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How to Generate Leads from LinkedIn Read More »
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Before jumping into specific channels, it’s best to look at social media as a whole. While all the social media channels have their quirks and differences, there’s also a lot of overlap in how you approach them.
Should you even be using social media at all?
When does it make sense to make social media part of your marketing strategy?
How do these channels fit into the rest of your market funnel?
What are the trends sweeping across all social media channels?
I recommend getting a solid grounding in how social media works, then going through the different channel options to pick the one’s that are right for you.
Facebook has definitely gone through a period of ups and downs over the years. For a long time, lots of businesses invested heavily into building their pages and audiences. Then Facebook completely changed how those posts end up in the newsfeed. The organic reach got so limited that Facebook became a “pay-to-play” social network by default.
You can still lead with a content and value-based social media strategy but it’s really difficult to get traction with paying to post your Facebook posts. Every Facebook strategy needs a dedicated budget to promote posts.
Even with the extra hurdle, Facebook is still the heavy-hitting social media channel. You can reach anyone on earth and Facebook’s targeting is extraordinarily detailed. You can get anyone and everyone that you want. Facebook is still the starting point for any social media push.
Instagram has become THE social media network. It’s easy to generate content for, has solid engagement, and still has a true flywheel that you can build over time. As you build your audience, you can still depend on being able to reach them with every post unlike Facebook which became “pay-to-play.”
For any B2C brand, a thriving Instagram account is absolutely essential. I wouldn’t waste any more time before getting started:
YouTube has gained a ton of momentum in the last few years. The search volume is almost as big as Google and the user engagement is off the charts.
The one major downside is how much effort and money that great video content requires. There’s certainly shortcuts and corners to cut in the beginning, but it’s always going to require more effort than some of the other social networks.
That said, YouTube is worth the effort. Use these guides to ramp up quickly:
Surprisingly, LinkedIn has become one of the hot social media networks lately. The engagement on LinkedIn posts are off the charts, easily outpacing Twitter profiles and Facebook pages.
If you’re B2B, I strongly recommend that you make LinkedIn a core part of your social media strategy. It’s too hot to pass up right now.
Pinterest doesn’t get nearly as much attention in digital marketing circles as it should. Yes, the Pinterest audience is overwhelmingly female. You should strongly consider making Pinterest a priority if your target market skews towards females and you have a highly visual product.
Check out our Pinterest guides to get started:
Twitter used to be one of the heavy-hitting social networks. If you wanted a serious social media strategy, you had to have an engaging and active Twitter account.
These days, Twitter isn’t considered a required channel for a social media strategy. The half-life of tweets are exceptionally short, it’s really difficult to get them to go viral, and a lot of people have decided to avoid Twitter because it’s too difficult to use. While it can still be worth pursuing, it’s definitely no longer a requirement.
If you think it could be a good fit, these guides break it all down:
There’s always a new up and coming social media channel to start looking into. If you’re looking to push into channels that most teams haven’t spent much time on, start with Reddit and Snapchat.
There is possibly nothing else in marketing more magical than getting a paid marketing funnel to work.
Think about it.
You put $1 in and you get $2 out.
At that point, you’re printing money for your business, getting bigger with every cycle of your paid marketing.
Now the bad news, paid marketing is really difficult to make work. There’s a lot of serious players that are all trying to convert the same prospects. So ads get bid up quickly. It’s still possible to win but you want to take paid marketing seriously.
First, go through our guide on PPC. That’ll give you a really strong foundation so you can compete with the paid marketing pros.
Once you’re ready to go through some of the core tactics for paid marketing, read through our post 7 Ways to Get High Quality Paid Traffic with Rock-Bottom CPCs.
For B2B marketers, definite go through our post on How to Generate Leads with PPC Campaigns for Your B2B Company. I’ve run B2B and B2C paid marketing campaigns and while there is a lot of overlap, there’s also some key differences that B2B companies need to watch out for.
These guides will also be helpful when learning the basics:
Google Ads (formally Google AdWords) should be part of every ad budget. The best part of AdWords is that as long as there’s a few keywords that people use to find your product or service, it’s really easy to get in front of your ideal prospects. Since they’re searching for those keywords, they’re already aware of the problem and have decided to take some action to solve it by looking for solutions. Those are the prospects that you want to be in front of.
For a small business, hopefully your niche isn’t too competitive. That means you’ll probably be able to run ads on Google Ads that aren’t too expensive. If you’re going after a really large market, keep in mind that other businesses have most likely bid up the ad placements really high. It could take some time before you’re able to compete with them directly on Google Ads.
We have a number of guides on different parts of Google Ads to help get you up to speed: