And why shouldn’t they?
If they’re going to pay a consultant or team member to market to potential customers on those networks, wanting that marketing to translate into real dollars and cents is a reasonable expectation. Up to this point, the response has often been lackluster. Words like branding and community typically take the place of tougher words like revenue and return on investment.
I’m here to tell you today the code has been cracked – driving and measuring revenue with social media can be done by any business. There’s one strategy that can work for ANYONE.
Three Straightforward Steps to Drive Revenue
- Build a community of consumers.
- Create search-optimized content for those consumers.
- Drive search customers to your services using that content.
It’s that simple. No tricky calculations, marketing mumbo jumbo, or otherwise. All you need to do is measure the results in a program like Google Analytics.
A Quick Hypothetical Scenario
Let’s pretend that our business is a packaging manufacturer. We’ll call it Boxbox Corp. Boxbox Corp. only sells to large manufacturers and depends on a small amount of leads to generate all of its revenue. There is a relatively small number of potential customers for Boxbox Corp.
For Boxbox Corp, sharing content about their products would be counter-productive on Facebook – consumers aren’t interested in customer-facing content, like box and packaging specifications, pricing, and uses. Similarly, creating consumer-facing content about their products, like arts and crafts displays made from boxes, would attract users who would be very unlikely to be their customers and would not respond or engage with sales messages. Targeting just their potential customers would be difficult at best – they would be a small target market, hard to track down, unlikely to click through on sales messages while at home, and unlikely to be on Facebook while at work.
Instead of trying to address customers on social networks, they could build communities around arts and crafts projects, focusing on featuring their goods. At this point, a lot of this should feel familiar – companies like BlendTec broke ground on these methods a long time ago. This type of content is much more popular with consumers at large and lends itself to easy community building.
A New Twist on the Old Paradigm
The new ‘twist’ on the old paradigm is creating search-optimized content that is appealing to consumers but is simultaneously optimized for customers – meaning it uses terms and links internally to service or product pages that are designed to rank for a search engine query that your customers might make.
In our example, Boxbox Corp could create a step-by-step blog post on how to create a snowman skeleton out of boxes for easy snow-man creation in low-snow areas. In the blog post they would link to their actual product or service. Then, they would share that post with their community, who would share it in turn and generate links to the step-by-step. That would, in turn, help their sales pages rank for searches made by those interested in purchasing their product or service through increased domain visibility, relevant click-throughs on their blog post, and SEO value passed from internal linking. All of the above is measurable in Google Analytics.
Tying Up Loose Ends
That’s it! One simple strategy that any business can utilize or roll into their larger search and social strategy. The best part? Everybody wins. Your community wins, because they get interesting and engaging content that they enjoy sharing. Your content wins, because it gets linked to directly. Your services pages win, because they get a boost in the search results courtesy of your well-written content. And your lead generation program gets two additional sources of qualified leads – leads who click through the services page directly and leads who click through to the services page after finding your content in the search results.
________________________________________
About the Author: Dan Wilkerson is a social media project manager for LunaMetrics, a digital marketing intelligence consultancy with services including social media marketing in Pittsburgh, PA.