By Jim Hingst

 

One of the biggest challenges that a
small business faces is generating enough leads from all of its marketing
activities to reach your sales goals.  If you are investing time and money
on social media, your efforts need to produce a return on your
investment. 

 

It should be no surprise that social
media is the most effective marketing tool.  With nearly half of the 7.9
billion people in the world using these platforms, social media not only can
deliver a message to a broader audience at a lower cost. Above all, it can
produce a greater volume of sales leads than traditional advertising and
communication channels.

 

Establishing Social Media Goals and
Strategies.

 

One of Steven Covey’s 7 Habits of
Highly Effective People was to “begin with the end in mind” adjuring the
necessity of setting goals. In establishing specific goals for a highly
effective social media strategy first answer these questions:

● Audience: What are your target
markets?

● Platforms: Which social media platforms do your
customers and prospects use?

● Content: What type content does
you audience prefer? How frequently will you post content?

● Measure: What metrics will you
track to gauge success for each social media platform?

 

Answering these questions will help in
selecting the best platform for your social media marketing strategy. As you
make your selections, you should also develop specific goals for your program.
These goals should be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and
time-bound. Moreover, you should craft goals which are particularly suited for
your business.  

 

Branding. Improving the visibility of your shop
among your target audience is integral to success in the sales process.
Multiple contacts with prospects improve your odds in selling new graphics
programs. Here are examples of goals for your social media marketing plan:

● Increase
the number of engagements on Twitter by 25% versus the number for the previous
year.

● Add 500
LinkedIn contacts during the 2023 calendar year.

● Generate
50 links each month from Facebook to your website landing page.

 

Public
Relations. Your business interacts with
the general public as well as with your target market.  If your shop is involved in a charity event
or supports an athletic team, social media can bolster your branding within
your community.  Tracking the number of
social media mentions helps in understanding how the public views your products
and services, your standing within the community and your reputation as an
employer. Good PR not only improves your shop’s relationships with customers
and business associates but also helps you attract the top-quality candidates
for future employment.

 

To enhance
your image within your community, activities in your social media marketing
plan could include:

● Photos
and stories about employees;

● Postings
about your shop’s participation in local events; or

● Articles
about customers’ new graphics programs. 

 

Lead Generation. Setting a goal for leads produced is a
practical target, because you can easily track your results. An increase in
brand awareness, on the other hand, is not so easily measured nor is gauging
improvements in attitudes about your business. Using likes or shares or numbers
of followers also has little practical application that affects revenue or
profit. Leads, on the other hand, are important because you can turn those into
cash.

 

Developing a Social Media Marketing Plan.

Once you settle on your social media
goals, determine the platforms you will use, action steps needed, people
responsible for activities, costs and target dates for completion of tasks.

 

Generating
More Impressions and Engagement. If you include Twitter and Facebook in the
Digital Section of your overall Marketing Strategy, you need to develop a
written plan of action. That plan should not be an exhaustive dissertation.
Rather it should provide an outline to include:

 

•
Specific Marketing Activities

•
Person(s) Responsible

•
Costs

•
Calendar of Events

•
Action Steps

•
Measurables

 

Choosing the
Right Social Media Platforms. Another
major marketing challenge facing small business is choosing the best social
media platforms. Many experts feel that Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram and
Twitter (in that order) generate the highest volume of sales leads.

 

Providing
useful content on social media is time-consuming. You can’t afford to spend
time on every platform or you will spread yourself too thin. Because small
businesses have limited resources, limit your social media choices to no more
than three platforms.

 

The best way
to ascertain which social media platform is best to promote your business is
for you and your salespeople to survey your customer base. Which platforms do
they use for their companies? In providing content to your business base, how
would your customers prefer to receive information about your shop and your
products and services?

 

In deciding
which platform is best suited to realizing your marketing goals, you also need
to decide which social media platform best complements your content and the
business culture of your clientele. For most sign shops, printers and
wide-format graphics providers, social media platforms which are more visually
oriented, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter are good choices for the
visual communication marketplace.

 

On the other hand,
LinkedIn might be a more suitable channel to communicate with CEOs, Marketing
and Advertising executives and purchasing managers, especially if your content
consists of long articles.

