How To Use Social Marketing To Drive Top-Line Revenue

Unless you have been living under a rock recently, you have likely heard about social media and how companies are using their blogs, Facebook, Twitter, and other viral marketing channels to promote not only their brand, but also their products and services.  Now that we are well within the holiday shopping season, expect to see more retail-related posts, status updates, and tweets than ever before.

Perhaps you have not incorporated social media into your business yet because you do not want to tarnish your brand by using a potentially risky public forum, or maybe you simply do not know how to use it effectively.  Hopefully this article can provide some insights on how to supercharge your top line revenue through good, old-fashioned customer service, now tweaked for the social networking age.

So what is the goal?  Your goal should be to not only promote awareness of your brand, but also to distribute that awareness to a larger audience.  Take a look at the picture below for the journey that a customer takes from ignorance to advocacy and you will start to get an idea of the complexity inherent in this strategy.

The best way to distribute your content is through “super-fans”, or advocates who can increase your exposure exponentially.  There are five basic steps to finding advocates and for providing an incentive for them to share your products and services with their friends:

1. Identify Advocates: Find your targeted customers in the various social media forums through selective searching (e.g., who has the most Twitter followers, the largest Facebook fan page, the most subscribed to blog, etc.).

2. Establish Connections: Do not contact this advocate directly at first.  Follow the conversations that are happening, get a sense for the community, and then participate on relevant topics (do NOT hard sell in the community).

3. Strike Hot Leads: If someone asks a question or posts a comment in a forum that you know the answer to or that your product or service solves, then reply but resist the temptation to mention your content.  If the person is truly interested at this point, he or she will contact you (e.g., via your signature, Twitter profile, etc.)

4. Contact Advocates: Now that you are armed with information about their community, contact the advocates when the time is right (i.e., they are trying to promote something relevant) and inquire about partnerships (e.g., “I’d love to help promote your offering”).  Then, using good discretion, mention your service if he or she responds.

5. Deliver Engaging Content: This is the key to the entire strategy.  If you do not provide your own relevant, engaging, and actionable content, then the advocates will have nothing to share with friends.  You need not only an extremely easy method to share your content, but also a means to recognize and reward people for sharing it.

Using social media and online marketing effectively may seem time consuming and require a substantial amount of effort, often without a meaningful way to track the results (aside from basic Google Analytics).  However, considering the following hard statistics can you afford not to spend the time?
•    Nearly 90% of links 14 to 24 year-olds click are sourced from friends
•    15% to 20% of unique visitors are sourced from these advocates
•    These valuable visitors account for 1.5x to 4.0x conversion lift (i.e., percentage of additional people performing a desired action, such as clicking an ad)
Sources:  Microsoft, Viacom, Razorfish, Meteor

Editor’s Note: Sean Everett is the co-founder of Evolyte, a mobile app marketing firm created to help mobile app developers and other small businesses break through the advertising noise in order to generate explosive, measurable, and sustainable returns.

What do you think? Any other tips you’d want to include here?