I recently started defining marketing as an invitation. If you haven’t read that article yet, it will give you the big idea behind my definition. Essentially, invitations are a precursor to something else. They prepare someone for what is to come next. Several aspects of each invitation set the stage for what the recipient can expect.
For example, no one is going to wear a tuxedo to the Friday night firepit invitation you texted an hour ago. By contrast, everyone should know better than to show up to a wedding in cargo shorts if the professionally designed invitation included multiple layers of cards, envelopes, and protective tissue paper.
When we transfer this invitation idea from social settings to the business world, we need to think through the process in a similar way. Each marketing category you use in your business is inviting a specific audience to a specific step. Are you creating expectations that are consistent with what they will encounter upon arrival at the next step?
Social media marketing - by which I mean organic and paid content - is one area where I find the biggest disconnect for many businesses. Most business owners never consider how social media fits into their larger marketing strategy. What is your social media inviting your followers to next, and will it fit with what they think it will be?
Social Media in Your Marketing Strategy
Social media is an (almost) inescapable component of marketing for most businesses today. While your business might not need an account on every platform, you most likely need to maintain a presence where your ideal audience is likely to find and follow you.
Identifying your best social media platforms for both organic and paid posting is part of developing your marketing strategy. The persona profile, a fictitious representation of your ideal client, should point to a few social media platforms that will work well for your marketing.
Once you become familiar with your targeted social media platforms and what kind of content generates the best engagement, you can plan strategies. As anyone who has spent time producing business content on social media knows, this takes much more effort than running a personal account! Business social media requires a lot of thought and intentionality. You will need to decide:
How often to post
What topics to talk about
What mix of text, graphic, and video posts is manageable
General messaging (the language you’ll use)
Brand colors, language, and style
Once you get into a rhythm of planning and creating your social media content, it does become easier. But it will always take effort, even if you have help developing the actual content.
The effort business owners put into making posts for social media typically causes that aspect of the business to become self-contained. It is such a big undertaking that businesses begin to view social media as being a marketing activity for its own sake. But when you take a step back and think about it objectively, you know that it’s not at all a standalone marketing task. Social media has to invite your followers to something else. And this is where I usually see that exhaustion has set in, and business owners have nothing left in the tank to give those prospects who accept that first invitation.
Social Media Engagement: What Do You Want to Happen?
How would you answer the following question:
Why does your business need to be active on social media?
If you’re like most small business owners, you will probably have a few of the following answers:
It’s the first place people will look up my business
It’s where I can advertise to my target market with specific content
It’s where I can build a following of potential clients
It’s where I can introduce people to my business so that they want to learn more
It’s where I can engage interactively with my audience
It’s a way to keep people informed about news, products, and services I offer in real time
It’s the best place to show off my business style and personality
It’s where I can stay top of mind for my ideal clients
Based on the reasons above, or your variations, we can see that social media platforms are the best known marketplaces for consumers and providers to meet. Now answer this:
How much business really takes place directly on social media?
Do people invest their money into your business - whether they are buying a product or your service - directly from the social media app? Or is social media the place where they accept an invitation to the next step in the journey of becoming your client?
In most cases, social media is the invitation. The sales relationship is built from the RSVP onward. So you first need to ask yourself what is the next step that people who see you on social media will take. Here are a few examples:
Do you primarily want people who see you on social media to sign up for your email newsletter, so that you can engage with them more personally?
Do you want them to visit your website so that you can retarget them with digital ads?
Do you want them to read your informational blogs so that they come to trust your expertise more?
Do you want them to keep seeing your business name so that they recommend you to other people?
The specific calls-to-action in every single post will vary, but the question you’re trying to answer here is the big-picture landscape of the persona journey. Once you can answer this question, you’ll have a better idea of what kind of content to put on social media and what metrics will help you identify success.
Does Social Media Match What Comes Next?
If you have identified what you want people to do that signals an RSVP to your social media invitation, it is imperative to meet the expectations that you have set for them. I just went through a list of questions to ask yourself about what you want your social media followers to do. The next set of questions are for you to confirm that when they take that action, what happens next makes sense:
When they visit your website, does the aesthetic match what they saw on social media?
If they take the next step to learn more about a product or service, does your link take them directly to a shopping or information page?
If they click on a button to sign up for your newsletter or download your freebie, can they do that seamlessly?
If they use a feature to message you, do you have a system in place to respond quickly and appropriately?
If they sign up for a discovery call, are you collecting the right information to show up prepared for the call?
The thing that happens when someone accepts your social media marketing invitation absolutely must meet your potential client’s expectations. When a business owner tells me that they have great social media engagement, but it’s not getting them any sales traction, I perform an audit on their social media invitations. What I find most often is a huge disconnect between “RSVP YES!” and whatever comes next in the process. Alternatively, if someone tells me they want to get more engagement on social media, my question is, “Why? What will that do for your business?”
Create Content to Welcome Clients Who Accept Your Invitation
If you receive an invitation to a party that begins at 4:00PM, and you arrive at that time only to find your host still in their pajamas with no signs whatsoever of there being a party, how would you react? That’s a pretty awkward way to start things, isn’t it?
Now imagine that someone has been following and interacting with you on social media for a few weeks, and you comment with a link that invites them to visit your website. Up until now, they have been enjoying your beautifully designed content and chatting directly with you (as far as they know). When they click on that link, will they continue to see the exact same aesthetic and language style? Or will they initially wonder if the link sent them to the wrong website?
If your potential client experiences dissonance in their perception from one place to the next, they will feel that same kind of awkwardness. Even worse, they will immediately start to lose trust in your business, and they will ultimately disengage. Most of the time, they will quickly abandon the website, followed by dropping off as an active follower on social media. This all happens so fast that they usually don’t even know exactly why they were turned off, so it’s rare that you will receive direct feedback.
Every business owner must spend time assessing what expectations they are creating with their invitations. Be critical and think like the customer. Ask outside parties to review the process for additional feedback. Does the experience match what is laid out by the invitation? If the answer is no, then it’s time to focus your energy on this step of your marketing strategy. Whatever your next step is - another invitation, shopping tools, a helpful resource - it needs to flow cohesively from the expectations you have set.
Is your website or discovery call calendar optimized to receive people who RSVP Yes to your social media invitations? If not, the good news is that your next steps will be easy to define based on the content you have already poured so much time and energy into creating! If you would like to explore how social media fits into your marketing strategy, I would be happy to support your business. Take the first step and schedule a discovery call now.
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