers to exclusive events.
If your buyers become evangelists for your brand, they turn into important salespeople who cost you nothing per month.
Use Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook to remind them that you're interested in continuing to offer them valuable content.
Promoting that trust between seller and customer is what makes Inbound Marketing so powerful. And nothing is more valuable than a customer showing that trust on their social media.
As you've seen, at every stage of the Inbound methodology, social media can be used to move potential customers from one stage to the next and bring buyers back to your brand.
We hope these tips have been very helpful. Don't forget to leave us your comments and questions in the box below this post.
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