The world of online marketing is a noisy place. Your prospects and clients are bombarded every single day with message after message from all angles. Standing out is hard, but there’s a secret to getting your company’s message noticed in this overcrowded world. Don’t sell (yet).
Life can be tricky for those tasked with managing social media, blogging and other forms of online promotion when ROI is measured by people who just don’t understand marketing.
When time spent on message creation and promotion equals X – for the bean counters and some backward thinking CEOs, sales made as a measurable outcome must equal Y to make the whole thing worth while.
And so the temptation (and often the instruction) creeps in to ensure every message has a call to action, a promotion or at least a product mention. The net result is often a boring, self-adulatory content platform which will have your audience turning off in droves.
But the smart thinkers are doing it a very different way.
Social media guru Gary Vaynerchuk has a book due for release in the autumn named “Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook”. Even without much preview information being available online at time of writing, it’s clear that what Gary’s going to be talking about is the process of softening up your prospects with small subtle hits (Jab, Jab, Jab) before delivering your killer blow (Right Hook).
Using a different analogy, picture a couple on a first date. Our couple have read one another’s profiles on a dating site and agree to meet for drinks. Our lady arrives at the bar having had her hair done and bought a new dress. As she sits down with her date for the evening ready to be asked what she’d like to drink, our ROI focused man shouts “my place or yours? – what’s your favourite position? – condoms were 3 for 2 at Boots – should we go … right now? In fact, let’s get married.”
Impressive chat (especially as it was all within 140 characters). I’m willing to bet that approach very rarely (if ever) works – but so many brands take exactly that approach to their social media.
What both our boxing and dating analogies are both saying is that to be a hit with your audience, to get their trust and become a worthy company with whom to engage, you have to be gentle, charming and not go in for the kill at the earliest opportunity. In simple terms, if you have 10 posts, you should break them down roughly as follows:
2 out of 10 – original content that you’ve written yourself, from scratch, or with the help of a content marketing agency.
5 out of 10 – content that you’ve curated from around the web (ideally having passed comment or said why you’re sharing)
2 out of 10 – news from within your own company, be it product updates, new hires, client wins (stuff that’s interesting but not salesy)
Only 1 in every 10 posts should be a sales message.
Through delivering useful, relevant and entertaining content 9 out of 10 times, your audience will forgive you for selling to them. They will barely notice that you’ve polluted their feeds with your promo item and will probably give it a read, now that they trust you.
I agree that the ROI hungry managers I mentioned earlier will be less than impressed with your spending 90% of your time not selling. But hopefully this post will give you some of the ammunition needed to persuade them to stop selling and start building relationships.