 

Finally, you
need to consider the demographics of those using the social media platforms.
Some platforms are geared more for a younger audience, such as Instagram. Other
platforms, such as LinkedIn are better suited for business professionals and
the B2B marketplace. In fact, more than 80% of B2B businesses rate LinkedIn as
their primary social media platform.

 

Using Facebook for Marketing Research. Facebook is certainly a viable platform
for businesses because it reaches 2 billion users, 75% of whom are active on a
daily basis. Half of its users visit Facebook several times a day. What’s more,
Facebook has broad appeal across the full range of age groups. As effective as
this platform is for all companies, 90% of B2C marketers regard Facebook as
their primary social media channel.

 

Since nearly everyone is on Facebook, you can use it
in building a comprehensive profile on a prospect. A prospect’s Facebook page
is generally more personal than his business presence on LinkedIn.

 

As a sales tool a prospect’s Facebook page generally
reveals his personal interests, such as family, hobbies, political affiliations
and religious beliefs. You won’t find this type of information on LinkedIn.

 

In face-to-face selling, you can use this information
to break the ice on an initial sales call as well as to avoid touchy subjects.
In researching a prospect on Facebook, pay attention to which Facebook groups
he belongs. 

 

Twitter. What makes Twitter valuable as a marketing
tool is that its reach extends to more than 200 million daily users. Albeit the
vast majority of its users are rarely a focused target audience for most
consumer or business advertisers, Twitter’s vibrant activity makes it worthy of
serious consideration as a viable marketing tool. Whether this tool harmonizes
with your other marketing plans depends on:

 

• Whether your prospects and customers use
this platform; and

 

• Accumulating a base of followers who could
use your products and services and who have the money and authority to make
buying decisions or influence purchases.

 

Using
Twitter to Promote Your Content. Repetition reinforces your brand identity and
boosts your credibility. To ensure that you sustain the frequency of your
postings, you should develop a posting calendar to schedule your tweets.

 

LinkedIn. Facebook has the largest user base with
more than 2.7 billion active users. Twitter has approximately 330 million
monthly active users. While
LinkedIn does not have the broad user base of Twitter or Facebook, it uniquely well-suited
for B2B marketing and sales.

                                          

For B2B sales LinkedIn is potentially
your most viable social media marketing tool. Consistently used you can build a
community of prospects, customers, industry associates and influencers to
generate leads that you can convert into sales. 

 

Regularly posting on LinkedIn or other
social media platforms improves your odds that your connections or followers
will notice you and establishes you as an authority in the graphics market.
That helps in lead generation. 

 

Whether you are on LinkedIn or another
platform, you may also find other opportunities to harvest sales leads by
joining groups devoted to the signage and graphics markets as well as joining
groups associated with your target markets.

 

Using LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator you can
target professional people,
such as mid-level managers, executives and business owners and generate leads that you can convert into
sales. 

 

When prospects use
LinkedIn, they are looking for products or content related to their business.
This audience is more likely to have an interest in the products and services
that a sign shop offers, such as corporate graphics, signage or large format
digital printing. What’s more, LinkedIn users include those who are decision
makers or who can influence buying decisions.

 

Posting relevant content lends credence
to your company’s stature as a competent and trustworthy graphics provider.

 

LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator. Regularly posting on your social
media platforms and waiting for prospects to call you is not the only way nor
is it the best way to use these platforms. A more proactive approach to using
social media will likely produce better results.

 

LinkedIn,
for example, features their Sales Navigator which can
help you expeditiously identify and engage with key decision makers within your
target market.

 

Sales
Navigator employs a number of filters, which excludes sales suspects which are
less likely to become paying customers. It not only finds companies with the
money for graphics, but uncovers key contacts with the authority to spend that
money.

 

Using the Sales Navigator feature
requires you to proactively contact the sales lead either through phone
prospecting, direct mail, email marketing or a combination of approaches.

 

By searching their
database for your ideal sales prospects, you save time in prospecting for opportunities and building
relationships. LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator feature, however, is not free. The least
expensive plan is $79.99 per month. To see if the LinkedIn plan is a good fit
with your sales and marketing strategy, you can try it for free for a month.

 

Tips for LinkedIn Posts and
Articles.

 

● Begin your posts with a benefit statement which answers
the visitor’s question: what’s in it for me?

