What can social media do for MY business?

Welcome to another edition of social business unplugged, practical advice on how to leverage social media for your business. Now, the host of social business unplugged, author of the forthcoming book maximize your social published by Wiley and founder of windmill networking. Neal Schaffer. Greetings, everybody this is Neal Schaffer and welcome to another episode of social business unplugged. I hope you're enjoying this podcast from wherever you are listening in the world. I'm actually at my home office, because yesterday, believe it or not, I had arthroscopic surgery on my right knee from a torn meniscus, not to gross any of you out. But everyone in social media, you see us tweeting and blogging or what have you, we are real people who get injured as well. So today, I am in recovery mode. Day before my surgery, I had a chance to talk to actually a friend of my wife's friend, who is very, very new to social media. And he asked the question that I think comes up a lot. And some of you that are listening to this podcast are probably in the business of consulting or social media agency yourself. And some of you are really trying to figure out either how to get started or how to take your social media to the next level. So I'm hoping the advice that I gave this person will serve you all equally well, this person actually runs an import export business importing organic foods or organic ingredients from overseas. And he has been successful just launched the company about a year and a half ago, he was successful in the import and selling of these products to a certain chain of stores that specialize in Asian organic foods here in Southern California, they actually operate throughout the western United States. And now he wants to go from tackling the ethnic market to the whole foods, the sprouts, all these general supermarkets that specialize in organic or maybe high end foods like Bristol Farms. So the question that becomes, what can social media do for me now you have to remember, I meet a lot of startups, and I suppose this business has only been around for years. So I guess you can consider the startup and some startups never put much into marketing, but because of relationships, or because of just knocking on doors like this gentleman did, he was able to successfully launch his business, and now extend it by offering new product lines. So the question really becomes and I asked this of all my clients, and you need to ask yourself as well, how did you go about getting leads before social media? So can social media first of all help in that process. And obviously, if you're doing b2b sales, social media, we all know can be a great help starting with LinkedIn to try to find decision makers. And then by sharing and creating your own content to try to influence them, and is creating sort of icebreakers to start conversations with. And it also gives you a little bit of Google juice as well. So the others online may find out more about you and your company. But if we're trying to go from a b2b perspective, to a b2c perspective, we're trying to attack these new markets. And, you know, there's like a push pull approach, right, you have the approach where you're trying to connect with the Whole Foods, or the sprouts or whatever wild oats or whatever supermarket it may be. And there are many, many ways of doing that. There's also many, many ways of driving consumer demand. Now, the site that the gentleman is building also has an E commerce aspect to it. So he is starting that b2c. And once you start having ecommerce, you're now selling directly to people. And when you're selling directly to people, obviously, social media can play a very, very important role. But it also can add one thing that most companies forget is that if I wanted to bring online or new products, and that company itself is very, very strong in social media, that's going to be very attractive to me, right? This company, not only already has customers, but they have fans, and those fans are going to spill over. And it's going to be synergy with our own marketing our own social media program. And that's one of the pieces of advice I gave the gentleman is having a strong social media program is going to have positive influence when you negotiate with these companies, not just for your own ecommerce, but also to show that you are a respected brand that has a following. And therefore sales will follow very, very important for credibility these days, especially if you're a startup, the question then becomes well, how much is this going to cost? And how much am I going to get back from this? And as you all know, there is no one single answer. In fact, I quickly turned around and said, Okay, if you're going to advertise in a newspaper, advertise on radio, put up a website, how much you're going to get back from that, right? You don't know You don't know until you try. And it's only after part of the experiment of trying out different things, you begin to see, okay, if I put out a blog post, I know it's going to attract X number of new website visitors. And out of X number of new website visitors, I have an average conversion rate of 0.5%. And the average sale from someone who comes to my blog is $30. So that I know that if I write a blog post that is read by 500 people, and I have that sort of a conversion rate that's going to equal maybe $100 in revenue. It's that sort of calculation