Social media marketing is about developing interesting content for your prospects and customers. It's like having a great party, inviting your guests over to have a great time, serving wonderful food and drinks, and being a great party host.
I doubt much at parties you walk around with a megaphone screaming at guests telling them how awesome you are and how they need to stop having fun to buy something from you.
If you did - you'd be a royal dick, and I'm never going to a party at your house.
But that's how 99% of social marketing is conducted by agencies and so called "social marketing experts".
It's also why most social marketing fails and why big brands are leery to invest any sizable amount of money in the channels (even when they're spending tens of millions in Facebook, I guarantee you they're spending hundreds of millions in television or "elsewhere") .
It's tragic.
I have a different take on social media than most "marketers" - social or otherwise.
Social Media isn’t easy. Nothing worth doing is. You have to work and you have to earn it. I strongly feel that there’s a gross estimation regarding the balance of talent and work ethic. Talent can only get you so far.
When you start to really understand what social media is today and where it’s going, you start realizing that social media is just the slang term for the current state of the internet and the conversations that people are having on it all day long.
Here’s the key statement: if you are a business or organization of any kind that wants to be heard in the world, refocusing on the content you put out on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube, Linkedin, Medium, and whatever else has the market’s attention at the time, is a huge factor.
Since social media marketing began, people have dismissed organic content because of the rise of paid advertising. Oddly enough, this happened in Google search as well. Originally, it was a big deal to have "paid ads" and those ads were preferred by people over organic listings, because people felt "well if someone's willing to pay to send their message to me, it must have some value."
Now, some ten years later, the opposite it true. Sponsored advertising has become outrageously expensive in Google, and thus now there is a focus on developing great organic content by companies, and looking at organic results by customers and prospects. The same is true in social media - the pendulum is swinging towards developing amazing organic content. As that pendulum swings towards saturation of paid social, the imperative to get very serious about the content that you put out in an organic way on social networks matters more. Why? Because it will become the most natural state of the internet. While the supply and demand shift for paid media become saturated (as it did with paid search around 2010), it leaves an incredible opening for the brands that make great content to grow the right way and ahead of their competitors.
What has emerged in the paranoia of everyone thinking social media only works when you spend money, is a lack of hustle and a lack of understanding that great content, especially when amplified in subtle ways, can be unbelievably effective.
Basically, here’s my overall belief: if you’re a small business, you want to focus on spending your time, money, and effort on creating great content (and a lot of it). You should be spending 80% of your marketing budget in a year on creating quality content and only 20% on paid amplification —not the other way around.
Why that 80-20 split? Because no amount of paid media is going to turn crappy creative into good content.
And that fact is a BIG deal - because it flips on its head what has historically been the relationship between content creation and media. For example, in television commercials, it's not uncommon to have a budget of $500K-1M for a commercial (a single run). That commercial is a mini-movie - complete with directors, producers, talent, etc. That may seem outrageous, but given that commercial is going to be placed in a media flight of $100-200M on major networks - it's not even 10% of the total marketing activity.
Now the media distribution is free (or virtually free). In YouTube, if I design an amazing video - it could be seen by 20-30-50M people in a month. To buy that same level of visibility on television, I'm looking at 50-100M dollars in media purchases.
But chances are, I'm not going to create an amazing YouTube video for free - so now the content COSTS way more than the media. As a result, advertising executives, marketers, and businesses, are completely in the wrong mindset. They're used to paying for massive media weight - when now, the real challenge, is developing engaging content that is worthy of the investment of TIME of someone parusing around online.
That takes talent. That takes effort. That takes money. That takes skills.
It maddens me to no end to think about the fact that most small business (and even A-list personalities) waste money a year on tactics like websites, PR, direct mail, or paid media when they could have just gone all in on organic social content and a small amplification budget to achieve more valuable results.
If you sell to younger customers, you need to understand is that quality content is so important to marketing to anyone under the age of 40 right now. Anyone in that demographic discovers a business for the first time by either: (A) Google searching or (B) finding their content on social media.
If you are not completely crushing it (creatively and in terms of audience cohesion) and focusing on the content that you put out on the most important social platforms, you’re going to become mute and obsolete in the modern day of doing business.
That’s why organic reach is so important because the impression you get when someone comes directly to your page is a much more qualified lead and potentially a more valuable customer than someone you got through an ad buy.
That's why I've partnered with some of the best artists, storytellers, and visual artists in the world. They have these skills to tell the stories and make engaging content that gets digested and shared. That may not seem like a great investment on your part - but a commercial runs once, and it's gone forever.
If you build an audience around valuable content that services the outcome they want the most - that's something that lasts forever, and grows in value over time as you continue to add to your repository of knowledge and content assets.
That's what sets me apart from all but a handful of the social media marketing talent out there. I build assets that attract audiences that build your business. Let's talk about what we can do together.