● While “brevity is the soul of wit,”
LinkedIn posts with at least five lines generally garner more attention than
shorter posts.

● Skillfully use line spacing to aid
readability.

 

 

 

YouTube. Arguably
YouTube has the potential as the best platform for B2B communication. It is the second most used social media
platform next to Facebook. What’s more its search engine is the second most
used next to Google.  Each day more than
one billion hours of its videos are watched which is more viewing time than
Netflix garners.

 

The challenge
for many businesses is that producing YouTube content can take considerable
time and expense to produce content. Postings on YouTube, however, don’t
necessarily require an elaborate studio and production and sophisticated
film-editing equipment. For next to nothing some shops produce
attention-getting and highly-effective videos showcasing their graphics
programs just using their iPhones. Other options include hiring a local
videographer or using the talents of your employees.

 

Best Practices
in Social Media Marketing.

 

In
many respects, marketing to other businesses in which you must take a rifle
shot at a specific audience in a defined geography is much more challenging
than broadcasting to the general public. Nonetheless social media can be
fruitful for B2B marketing if you employ the following best practices: 

 

Social Media Posting Schedule. While posting too frequently is
inadvisable, so is posting infrequently. What’s most important in growing your
social media presence is consistency.

 

You should actively post relevant content
on each of your social media platforms. The frequency for posting can vary
depending on the platform. While posting weekly on LinkedIn may be sufficient,
using Twitter may require one or more daily tweets.

 

In addition to consistency, regularly posting
on a specific day at a specific time is recommended. This conditions your
followers to expect your posts on a consistent basis. That’s why including a
calendar for postings is critical to the success of your social media marketing
plan.

 

Optimizing Your Social Media Profile. For generating B2B sales leads from
social media the prospect must first find you. To improve your chances of being
found, you must optimize your profile. That means that you must use the right
words and the right hashtags so your shop easily comes up in searches.

 

Review your profile for each of
your social media platforms. It should include your contact
information including phone number, email and links to your website, blog
and other social media platforms.

 

Your profile should also include keywords
that prospects will likely use when searching for products and services that
you offer. A sign shop might use keywords, such as wide-format digital prints,
fleet graphics, banners, decals, signage and window graphics.

 

Among the major social media platforms,
LinkedIn is most effective in producing leads. If you are on LinkedIn make sure
that you are visible to anyone and that you list your services.

 

The first and often the most lasting
impression of your shop is your social media profile. How you present your
company information and your visual identity across your channels should be
memorable and consistent as it appears on various devices, such as laptops and
cell phones. Remember to include links to your website and other platforms and
test those links ensuring that they function.

 

In your profile headline succinctly
describe what your business does. Use the keywords and hashtags which would
best attract the leads from companies in your target market.

 

As a graphics professional make sure that
the imagery in your profile looks professional. People make an immediate judgment about you and your business in an
instant. If you include a
photograph of your business always incorporate your company logo in the
picture. Not only should your imagery
attract the attention of your target audience, it also should be unique enough
to differentiate you from your competition.

 

You should also maintain visual consistency
across all of your social media channels, website and other forms of business
communication. In fact, as part of your marketing strategy, you should create
guidelines or a stylebook for all aspects of your visual communication.

 

Lead Follow Up. Collecting leads is only worthwhile
if you and your associates follow up in a timely fashion. In today’s world,
timely means following up the same day that you receive the lead.

 

That’s where email marketing is important
for small business. It provides immediate follow up of social media leads until
you have the time to phone and schedule a face-to-face meeting. Email marketing
is also highly effective on its own in lead generation.

 

For each lead, you need to record who
responded, when they responded and what were the results. Did the lead result
in a quote? Was the value of the quote? Did you get the order? If not, why not?

 

If you are sales oriented, you should
track your interactions with prospects through the sales funnel from initial
contact to closing the sale. You should also collect key information in your
customer relationship management (CRM) program.

 

The information entered into your
database should include the nature of the prospects business, key contacts,
size of their fleet, locations of their store outlets, as well as phone numbers
and email addresses.

 

Initiating Engagement. Responding to comments, direct messages (DM) and inquiries
is key in engaging with customers and prospects. You can also initiate the
process in the following ways:

● By commenting on a prospect’s posts;

● Messaging a prospect after they follow you
or accept your invitation to connect; and

●
Sharing a prospect’s content. If you use a link shortener such as Sniply, you
can add your comments to their content along with a link to your website. 

