With endless tools at our fingertips and the entire world within our digital reach, creative marketing - especially social media marketing strategies - should be pretty much plug and play at this point, right? Easy breezy. But if it doesn’t feel that way to you, you are not alone. The ocean of options now available and the ever-emerging technologies at our disposal can indeed feel a little overwhelming, and knowing where to begin, like a shot in the dark.
Whether you are a marketer or an entrepreneur, making sense of your digital marketing solutions and all the advertising options available to you - while staying on top of trends and keeping the budget in check - is absolutely crucial, and critically hard.
We sat down with Jason Heiber, founder of Digital Marketing NYC, and author of the Amazon Best Seller, ‘Instagram Stories’, to talk about exactly that; how to run successful social media marketing strategies, without blowing the budget and losing your mind in the process.
We got him to share his winning three-step strategy, a master framework that Digital Marketing NYC runs day in and day out for their clients. It fuses content marketing (organic and paid), social media marketing, and email marketing, and an automation mechanism that can wrangle this beast and make your life a lot more simple.
“You need a simple strategy that you can run at scale - and without risk.” says Jason, “Now, I know that might sound like a major contradiction, as there is always risk involved with advertising - it's professional gambling of sorts - but the point is really how exactly can you provide long lasting and sustainable value to your client?”
Jason goes on to explain, that whether you are selling a product or a service, this should be your goal. How do you aim for the lowest hanging fruit and obtain what Jason calls, 'the digital hard assets'? How do you build assets that don't evaporate like paid ads that flop? And how do you leverage the over saturated but ever important platforms that everyone and their mother are using?
Big questions, with a three step answer.
Step 1
Create an offer and promote it.
Make this something that your prospective customer or client will likely have a high interest in. The closer the offer to your core product, the more value you stand to make from your collected email list later.
If you prefer to go the organic route, Jason's book, "Instagram Stories", is a guide to exactly that. It is an easy 2 hour read with actionable ideas and simple strategies aimed at cultivating organic growth.
On the paid side: Run Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn lead ads, ads designed to collect an email in a very easy form and fashion. The goal here is to design an offer that your audience will gladly sign up for - be it a percentage off, or a tool or service, or an informational download, for example. The goal is to keep the cost per acquisition as low as possible, and offset it against the value of your core offering.
A word of advice here, especially for social media marketing, would be to keep things social, entertaining and value rich. Remove friction, remove risk. Offer something your target audience wants and will instantly benefit from.
Think of this as digitally opening the doors of your shop or office to prospective clients, however, paid social media ads allow you to present your best self and give your best sales pitch, 24/7, always on, always running, even while the doors are closed and you are sleeping. That's powerful. Extremely powerful when combined with the integrated workflow mechanisms below.
Step 2
Now you create an automated email series in an auto-responder of your choosing - mailchimp for example - and transfer your collected emails into this.
Your series will then be automatically triggered every time someone is added to that audience, and you now have a powerful, ready to go email series, sent out to interested prospects, that will both nurture them and give you more opportunity to “talk” to them. This is where you can establish a relationship and communicate a message. Familiarity, after all, builds trust. And trust will, quite literally, pay out over time.
Step 3
Use Zapier to push emails on the front end, and add them to your automated email series inside your auto responder. You can build so called “zap's” using Zapier, that will automate the entire process of collecting the email sign ups on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, or any landing page, and send them straight into your mailchimp, or auto-responder account. Which then triggers the email series automatically.
See what we just did?
You now have a fully automated social media marketing strategy that runs on autopilot, is on 24/7, constantly bringing in business, all built off collecting an asset that you can continue to capitalize on for weeks, months, and maybe even years. Your auto-responder can be set to send emails over 12 months, and if you paid $1 to acquire that email, you now potentially have 12 months to make $2 dollars out of that prospect and make the spend worthwhile.
It sounds too simplistic perhaps, but it is here you will see tremendous results, and by using paid social media marketing strategies you will be able to create a fully automated system, that will literally run while you are sleeping, promoting your brand, product, or service - 24/7. That's where the true goldmine in social media marketing lies.
A social media marketing strategy can yield a rapid 4-10X ROI, straight out of the gate. Given that this strategy is built off these 'digital hard assets', that return on investment keeps growing.
"Increase your window of opportunity to succeed. Put the odds in your favor. Extend your marketing dollars...make ‘em last."
This social media strategy that will work for any e-commerce company as well as service providers. The real challenge is - as it often is with marketing - what do you have to do to capture that initial attention, and get your prospect to connect with you?
Some of the most successful examples Jason currently runs, give the prospect an immediate win at the click of a button. This is where you will have to get creative yourself. But take advantage of speed. Digital has literally changed how we play, and a single click in this day and age can mean some form of immediate value exchange, and that's what's expected now. “Think efficiency, ease, and value, and you will find the solution.” advises Jason.
Your organic social media strategy or initial paid ads are just the beginning, so while it’s important to focus on these, it can’t end there, and that’s the failing Jason claims to see far too often, even in very well established and highly efficient companies. It’s only by implementing the entire automated workflow that your social media strategy will yield success.
"Truth is," says Jason, "we live in a time of digital disruption that is changing the digital landscape almost by the minute - data, tech, computing power, and connectivity is impacting all industries, across the board, all the time. But don’t let it overwhelm you. Make it simple and make it work for you, then carve out a presence in that simplified space by being true to your product and true to your voice."
This is your digital real estate. Step up to it. I am sure you are aware of the riches in real estate, this is your time to claim your land in the digital space using effective and automated social media marketing strategies. There’s no avoiding it at this point, so simplify and crush it.
Watch this video to learn more about Jason's 3 step strategy:
