From Awareness to Advocacy: Social Media's Power - Lets Talk Social S4E5

Hey everyone, and welcome to this week's episode of Let's Talk Social. I am your host, rich Hake, and I'm gonna be keeping you in the loop as per usual on all things social media. And today's episode is pretty interesting. We're gonna be going over the basics of social media marketing and how it integrates into your customer journey. And so we're gonna go over this little introduction really quickly. A point on just understanding the overall compass of social media marketing. We'll talk about what a customer journey is and how to introduce a plan into yours and how to integrate social media into it after that. And then finally, we'll go over the base requirements for a successful marketing funnel and some pitfalls to a potentially, avoid or not to potentially avoid, but to avoid so that you don't have any potential errors down the road. And this episode is, Really gonna be for everybody. If you're a seasoned marketer or just a business owner looking to boost some of your online presence, or maybe you're a page manager for somebody else, hopefully this will be some food for thought for you. So what we're gonna be going over right out of the gate is exactly what is social media marketing. And so at its core, it's all about, using our social media marketing platforms to build an audience for us and. What we're gonna be doing with that audience is marketing our brand to them to increase our sales, increase website traffic, increase conversions, increase leads, increase all the things that generate us business and turn into dollars. And as if you've listened to this podcast for any more than two or three episodes, I am constantly talking about tying in social media to the dollars and not losing sight of that. It's very important to make sure we're always paying attention. To the actual, point of what we're doing right? And that's to get people back in the door to fund this thing. Otherwise we can't continue to keep doing our marketing. So today, social media is a game changer in the marketing landscape. It offers a lot of unique avenues for people and it also allows you to reach your audience in real time. I think that's a big thing people forget. Similar to like a radio ad, right? The second you put that out, it's gonna be an immediate call to action for people. And Social media is even more so real time in the radio because you have it in your fingertips and can control exactly when that message goes out. Now the beauty of social media marketing is really, its adaptability. So if you're a small business or a multi-million dollar company, there's a platform and the strategy that you can implement to suit your needs. We've seen so many hundreds of ways to strategize and to capitalize on your market and on brands, markets. If we're watching from a third party perspective, And so it's very accessible and adaptable, and so it's for everybody, which is great. And so if we can effectively leverage our social media, we can actually help your business achieve its business goals in a cost effective and impactful way. Again, we want this stuff to pay for itself, if anything, to be a multiplication on our return on investment. We'd like to see, even outta the ad campaigns we run for clients, four to eight is our minimum on return on. Ad spend. And so when we're talking about just return on investment of time and all these other things, it's important to not waste any of our time and make sure we're maximizing it. I'm gonna go over the introduction to what a customer journey is, and then like I said, we'll talk about how to integrate it into social media itself. And essentially what your customer journey is the process of what your consumers will go through. And so it's from the very base level, which is becoming aware of your product or service to the end of the funnel, which is the conversion. So actually making a purchase, and then anything beyond that. So repeat purchases. Maybe it's a monthly subscription, that kind of stuff. Now, journeys are typically broken down into four or five stages. I've currently got hours at five actually here in office, and so we'll go over what those are. At the very top of the funnel, we've got awareness, so that's, they learn about you for the first time. We have consideration and engagement, so that is where. We're hitting'em with post. We're getting them to engage with the brand and ultimately hitting those frequency and the touch points to get them to try to come back to wherever they convert. Underneath that, we have our purchase. Underneath that we have retention, and then underneath that we have advocacy. And so normally what I'll do is I put the first three awareness, consideration, and engagement and purchasing in our actual funnel. And the last two I have. Kicked out to the side and set up as the repeat purchase journey there for retention and advocacy. And so if they become an advocate, they can tell other people about your brand and try to get them to purchase as well. And so each one of these stages does represent unique opportunities for businesses to connect and engage with their audiences and in different ways. And We have so many different things that we do here in office to try to make sure that we're putting multiple pieces of our efforts in each of these buckets so that they work together and push people down the funnel and ultimately get them to that advocacy point where they're going out and telling other people about your brand. And as you can imagine, social media plays a huge and vital role in this journey. And ev it's got a touchpoint in all five of those categories where something like email marketing or a radio ad may only have. One of those categories, maybe it's awareness or maybe it's direct to purchase from the email. And so that's another crazy thing about social media is that we can use it to tie into our entire customer journey, which is really strong. And so as we are talking about this, I'll move straight onto our next point, which is integrating actual social media into it. And as I said earlier, different social media platforms have their own unique strengths and are suited for different stages of the customer journey. And some people, and myself included every now and again, We'll talk