 

Make
Social Media a Team Effort. In a small business you can’t do everything
alone. To improve your content and results on social media encourage others in
your shop to contribute to the creative process. Solicit their suggestions and
their stories. When anyone is in the field, remind them to take pictures and
video clips of the installation process and the finished graphics.

 

By
involving your associates in different aspects of your business you will make
them feel as part of a team. In addition to their contributions in your
marketing strategy, your team members will be more motivated to perform better
at whatever task they are engaged in.

 

The more involved that your employees
become, the more likely it is that you will attain your business goals, whether
it is to generate more leads or to improve the quality of your products or to
provide better customer service.

 

Conduct
a Poll.  Opinions
are like noses. Everyone has one. Most people can’t resist adding
their “two cents worth” to any question. That’s what makes a social media poll an easy,
efficient and cost-effective way to take the pulse of your target audience.

 

When
your followers respond to your questions, you gain a greater understanding of
their needs as well as the likes and dislikes. With this insight, you should
have a better understanding of the type of content you that you should provide
your audience.

 

Business
also use social media polls to determine which platforms their followers
prefer. That way you can decide which platforms are best suited for your
market.

 

In
addition to gaining critical market information, polls are a great way to
stimulate engagement with your audience that results in sales leads and
ultimately in sales.

 

Crafting Your Posts.  Write your social media posts
using an economy of well-chosen words. The copy should contain a key
benefit that would appeal to your target audience. Photography should be
attention-getting, sharp and memorable. Finally, your post should have a call
to action. Give the prospect a reason to contact you.

 

When you
deliver value in your content, you stimulate interest in your product
offerings. That influences those in your target audience to respond to your
calls to action and can ultimately sway attitudes that impact buying decisions.

 

Ideally, social media posts should
include a link to a landing page on your website or to a blog post. A landing
page is not the same as your home page. Instead, the page includes a form
designed to collect leads. Tracking leads from your landing page is a good key
performance indictor used to measure the effectiveness of your social media
marketing activities.

 

Social Media Content. When you post on your social media platforms, your content
should be relevant to your business. More importantly, it should relate to the
interests and unmet needs of your target market.

 

Useful information on your social media
platforms helps form those positive first impressions which become lasting
impressions. Those good impressions set the stage for your sales meetings. It
also reinforces your messaging and branding.

 

Remember that quality of content trumps
quantity. You don’t want to annoy your followers with spam. Nothing is more
obnoxious that shameless, chest-pounding self-promotion. Prospects don’t want
to read advertising. They don’t want to be sold. Instead, they want you to help
them buy. They want information that they can use in their businesses.

 

Posting examples of your best work or
providing news that prospects can use helps increase visibility, builds a
following and generates more leads.

 

A great way to deliver your message is to
tell a story. One effective type of storyline is based on the problem-solution
format. For example, in a social media posting you could report how a retailer
revamped the appearance of his store interior with new wall graphics. That
change in décor resulted in a higher volume of traffic and higher sales. The
post could link to landing page where the prospect could fill out a form and
download the definitive white paper on store identity programs.

 

Conduct a Contest. To generate more sales leads, you could run a social media
contest in which participants complete a simple form. You could also base a
contest around a discount. The goal of the contest might be to build your
database of contacts for your email campaigns and sales efforts.

 

One popular way to generate leads is to
run a Twitter contest. It’s also a great way to build your company’s brand. The
goal of your contest could be to drive traffic to a landing page on your
website, where prospects could enter the contest by filling out a form.

 

So that you don’t discourage people from
filling out a form, keep it simple. All you need for a lead is the contact’s
name, company name, location, phone and email. With that information, you have
everything you need for to measure the success of your campaign.

 

Of course, a contest always needs a prize.
The contest does not necessarily need to be expensive. It does need to be
relevant to the prospect and have some value. For example, in prospecting for
fleet graphics or store graphics, you could offer a copy of an authoritative
and comprehensive book on the subject. 

 

The type of contest suitable for the
corporate graphics field could be a photo contest in which prospects would
submit a picture of their company vehicle, store sign or window display.

