Another delightful cartoon from the great Tom Fishburne…cruelly pointing out a reality of modern day marketing. Worth reading the full post at social marketing hype.
In fact, Tom is a little more sympathetic to social media marketing than the title might suggest.
The reality remains, however, that despite all the hype and buzz, social media marketing is not delivering for most people. There are a number of reasons for that. Firstly, there’s really no such thing as “social media marketing”. Social media is, as the name suggests, a channel or media-type that can be used for the purpose of marketing. Like any other media, it has it’s own unique features along with advantages and disadvantages when it comes to marketing.
When it comes to getting marketing results, the same rules apply to social media as any other channel. And the only way to actually get worthwhile and ongoing results is to apply tested marketing principles…whatever the media channel.
If you must use social media (and there are good reasons why it is not necessarily the best use of your resources and attention) then a good place to start is…
… the No B.S. Guide to Direct Response Social Media
Contrary to what many think, Dan Kennedy is NOT against the use of social media channels for marketing. However, he does most definitely insist that any media must (1) Produce clear and measurable RESULTS and (2) Those results must deliver a worthwhile “Return on Investment”. In other words, it must be suitable for the application of direct response style marketing. Now it’s fair to say that Dan does not see social media as a good match for direct response style marketing and so it would not be his first choice. However, if you do decide to use social media as part of your marketing mix, this book sets out how Dan recommends you go about it.
The book is co-authored with Kim Walsh-Phillips who runs Elite Digital Group, a direct response social media agency. She’s also a fully paid-up member of the GKIC world and at the time of publishing also runs GKIC’s social media marketing campaigns. So the format of the book is that Dan provides the “Big Picture” strategy and Kim delivers the more detailed “How-To” of implementing through social media channels.
The book contains 16 chapters, along with an introduction, the usual author bios and the obligatory GKIC introductory offer. Unlike most other books in the “No B.S.” series, there isn’t a section on “Additional Resources” or guest chapters. There are additional sections in some chapters from other experts, but these are relatively short.
Somewhat unusually, most chapters are divided into two sections, one written by Dan and the other by Kim. Each chapter also has a summary at the end of “#NoBSsm Tweetable Takeaways”.
To recap, this book is all about how to implement a direct response marketing approach through social media. It starts out with a recap of basic principles of direct response marketing. For experienced marketers, much of this will be revision. The authors then move on to the details of setting up a marketing funnel through the steps of lead capture, follow up and conversion. I was a little surprised to see that email plays a large role in the overall strategy…but on reflection that makes perfect sense.
The sections by Kim on the details of implementation contain plenty of examples and illustrations that make it easy to grasp what to do.
Of the different social media channels, Facebook is the one featured most prominently. There is a short section on LinkedIn but very little on other channels such as Twitter or YouTube.
One of the big takeaways from the book for me is that it’s not easy to make worthwhile returns from social media marketing (some people do, of course). Kim Walsh-Phillips is very open about the need for ongoing monitoring and adjustment of campaigns and you’re left with the impression that this is an area for experts.
Overall, the great value of the book is demystifying the topic of social media and showing how it can be used to get worthwhile results. It provides a great service in showing what NOT to do and hopefully will save a great many marketers much wasted time, effort and money. For experienced marketers, most of this will not be new but there are enough specialist tips and insights to make this worthwhile for anyone using or planning to use social media in their marketing.
What’s outlined in the book won’t magically solve all your marketing problems…
…but it does give you a proven approach to get a worthwhile return on the money you might invest in marketing through social media.