about email marketing even as a social media, right? It's almost like its own social media platform. It is a social piece of media if mo if, done correctly. And so every, again, like platform is gonna have its own spot in the customer journey. And that is where the adversity comes in with these platforms and why they're useful. And for instance, Facebook's. Broad reach makes it great for creating awareness. Instagram's visual aspects, as everything looks pretty on the gram, is perfect for our consideration stage because you can ew and aw people with, good looking stuff. And then, like we had mentioned, email marketing, maybe it's Twitter, a any sort of blast that has a direct call to action can aid in purchase decisions and, advocacy, retention, and all those other categories. Trying to get people to come back and advocate for you and. What's great about that is it works for B2B and b2c. And my business Alpha has a B2B thing and we actually. Have to focus on our own B2B efforts so that we can continue to grow our client list. But then also we do B2C marketing for our clients. And so we're focusing on both pieces of that puzzle there. And it's a really important thing, when considering all this. So if your business is B2B or b2c, don't say, this isn't for me, cuz it, it truly is for everybody and it will touch customer journey on all five points of those stages, regardless of B2B or b2c. And so it's all about using the right platform, the right stage, and the right audience. Those three things are crucial. And so one brand that does this exceptionally well, all things aside is Nike, which has really mastered the art of leveraging all their different platforms to stay engaged with their customers at different parts of the journey. I actually didn't know this, but Nike even has, like special programs that they do just for like their artists and creators. So you can actually create art and then upload it onto like sneakers or hats and that kind of stuff. And there's a whole sub knit community inside of Facebook groups, and I think there's an Instagram page and some other things. So that's one. Retention is so huge with that group, I can't even imagine. But as you could guess, Nike has a very strong presence in Facebook, email, Instagram, TikTok, everything. And so they're checking all the boxes there. Now, when it comes to integrating the actual social media, parts into your customer journey, my favorite thing to do is to actually draw out what the funnel is, or even just my five stages. And then I try to start making lists of, Hey, out of all the things I'm doing, what falls into each of these categories? Or you could even make a list of all the things you're doing and the five categories start drawing lines between them. Some things will touch multiple categories, and so that's okay if they fall into the bin twice. But we do have some base requirements for social media marketing and establishing what these funnels are. And some of that has to do with goals, understanding your target audience, generating consistent, and engaging content. And then also being able to look at the analytics. All of that is really great, but ultimately we still need to make sure that we are checking the boxes, on the funnel as well. So those are my two kind of base requirements, is make sure that we have chosen the right platform with the right audience and with the right media, that we're performing for them. While also trying to check all five boxes of the, the funnel. Looking at the customer journey and the funnel are synonymous. And so those two foundations are really, or those two elements are really like the foundation of. Everything that comes into tying into social media marketing and having the actual funnel. Now, I'm not gonna go into every single one of those topics just the awareness category in the funnel itself would probably dictate an entire episode, and there's tons of information about this in past episodes of mine. And maybe we'll do these if you guys request it, but, just, even just getting this part, just getting to this far with having the five steps in the stages and looking at your efforts to see which one of them fall into these steps is huge. I guarantee you we've already got some holes even in my business, and this is something I focus on all the time. So if you're a restaurant, a boutique, a construction company, look at this stuff. Try to figure out where people are coming from, stick'em in there, and then look at all your, efforts and see where the holes are. And, I put this down here, but the marketing funnel is a visualization of the customer journey. So it's a way for you to visually look at what your efforts are, and theoretically that is going to be every one of your customer's journey, getting toward a purchase or, inquiring for your service, whatever that is. So if everyone is going through this journey, we need to look at it and monitor it and alter it to hold your brand in the best possible light. And so social media, again, is a huge part of that. And we talked about maybe some potential pitfalls when it comes to. Looking at our efforts when it comes to our customer journey and implementing our customer funnel and social media, trying to make that as good as it can go. And just like with anything, any marketing strategies, social media has its pitfalls, including inconsistent messaging across your platforms. Neglecting engagement. So not replying to people in time or just not reading the analytics properly or just at all. So that's three huge things there. And I'll hit each of'em really quickly. So an example of inconsistent messaging would be we post really funny and engaging stuff over to our Twitter and on LinkedIn we're posting nothing but very professional careers. That doesn't have a huge alignment, and that may be confusing to some people. Whereas if you're professional on Twitter and we're professional on LinkedIn, that's consistent messaging across your brand. And so when the person in this stage of customer journey sees you on Twitter and they're, maybe that's your awareness thing, they see like a tweet that someone retweeted and then they start to learn more about you when they see you on LinkedIn a month later or a week later. They need to have that same feel and that same message coming to you