 

When you try a tactic, such
as a contest, measure your results to determine what worked and what didn’t.
This will provide you with an insight when planning future social media
strategies and tactics.

 

Build Your Base of Followers. You can have the best content in the world, but if
you don’t have followers, your message will have little or no impact.

 

If you want people to follow you and
engage with you, try following and engaging with them first. Be selective on
those who you follow. Don’t expect that following those who share your
political philosophy will also share your interest in business topics. Instead,
only follow those who in your target audience or industry.

 

Community PR. If your shop is active in
your community, post the events that you participate in. For example, if you
sponsor a children’s baseball team or are involved in a charity, post
photographs of the games or affair.

 

Crafting Your Message.

 

Platforms such as Twitter
restrict the configuration of your message. To ensure the greatest impact of
your tweet, keep your message short and sweet (about 100 characters). That
message should include a key benefit and a call to action to encourage your
target audience to respond. In addition, include an attention-getting image,
and a couple of hashtags. Most importantly, incorporate a link to drive sales
leads to the landing page on your website.

 

How your
tweets and posts are formatted affects how well you connect with your target
audience. Some of the key elements to a post are:

 

• Benefit Statement

• Hashtags

• Visuals

• Links

• Call-To-Action (CTA)

 

Benefit Statement.
Whether you are writing a Tweet, article or ad copy you need to lead with a
benefit statement that succinctly tells the reader how he will profit from
reading further or doing business with you. In business key benefits include
helping customers increase their sales to make more money, bolster their egos
or improve the safety of their vehicles.

 

Hashtags.  Hashtags are keywords or keyword phrases preceded by the
pound symbol (#) used to help your target audience easily search for and find
your content. Include them in your profile and your posts. When you create a
hashtag that is specific to your industry or niche within that industry, it
also helps to promote your shop and your products and services.

 

Twitter is not the only social media
platform that support the use of hashtags. Other platforms that support its use
include Instagram, Pinterest and YouTube. Facebook, however, does not support
hashtags although you may notice that some of its users include them in their
posts.

 

 

Avoid Spamming.
Using too many hashtags is not only obnoxious and can hamper readability.  Some platforms, such as YouTube, will
penalize you. In fact, these platforms may remove your posts. What’s more, a
social media platform may disable your links in the case of spamming.

 

 

Using a hashtag analysis service such
as Hashtagify, Hashtracking or Talkwalker, can help you discover the most
relevant hashtags for your business and your target markets. For example, if
your primary business is wrapping cars and trucks, you might use the following
hashtags: #vehiclewraps, #vehiclegraphics or #truckgraphics.

 

You can also do your own informal
hashtag research by checking the results produced when you enter a hashtag in
the search bar for a social media platform. Put yourself in your prospect’s shoes. Which topics would most interest
them? What words would they use in their searches?

 

Links. If a primary goal of your social media
strategy is to increase website or blog traffic, always include a link. Long URLs are unattractive and can incumber your click-through
rate. To condense long URLs you need to use a link shortener, such as Bitly, Sniply
and Hopp.co.

 

Shortened links also look more
professional and reflect more positively on your shop. Some link shorteners
also provide analytic tools which allow you to track clicks, page visits,
conversions and time on your site. Many of these services are free.

Visuals.  As people cursorily peruse social media you need a
hook to grab the viewer’s attention. While a strong benefit statement, works
for conventional marketing, social media is more visually oriented. Posts
containing a video clip garner the most attention and engagement. Photos and
infographics are also effective in generating interest and responses than posts
without images.

 

 

An
infographic is a visual representation often used to convert statistical
information into an easily understood and appealing image such as a chart or
graph.

 

 

One of the biggest challenges for writers
whether it is composing a magazine article, ad or social media posting is not
the written word. Instead, it is selecting an attention getting photograph.
Without a show-stopper, all of your pearls of content wisdom are for naught.
Professional-looking photography is the window to gaining visibility and
thereby social media engagement.

 

One of the first lessons you learn when
writing an ad or a direct marketing piece is to thumbnail sketch the layout
first, then write to fit the layout. This lesson should not be forgotten when
composing a social media post.

