Digital Marketing for Skeptics

Lesson #2

How well does social media marketing work?

Welcome to Lesson #2. Did I convince you that you need to have some sort of online presence for your B2B business? Let’s take a look at our current online options, starting with social media.

Listen to Lesson 2

One Thing to do Right Now – Take 5 Minutes

LOG ONTO one of your social media accounts (Linked In, Twitter, Facebook, etc.).

Look for some DATA on your posts – the number of comments, likes or views of a recent post of yours, or the number of followers you have.

WHAT POSTS get the most engagement?

If you don’t post at all on social media, then spend five minutes READING POSTS online and think about what type of post or content catches your attention the most.

Listen

You can listen to Lesson 2 by clicking the play button to the left of the audio player here, or read the content below.

Homework

Things to think about from Lesson #2:

What does your current engagement rate look like for any of your social media posts?
Which posts of yours had the highest engagement rate?
Were they articles? Or videos? Your own original content? Something you shared?
And what kind of budget are you comfortable spending to increase the number of people who follow you or see your posts?
How can you measure the return on that investment?

Digital Marketing for Skeptics

Lesson 2 – How well does social media marketing work?

Hi there, and welcome to “How well does digital marketing work? Social Media.” This is the second lesson in the series, so hopefully you have already listened to Lesson #1 Why Do We Need Digital Marketing?

This is Kelly Berry again, your resident skeptic.

In the first lesson we discussed the fact that most of us prefer to do business with people that we know, like and trust – through personal connections and referrals. But research shows us that B2B customers spend a significant amount of time online vetting companies they might do business with. So we can’t avoid an online presence altogether.

In this lesson, we’ll look at some data relating to online engagement. Or more specifically related to social media posting and marketing. How successful is this digital marketing option at finding new customers?

Do you use social media for your business?

Let’s start with organic social media.

Do you post any news items or company press releases on social media? Perhaps Linked In or Twitter? Do you get much engagement from those posts? For social media, we measure engagement with an “engagement rate”. This is a formula that adds up all the likes, comments and shares from your post, divided by the total number of followers to your social media page.

Engagement rate = (SUM OF ALL YOUR LIKES, COMMENTS, SHARES of a Post) / TOTAL # FOLLOWERS

What do you think your engagement rate looks like? Have you ever looked it up on Linked In or Facebook? If you post for your business you should be able to find this information.

Facebook is the most popular platform for marketing – but not always the ideal one for B2B. Its engagement rate is 0.27%. That’s right – about one quarter of one percent. So if you have 1000 followers on your Facebook page, less than 3 of them will like, share or comment on your post.

Instagram has been growing in popularity, even for B2B. And it currently has the highest engagement rate at 1.16%.

Linked In, perhaps the ideal B2B social media platform does better than Facebook, but still not great at 0.35% – so just over one quarter of one percent.

And finally Twitter – unless you are a politician, the engagement rate is very low, with an average of 0.07%.

Think about what these numbers are telling you – of the people who are ALREADY following you, on average, less than 1% actually engage with your posts on social media. These people already know you exist and they still aren’t engaging with your posts.

How much time do you spend on posting on social media? Can you look up your engagement rates to see which posts had the most success? Is this something you track regularly? Does it drive your content or frequency of posting organically?

Now let’s consider what might happen if instead of just posting on social media, you paid to increase the number of people who see your posts?

Paying to Increase Engagement on Social Media

Let’s move on from organic social media engagement to social media marketing. At least here you are trying to reach contacts that don’t already know about you.

Here are some current stats on the use of social media marketing:

#1 – The average cost per mille (or cost per one thousand impressions) is $4.33. Bear in mind that isn’t cost to obtain a customer – but a cost to get 1000 people – hopefully potential customers – to see your ad.

#2 – The average click through rate (or CTR) looks at those who click on an ad and go to your website or landing page. The average CTR for social media marketing is 1.3% (# clicks / total impressions)

#3 – The average spend on social media marketing is $4000 to $7000 per month or $48,000 to $84,000 per year. But if we break this down a bit, businesses with under 20 employees typically spend far less – closer to $2500 a month, or $30,000 a year. And those with over 50 employees might spend $100,000 or more.

How do you compare?

How does this compare to your spend on social media marketing? What return do you get on this investment? And what percentage of your total marketing budget is spent on social media marketing?

So after all this information – who is super excited about social media as a great way to grow your business?

Maybe it’s time to explore some alternatives. In the next lesson, we’ll take a look at Search Engine Optimization.