that you need at the end. The day for each type of marketing that you do on each channel to really drive the ROI home. But if you're not going to do social media, what are you going to do, it's going to cost a lot of money. The beautiful thing about social media, it's free. The problem is once you start outsourcing that social media, it's not free anymore. This is why and I think all you know, I've worked with agencies in the past, but I'm very passionate about empowering others to be able to do social media on their own. I like to empower social media agencies, social media consultants to help them out. But I also like to empower my direct customers, to help them do it on themselves to look for internal talent that can do it for them. And if they do want to go the outsourcing route, I have people that I've worked with that I highly recommend, in addition to that, as long as they own the strategy, they can definitely control the quality and the budget for what work is going to be done in terms of the social media. But yes, if you're trying to create relationships with people you've never met, it doesn't happen overnight. Why would social media be any different, it's going to require a constant daily presence, the presence doesn't have to take a long time, it's going to require a daily presence nevertheless, and it's going to require the creating of content, right, whether it's blogs, or photos or videos. And in the future, as your brand gets well known, you may not have to develop as much of your own content, and you can be curating the content of your fans, and sharing that with your communities. But it does require this sort of monthly expense. Now in the United States, from the latest figures I read, if you look at the marketing budgets of companies, they're spending between 10 to 20%, on social media, so I asked the gentleman, what's your marketing budget, you haven't had a marketing budget going forward. Think of once you have a marketing budget, you have a website, you're probably going to have paid ads, there's a social component to paid ads, paid social, which I'm a big evangelist for because I think it's extremely underutilized and inexpensive for what you can get out of it. But think about starting with 10 to 20%. Think about starting small, and what are going to be the immediate things you're going to find, well, number one, you're going to slowly build up a social media following, you're going to build up followers, and fans and those that circle you and what have you. So that's going to be one of the immediate results. The other result is, when you do that, in combination with creating more content, you're not only going to get new website visitors from social media, but you're going to start getting a lot more website visitors from Google, because the search engines will index your content. So you need to look at how these things trend over the course of a few months. On the other hand, you're going to have the indirect benefits of all these companies you're trying to sell into of checking out your social media properties, looking at what you're tweeting, who's engaging with you, how many fans you have maybe even looking at your Klout score, I don't know. And then you're also going to be able to use social media to find those direct clients to find them through LinkedIn, engage with them on Twitter, what have you. So I hope this gives you a very, very quick snapshot as to and maybe some of you, and I've been asked by many people, Neil, how do you convince businesses on social media? My answer is I don't, I don't waste time on that. If you haven't bought into social, you're going to be wasting your time, people and businesses have such strong feelings about social media, I only work with those businesses and people that have already bought into the fact that they need it. And therefore I don't waste my time on the sales cycle of trying to sell it to companies that don't understand that. But I'm sure even with that philosophy that I have, I still end up meeting people for the first time as this did as a sort of a pre sales opportunity. So I hope that that all makes sense. I hope that it's helped some of you and for others. It gives you a good holistic feeling for the way of how to think about social media as part of your total budget, your total marketing activities, and what can you see coming from it in the near future. That's all for today's episode of social business unplugged. I hope you'll join me again, hope you're subscribing on iTunes, rating this in iTunes and telling all your friends about it. Once again, if there's anything you'd like me to cover, please feel free to reach out to me on any of my social media channels or by email. Neal at windmill networking.com thanks again everybody. I'm gonna rest my knee until next week, hoping the swelling is done by then. Have a great day. Have a great week ahead and we'll speak to you again. Bye bye. Thanks for listening to another edition of social business unplugged. We appreciate your subscribing to our podcast. Please help us spread the word by sharing it on social media or adding your rating and comments in iTunes. If you would like to appear on the podcast or have content that you would like covered, please contact Neal Schaffer Neal at windmill networking.com Also please subscribe to the windmill networking blog on social media strategy at windmill networking.com Thanks again and make it a great day.