Congrats, you have a new website!
Now, people will flock to it out of thin air and buy from you, right? If you build it, they will come; that’s how the old saying goes. But as marketing author, Seth Godin likes to remind us, “Build it, and they will come” only works in the movies. Closer to the truth is something more like “build it, nurture it, engage an audience and they may come and stay.”
Before your brand can change lives, you first need to attract an audience. Then, it’s up to your marketing channels to convince consumers YOU can solve their issues (i.e. price, service, etc.) better than the closest competitor. In this day and age, you’re fighting an uphill battle if you’re not employing a multichannel marketing approach (paid and organic) to foster this depth of marketing engagement and encourage a conversion.
At the very least, you should be aligning your email marketing and social media strategies to support each other. These two channels are a match made in heaven and, when executed creatively, can get you closer to that dream world where prospects find you easily and click BUY. This stuff isn’t rocket science but when you have a lot on your plate, like many marketers do, exercising best marketing practices can seem overwhelming.
Read on to learn four simple ways you can start using email and social media in a multichannel marketing effort to help grow your business:
Craft, schedule, & auto-post content to all your social channels, then track analytics and manage interactions from a single, easy-to-use dashboard.
Some people rely on select platforms while others may dabble in them all. I’m on just about all of the social media platforms (Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube) and also use iContact for my marketing emails. You can cross-promote each platform and entice your audience to follow you on other platforms so that you can get your message to them no matter where they are.
Certainly, everyone knows cross-channel promotion is smart to do, but how many companies stop to ask their Facebook fans if they would also like to get email updates from them? And vice versa, by asking your email subscribers to follow you on your social accounts. Add your social icons to the bottom of your email and use a link to a sign-up form when posting to social media. Just be sure to provide as much of a unique experience as possible on each channel so as to keep your audience captive!
And when once hot social networks fall out of favor with the populace (R.I.P. Google+), never be afraid to replace it with a better suited network crowed by your best leads; always go to where the people are.
Why re-create the wheel? Once you create a great piece of content, you can chop it up, add to it, delete a little, turn it into a video, or use a video transcript so that you can tailor it as a unique piece of content for different channels.
Look at this scenario:
Just think of all the time you’ll save and all the content that you’ll have to share!
Stay in front of your audience by incorporating retargeting into your marketing strategy. You can take your email marketing list(s) and add them to Facebook or Twitter so that you can target them or create a lookalike audience (on Facebook) with ads.
Sometimes people just forget how awesome you are. You can nudge them to a conversion by reminding them why you are, in fact, pretty awesome. If you haven’t tried retargeting ads, you should. They’re easy to get a hang of and are an affordable ad option. But don’t just take my word for it, as Larry Kim explained it on our joint webinar and in several blog articles, retargeting ads double the chance someone will convert!
It’s become a ritual for people to start or wind down their day by systematically going through certain apps on their phones or tablets. For me, it’s Google News, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and then, my inbox.
It’s important to be where your audience is, and that means being in the apps they’re using every day, plus being on email. Email marketing is still the highest-performing marketing channel by far. By having a multichannel approach, you’ve now injected your brand into the mindless app-clicking behaviors of your audience and have the opportunity to grab their attention. Frequency makes a difference!
There you have it, the four ways that email marketing and social media can help grow your business. On the email marketing side, iContact can help. We offer a free trial as well as managed marketing services including, custom email design, content creation, and marketing metrics consultation. With unlimited sending and support, we’re ready to meet your email marketing needs.
This social media guest post is brought to you by Hank Hoffmeier, a marketing author, Loomly advocate, and Strategic Insights Manager at iContact. He loves helping small businesses and nonprofits crush it with email marketing.