Three Steps to Doing Social Media With a Purpose

Here are the three simple steps help you do social media with a clear purpose:

1. Know the Flow

Since leads are critical to any business, you better know where they come from.

Most businesses will get their leads from a handful of sources. This could be the yellow pages, SEO, Pay-per-click, referrals and, likely, social media.

Understand what your lead sources are and what percentage of your leads come from each source. You can understand this with readily available tracking tools like Google Analytics or simply asking clients or prospects where they heard about you.

Knowing where you leads are coming from gives you very important data about where your money is coming from. This tells you where to focus your limited marketing time and money.

Your focus should be on:

• Continuing to feed the sources that drives a majority of your leads
• Cultivating a variety good lead sources off social media. Because you have limited control over social networks, so it’s critical to have additional lead sources.

2. Get Off Social Media

Ironically, the most critical aspect of social media marketing is actually getting the prospect off of social media.

This means getting the prospect to come to your website, call your phone number, visit your brick and mortar location, provide contact information, or perhaps make an immediate purchase from your website.

Business doesn’t happen on social media, it’s where relationships are built.

The trick is to build the relationship and then make the jump over to the place where your business actually occurs.

Build into your social media campaigns clear ways for your followers to make that jump. That could be free giveaways that require entering contact info (which you’ll use to market to them via other channels like phone, email or physical mail) at a later time.

You can also use incentives or content to visit your website or come into your store.

3. Make the Sale

If the purpose of social media is to get leads, the purpose of leads is to sell stuff!

Sometimes, in the social media world, we forget that business is about making money.

Make the sale.

If you’ve built a solid relationship via your social media channels, this should be easy.

The folks who aren’t interested in what you’re offering wouldn’t have stuck with you this long.

As you provide information and build these relationships via social media, you filter out the folks who don’t want what you offer and you get down to a focused list of prospective customers.

That’s it.

Know where your leads come from, get them off social media and then sell them some stuff.

Dont do social media simply because its the thing to do.

Do social media because you have a specific purpose you want to accomplish and you know clearly what that purpose is.