If you jump headlong into social media and setup Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc. and start posting stuff, you may start getting great engagement and conversations, but have have difficulty in measuring ROI (return on investment) and increase in sales. We’re all in business to sell something (for the most part), and the hope is that social media will in some way help increase future sales. While some of social media’s benefit is certainly long-term, properly planning out marketing and measurement strategy will help you understand what’s working.
A Crumbling Base
You may have an awesome Facebook page and are doing all the right things to provide value and conversation on Twitter, but if your online base of operations isn’t working for you, it’s working against you. Ignoring your website or blog or where ever you want people to go to if they’re interested in buying means a lot of lost effort (and revenue). By planning out your marketing strategy and understanding what you’re trying to accomplish by using social media, you can put the right calls to action and landing pages on your website to help you reap the rewards of your effort.
Open Ended Promotions
Unlike radio or TV advertising, where it can be difficult to direct people to one place for collecting leads (although not impossible), online you can give people the link where you want them to go embedded right in the advertising or promotion. If you’re running contests or advertising with social media, do you have dedicated landing pages that help you collect those leads? If not, what do you hope to accomplish by running the contests?
Fans & Followers do NOT (necessarily) equal Customers
Customers are people who give you money in return for something they find valuable. Spending time and money getting lots of followers and fans may not equate to people who are interested in buying from you. By understanding exactly who your customers are ahead of time (with a strategy), and where those people are, you can more effectively build a community of people who have some interest in what you do, not just what you may be giving away for free.
Planning leads to better Measurement
By thinking through your strategy and understanding what you’re trying to accomplish, you’ll have a better overview of what tools make the most sense and how you can measure what you’re doing. While you can almost always get some measurements after the fact, they may not be the right ones for what you’re trying to do. Without the right measurements, you’ll be left trying to explain how an increase in fans correlates to the number of sales you had for the same period. By planning ahead, you can put the tools in place to tie together what you’re doing on social media and how it is leading to sales.
What planning have you done for your social media?
(photo by jurvetson, on Flickr)