 

As sign makers and wide format printers,
social media platforms are ideal for the visual communication industry. In
selecting visual content, you need to answer the following questions:

 

● Which platforms do your prospects and clients use?
What type of visuals will attract their attention resulting in engagement?

 

● Will you tailor the visual content to the various
social media platforms or will you select visuals that will have broad appeal
across all platforms?

 

Call To Action (CTA). Make sure
that when you write a post that you include a “call to action.”  Just as when writing a traditional ad, the
call to action tells the reader what you want them to do. Do you want them to
retweet, share, comment on or like the post? If social media strategy is to
drive traffic to your website or blog, tell them to tap on the link to that
site or blog post.

 

Without a
call-to-action link in your post readers generally continue scrolling to
another post and you have missed another opportunity to connect with a
potential customer.

 

Measuring Social Media Effectiveness.

 

Once you execute your social
media marketing plan, you need to measure your results on a monthly basis. Tracking your outcomes
can help you identify what works and what doesn’t in your strategy. That can
help you determine if the platforms which you have chosen are contributing the
achievement of your sales and marketing objectives. Based on your results, you
can tweak your plans until
you find a winning formula.

 

The metrics you use, such as increases in
the number of followers, impressions, likes or links to your website landing
page, should be compatible with your marketing goals. Some criteria are more
relevant to your sales objectives, while than others are too tenuous for
pragmatic marketing. Correlating “likes” with topline growth, for example, is
difficult if not impossible.

 

The best gauge for determining whether
your marketing strategy and activities work is the number of leads generated.
Leads, in the form of comments or phone calls or completed forms on your
landing page, are the types of interactions that you can respond to and convert
into cash.  

 

YouTube Channel
Analytics. Perhaps the
best B2B channel for engaging an audience is YouTube. With nearly 2 billion
active users, this platform has broad appeal across the spectrum of age groups.
Because most men are visually-oriented, it is especially effective in
delivering your message to the male audience – especially to a more affluent
male audience who occupy decision-making roles in businesses.

 

What makes
YouTube even more effective is YouTube Analytics.  This tool equips you with extensive analytics
which allow you to monitor actual results for a specific period against your
marketing objectives. Some of the key metrics that you can track include:

● Channel views – how many
visitors visit your channel

● Watch Time – how many hours
visitors watch your videos

● Average View Duration

● Average Percentage Viewed

● Increases in your subscriber
base

 

By tracking these
metrics, you can evaluate what works and what doesn’t so you can alter your
tactics. As with any social media platform, your success depends on consistently
posting new content relevant to your target markets.

 

Impressions and Engagement.
Two important metrics you should monitor when using a platform such as Twitter
are impressions and engagement. Impressions measure how many times your content
is delivered to your audience. Put another way, it measures how many times
a posted message is seen.  The value of generating impressions is that
each one helps in improving brand awareness.

 

 

While impressions are an important
gauge of measurement and a good general goal for a social media
strategy,
what’s more important are engagements. Engagements quantify how many times
viewers respond to your content by either liking, sharing, profile visits, new
followers, comments or reposting. Better yet, a platform such as Twitter tracks
the number of links to your website or blog.

 

Are Paid Social Media Promotions Worth
It? Most small shops have a limited budget to
spend on a paid promotion on a social media platform. Be forewarned, this type
of advertising on some platforms can be a little pricey. Advertising on
LinkedIn, for example, may cost you more than Twitter, but you will likely
reach a higher quality B2B prospect.

If you have budgeted for social media
ads, your money is best spent on a conversion campaign.  A conversion is
defined as a specific action, such as a lead generated. If your goal is to
generate sales, you want leads, not brand awareness.

 

A platform, such as LinkedIn, uses
filtering tools so you can target a specific audience. That way, you are not
wasting your money communicating with prospects in a geography that you
couldn’t possibly serve.

 

To track the effectiveness of your paid
social media promotions you should measure your results against your marketing
goals and the outcomes of previous campaigns.

 

Conclusion.

 

No one has developed a surefire formula for what
produces the best results on social media. The best advice is to do what
marketers did 50 years ago in direct mail marketing: Test, Don’t Guess. 

In other words, experiment by testing one headline
versus another; one type of content versus another; one set of hashtags versus
another; one call to action versus another. By continually testing you will
develop an idea of what works and what doesn’t for your company.

 

Good Luck Selling!