Social Media Marketing Revolution

A lot of marketers have all sorts of wrong ideas about social media marketing. Some think that you only need to post “viral content” to get tons of traffic overnight. They actually believe that if you are able to pump that much traffic to your target website, a large chunk of those people will buy whatever it is that you are selling.

Maybe you’re selling services, maybe you’re selling an event, or maybe you are selling products from an online store, it doesn’t matter. According to this idea, you just need to have a lot of traffic; courtesy of viral content on social media, and you will get the conversions you’re looking for.

There is an assumption that social traffic, regardless of which platform it comes from and regardless of how you qualify that traffic, converts to sales readily. Sadly, none of these assumptions are true. In fact, all of them are tragically mistaken.

If you believe in any of these, don’t be surprised if you spend a lot of time, effort, and money only to end up with a whole lot of nothing. Welcome to the club.

Effective social media marketing can be reduced to one metaphor. Master this metaphor and you probably will make money on autopilot with social media traffic. Screw up this metaphor or remain clueless to it, and you’ll continue to struggle; you’ll continue to believe that social media traffic can easily be generated through viral content. You might keep running after that unicorn only to get tired and frustrated.

It doesn’t have to be this way. You just have to have the right metaphor or the right conceptual model to make social media marketing work for you. Best of all, you can make it work on autopilot.

You probably have heard of all sorts of “set it and forget it” systems. You probably bought at least one of these products. Well, they’re definitely on the right track as far as their label. Social media marketing can be automated. It can be mastered to the point where it can produce income after you’ve set it. But getting there is another matter entirely. And that’s the price people have to pay.

And unfortunately, most people are not willing to pay for that. They’re excited about shortcuts, but they’re not willing to take the stairs to get to the top. At the back of their minds, they’re thinking that there has to be some sort of elevator.

There is no shortcut. You have to work with this metaphor

What am I getting at? Well, the secret to effective social media marketing is an inverted pyramid. It looks like a funnel. That is the metaphor you should have in your mind when thinking of ways to get traffic from social networks and social media platforms and turning that into cold, hard cash in your bank account.

I need you to keep this idea of an inverted pyramid in your mind. It should have a wide base at the top. The top of that pyramid is heavy visibility. It has to be there. You need to be visible on the four major social media platforms. I’m talking about Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and LinkedIn.

Taken together, the traffic volume you can get from these four platforms is mind-blowing. They can potentially pump a tremendous amount of traffic. But that’s just part of the equation. That’s just the top of the funnel. Potentially, you can push a lot of traffic from the top. That’s how wide the top of the funnel is.

This training will focus on these four platforms, but you can pretty much use the tips that I am going to share with you and modify them to market on other platforms since many of these principles easily apply.

You might need to modify them a little bit. For example, if you are thinking of marketing on Instagram, a lot of the things that I will teach you about Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and LinkedIn, can be tweaked to work well on the Instagram platform.

Now that you have a clear idea of the heavy visibility that you can achieve with social media, keep in mind that visibility does not mean traffic or clicks to your site. This is a myth. The visibility that I’m talking about means visibility on those platforms.

When people share your content within those platforms, you can enjoy a tremendous reach within such platforms.

But this does not automatically mean that when you share content on Facebook, people who see your link on the materials shared by their friends would automatically click them.

Get the idea out of your head that raw visibility, or as Facebook terms it, “reach,” automatically translates to traffic. It does not work that way. Instead, you need to start with heavy content visibility on each platform. People must see your stuff there. You must achieve a wide enough reach.

People may not necessarily click on through to your site, but that is secondary. At this point, you just want your brand to be visible. You just want people to become familiar with your brand.

So, what is the big deal about visibility anyway? You may be thinking since visibility does not mean actual visitors to your website, what good is it?

Think about it this way, when was the last time you saw an ad for the first time and automatically clicked it? If you are like most other people, you probably would want to see the ad show up a few times for you to become familiar with it. You might glance at it from time to time, you might read the description from time to time, but after enough showings, you might seriously think of clicking through.