we've done an episode in the past over your social media avatars, so it's building the persona of the person that is posting to your page. That still holds true here. So we need to make sure that persona that you build, the avatar of whoever the brand's voice is being carried across all of the platforms. And so that is what I mean by the consistent messaging. Just watch out for that, especially if you have multiple people running multiple things. Make sure that they have a similar vision there. The next one was ne neglecting engagement. So it is actually really important for your brand to be going onto your page daily, onto your social media pages and looking to see the. If you have any new messages, if you have any, comments or questions, if you've, obviously it's just, just the same as not replying to an email. If a client were to email you or if a customer emailed out a question and you just don't answer them, you're probably not gonna get their business. And so same thing is true here with Facebook, Twitter, and all these other fe social media feeds, is that we need to be monitoring them and making sure that we're being, We need to make sure that we're being timely with our responses so that the people can get the answers that they're looking for, and ultimately just have a pleasant experience. And so if you started a Twitter three years ago and you posted to it really consistently for six months, and then just let it die, someone could still find that, go in there and message you and not understand that you're not messaging there anymore and become frustrated that you're not. Posting to that platform anymore. And it's even hard for me to do that with my business with so many moving parts, if you're the owner, it's really hard to get away from all of it and work in the business instead of on it when it comes to something as small detail as replying to every single comment and message. And so that's why having a team do that stuff for you is really awesome because you can be really consistent with that. And then lastly, and this is the hardest one, is using your analytics effectively and really just using them at all in general. Not a lot of people are that analytic brained type person where they don't have a problem looking at spreadsheets for an hour and depicting what the data means and making educated decisions from that and then moving forward. If you're gonna spend all the time and all the effort to get your social media channels looking pretty and going through all these things, wouldn't you like to know if it's actually working and literally have real data that you can point to and make educated decisions off of? Yes. So that's another really big thing is get into your insights on your Instagram, on your TikTok, on your Facebook, and look at it. Do it weekly because. You need to be looking at it and testing out new content, doing all those things, seeing how the market reacts to it, and then making educated decisions from there. And that's one of the biggest pit, biggest pitfalls of anybody that runs social media pages at a professional level, or even for their own business, is they're not looking at the data and they have no idea that, oh, my biggest, Audience demographic is actually this age group, not this one. I had no idea. That would be a huge thing to know, right? So just reading that data and making educated things to look at from there. Again, there could be a whole nother episode just on that because there's so many different data points to look at. And then after you've looked at it, what do you do? So it's like then making decisions from that. So look at all of that. Make sure that you're consistently putting your brand image across all the platforms. Make sure you're engaging with your audience regularly and, timely if possible. So getting quick responses out to people and regularly. And also use data to inform your strategies. Keep an actual log of everything that is going on. You can look at May of this year from May of last year and start making, decisions like that. I'm sure you've heard people talk about this quarter wasn't as good this year as it was last year. That's like what they're doing. They have to keep stats and data about this. So if you're a marketer at any level, or a business owner at any level, you should already have some level of spreadsheet or data. Or mental note of how things are going and just putting that down, just like the funnel, it's a visual and it will keep you accountable. So that is, without getting too much into every single tiny little topic, the point of having a marketing funnel that is focused on what your customer journey is, writing it down. Placing all the pieces in your customer journey, and then looking at what your efforts are and finding where the holes are. I will probably end up making an episode on maybe the funnel and then, retention advocacy, so like the three and the two or maybe just an individual episode for each of them. That's probably 10 ish minutes long. Going through that stuff and looking at it because it's actually fun to me. To play the game of like, how do we make this cheaper? How do we make this better? And again, like you just look backwards and problem solve and then make educated decisions moving forward. So that is the whole episode guys. I apologize for the length of that one. We're creeping up on 20 minutes here. But again, my name is Rich Hake. If you guys are looking for any professional social media help, please hit up my agency, alpha Social Media. Just hit us with a Google and we will be the first result on there. We do social media, marketing, advertising, web design, brand identity and design, and photo and video. So we, under all of those hats that we wear under this organization, we put this podcast together to give our clients and prospects and just people out in the space also doing what we do. Additional information about how all this stuff works. So if you guys are enjoying, please leave us a, like a comment, even subscribe if you found any value out of this or if you wanna see those future episodes I was talking about. We love the feedback, so please keep it coming for us and we will see you on Instagram and not TikTok because I deleted TikTok off my phone and there's another episode ready coming for that one.