Please! Explain Why I Should Use Inbound Marketing? – SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING

Industrial Social Media Marketing Gets Your Message Out FAST.

Industrial companies are becoming more open to the idea of Inbound Marketing, but often when we start talking about social media marketing (SMM) as a critical component of that strategy, they are still resistant.  Perhaps the biggest problem is that they don’t use social media sites much themselves, so it is hard for them to see value in using them as a marketing tool.  Facebook?  That’s where their kids go to interact.  Twitter?  How can you say anything important in 140 characters or less?  LinkedIn?  If you make yourself too visible the head hunters will never quit calling you.  YouTube?  Isn’t that just for music videos?  And Google+?  What’s Google+?

Social media marketing  is becoming more and more relevant in the context of search engine optimization (SEO.)  If you think  regularly updated Google+ and YouTube pages don’t affect your Google search engine rankings … think again.  It may not take you from position 150 to position 1, but it will positively influence your rank.  And in case you haven’t noticed, social media posts are now showing up in search results.  Nobody knows exactly how Google’s algorithm works, but SEO’s are now definitely seeing a correlation between search rank and a web pages’s “share” factor.  (how many times it was shared on social media sites.)  It’s no longer enough to focus only on page titles, meta descriptions and building back-links to your website.  SMM is also SEO. In fact, when we talk to our industrial clients about social media, we explain that they should think of it as an SEO tool rather than social networking (although this varies from company to company.)

SMM’s SEO value is huge, but possibly more important are the ways it enables you to quickly and cost efficiently gain awareness and credibility for your company, or to promote a new product or service.  YOU may think LinkedIn is only for head hunters, but statistics prove otherwise.  The same is true for every pre-conceived notion you may have of social media.  Not every social media site may be right for your company, but I can just about guarantee that with a little effort, we can provide a list of  your potential customers that are on at least a couple of the social sites.  And by the way, joining LinkedIn groups where prospects in your industry are already engaging and interacting is one of the best ways for an industrial company to get noticed.

A major road block when it comes to industrial SMM is the fear factor.  What if we put up a Facebook page, and disgruntled employees who have left the company start making nasty comments on our page?  What if someone important (prospective customer) asks us a question on Twitter or LinkedIn, and we don’t see the post for a week?  By that time, he/she probably has a bad impression of us and has moved on to another company that can provide the answer.  And what about renegade employees?  People within the company that post things on our SM pages that are not “on brand” or that post things that don’t resonate with the image the company is trying to project?  Yes, all of these things are possible.  That’s why larger companies should work with a marketing firm that can help them develop a corporate social media policy.

Then there’s the time factor.  Setting up accounts, designing pages, then posting regularly on 4 or 5 social media sites does require time.  There are tools available to streamline the process and make it more efficient, but someone will still have to manage the overall execution.  In most industrial companies, everyone in sales and marketing wears many hats.  Taking care of business and customers will ALWAYS come before any marketing initiative, and certainly one as unproven as social media marketing.  Often when this is delegated to someone internally, it is finally seen as a collosal failure and waste of time – when the reason for the failure of the program was really that there was never enough time invested to make it successful.

The best advice I can give an industrial company that wants to implement an Inbound Marketing strategy but is unsure of how to handle SMM is to hire an experienced marketing firm to manage it for you.  The good ones include monthly metrics analysis and reporting as part of their service.  Month by month, as you begin to see the impact your SM program is having on search engine ranking, traffic to your website, and other KPI’s (key performance indicators), you may still not understand WHY it works; but at least you’ll see that it does have a significant impact on your Inbound Marketing.

Reason #4 why industrial companies should integrate Inbound Marketing into their marketing plans:  It is one of the fastest ways to increase awareness and credibility for your company and its products/services.