The same applies to your content on social media platforms. Do not expect that just because you come up with catchy titles and nice, attention-grabbing graphics that this is enough for you to expect a tremendous number of clicks to your website. It does not work that way.

People must be comfortable enough. Your content must become familiar enough for them to click on it.

When audience members click on the content you share through your social media accounts, they get a chance to like your page, follow your Twitter feed, pin your posts, or subscribe to your YouTube channel. They still stay on the platform, but they get a chance to subscribe to your account or follow you.

This is the second stage of the social media funnel or inverted pyramid. You must develop some sort of in-platform credibility. Your content is not just this random material that came out of nowhere. Even if people do not click on it, they see enough similarity in terms of branding, graphics, as well as other content cues so that your brand stands apart from everybody else’s.

Again, they may not necessarily be motivated to click, but with enough repetition through social media channels targeting certain topic categories and hashtags, your brand does not remain an unknown quantity.

Once you have people checking your content out through your social media accounts, you can then send them “call to action” content (CTA). This content recruits’ people to your mailing list. This social content that you are sharing offers some sort of incentive.

Maybe you are giving away a free booklet, maybe you are giving away software— whatever the case may be, there is some sort of giveaway to incentivize people to click on that link, enter their email address, and join your mailing list.

Whether you use freebies, special content, special free tickets to an online webinar that is pre-recorded, it does not really matter. Whatever the case may be, the endgame is to get people to join your list.

The End Game

When you look at the funnel, the endgame is to get people to that narrow end of the funnel. At that end, you are not necessarily getting them to click on an ad to buy something. You are doing something far more valuable.

Instead, you are calling them to action, so they join your list. You are converting your social media reach, meaning, the top end of the funnel, to list membership, which is at the very narrow point at the bottom of the inverted pyramid. This is where the magic happens. Once people join your list because you have successfully incentivized them to enter their email on your squeeze page, you get a tremendous opportunity to build a long-term sales relationship.

That is really the best way to describe it because when people give you their email addresses, what they are really telling you is that they trust you enough to want to have a business relationship with you.

This means you should not abuse that relationship. You should not send them garbage. You should not send them spam. And by spam, I am talking about material that is not related to the topic of your list.

Stay on message. Because if you can do this, you would have a tremendous opportunity to shape the conversation and continue to sell and convert your list, not just once, not just twice, but over the long haul.

There are many successful list marketers who make seven figures every single year, and all they have is a mailing list. It all depends on how you build that list, who is on that list, and what you are selling on that list.

Regardless of how you cut it, you can turn what would otherwise be a huge amount of social media reach into a loyal list. This is the secret to effective social media marketing.

You probably have not heard this before. I would not be surprised because many social media marketing books out there trying to trick you into thinking that you just need to harvest all this traffic from social media so people can click like monkeys on the ads on your website.

Maybe that worked when Facebook 1st launched nationally. It does not work today. Sadly, this is where too many marketers fail. They screw this up.

Now that you know the secret, here is some bad news. This is precisely the point where too many marketers screw up. When they are sending social media content, they promote their squeeze page directly. Although the squeeze page gives away freebies and incentivizes people to sign up, this is too much too soon.

And, not surprisingly, a lot of these marketers burn through a lot of exposure just to get people to their list. Worse yet, when these people join their mailing list, they are completely unprepared. They do not know what to expect, they’re not properly conditioned, a lot of them are not even fully qualified to become list members.

So, what do they do? They end up doing a whole lot of nothing. This is the worst kind of list member.

It’s much better to just have a very tiny list because if you have a huge list and almost everybody doesn’t do anything to put money in your pockets, you’re going to be paying for those list squatters’ month after month.

Alternatively, you might attract list bouncers. These are people who join your list just to get whatever premium you are offering, download it, and then promptly unsubscribe. They have effectively bounced from your list.

Effective Social Media Marketing

Effective social media marketing means using your social media traffic and highly effective content shared on social media to build successful relationships. Your email list is going to be the platform you will use to convert the relationships made possible through all that social media traffic. You’re essentially creating highly targeted mailing lists using content shared on targeted channels on social media. This is the secret to effective modern social media marketing.