Outsourcing is a common obstacle for entrepreneurs looking to scale their brand.
In the early stages of building an eCommerce business, you're responsible for virtually everything, but as your business starts to evolve, it's imperative that you evolve with it. Entrepreneurs don't have the luxury of excess time and the vast majority of your focus should be spent on the high-value tasks within your business, but that doesn't mean that less strategic, but still important, tasks and projects can sit idle.
While planning and strategies will boost your sales and generate revenue, finding ways to delegate and automate other tasks - including maintaining your social media presence - can help keep your business efficient and organized.
In this post, we'll look at:
- Best practices for creating a consistent social media regimen
- How to automate and delegate your social media processes
Role of Social Media in the Buyer's Journey
Before you start creating arbitrary content, it's important to understand the dynamic of your "buyer's journey".
In an eCommerce business, your target audience will fall into one of three main marketing platforms:
- Social Media
- Blog
Each of these platforms presents a unique environment to their users. Your primary focus as a marketer is to gradually move your prospects down each sequence of the buyer's journey.
- Social media - Your fans are interested in your content, but they probably aren't ready to purchase your products. People on social media want to learn about fun and interesting topics that appeal to them. Your content should focus on directing them to your blog.
- Blog - This your own personal website that will serve as the hub of your marketing efforts. When someone visits your blog, you can educate them about the backstory of your brand. Your articles should appeal to the unique benefits of your core value proposition. The primary goal of blogging is to convert your visitors into prospects.
- Email - When someone becomes a subscriber to your e-mail list, they're providing you with a direct connection, enabling you to market your products and services more directly. This is the last step of the "Buyer's Journey", and the one which will likely account for the vast majority of your revenue.
The first step in creating content for any of the above platforms is to determine the core needs and desires of your audience. Finding answers to the following questions through surveys and market research will help inspire ideas for content creation:
- What are the specific goals that they want to achieve?
- What are the obstacles that are preventing them from making any tangible progress?
Take as much time as you need to figure out the core benefits that your audience is looking to glean. If you have an email list, you can use surveys to garner this information. If your list is too small, get on the phone and call your customers. If you don't have any customers, then search the popular forums in your niche for prospects.
Knowing your positioning is an integral part of your marketing campaigns. The content of your social media updates, blog posts, and email newsletters will be predicated on the core needs of your audience.
Baiting the Line: Social Media
Your social media content should be succinct and thoughtful; fans don't want to spend hours of their time reading an in-depth report. Instead, they're looking to consume digestible content that provides immediate benefits.
Choose The Right Social Media Platforms
Before you start creating content, you need to first determine the social channels that are conducive to your niche.
A quick and efficient way to do this is by modeling the authority brands in your industry - analyze the social media campaigns of three to five prominent businesses, and then answer these questions below:
- Which social media channels are garnering the most engagement with their fans?
- Is their content being delivered through video, image, text, or a combination of them all?
- What trends are resonating with their audiences?
There's no need to reinvent the wheel with social media. A common mistake that marketers make is to scatter their efforts across a range of channels. This approach is seldom effective because it inhibits you from focusing on the networks that actually matter. The above three questions will give you insights into the social media platforms that you should leverage in your business.
For example, the fashion industry goes hand in hand with visual appeal, meaning image-based platforms like YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook will likely generate better results for businesses in this niche. On the flip side, in more professional niches such as law, insurance, and accounting, personal interaction is a more important facet; social media channels like LinkedIn and Twitter will provide more opportunities to reach audiences in these spaces.
Regardless of which social channels you leverage for your business, it's absolutely paramount that you form an understanding of the behaviors and attitudes of your followers. Keep in mind that in the early stages of building relationships with your prospects, the vast majority of your fans will simply be interested in your message or content, and won't be ready to purchase your products and/or commit to joining your email list.
Reeling Them In: Outsource Your Social Media Regimen
Once you've defined the key social media channels for your business, you can then begin delegating your content. In general, "rich content" (including videos and podcasts) can be repurposed into other content and shared on social media channels. Summarizing the core concepts of a video, course, or article doesn't usually have to be done by an expert in your space.
This strategy can be implemented with virtually any social media platform. Some examples include:
- Facebook - The headline of your video can be used as the lead-in to your status
- Instagram - Snippets of your content can be re-purposed into several short videos
- YouTube - Videos can be uploaded directly, and then summarized in the "Video Description" and "Tags" tabs
- LinkedIn - Posts can include succinct descriptions of the video content
- Twitter - The headline of the video can be used in the 140 character posts
Outsourcing your social media content regimen will require the contractor to become acquainted with your content, posting format, and social media schedule. In my opinion, investing a couple of weeks in training an employee is well worth the time and effort that you'll save yourself moving forward.
Assess Your Catch: Track Your Social Media Metrics
Metrics will help you identify the behaviors of your target audience. Though it may seem counterintuitive, the quality of your social media fans is more important than the quantity - your goal should be to build an engaged following that actually responds to your content. An active fan page of 20,000 people will generate more revenue than an idle page with 100,000 fans.
There are a few key metrics that should be tracked within your social media campaigns:
- Valid followers - If you stay consistent with a social media regimen, then your fan base should gradually increase. You can track your overall growth percentage by recording the number of new followers that you acquire each month.
- Post Reach - Every popular social media website has its own unique analytics tools. These insights will help you identify the specific types of content that are resonating with your fans. Monitor your post reach on a weekly basis, and pay attention to the trends that are working well.
- Post Engagement - Each month, document the engagement rates of your posts. If you're using Facebook, record the amount of Likes and shares that you've received. This'll give you insights on the optimal days and times to post each week.
- Conversions - This is usually the most important metric to document. Recording your conversions will detect the part of your sales funnel that needs improvement. Let's assume that your audience isn't responding to the opt-in that you're offering - if this is the case, then consider modifying your landing page and not your social media content.
A simple free tool such as Google Analytics will track click through rates, leads conversions, and sales conversions for social media. Track your conversions on a weekly basis so that you give people enough time to respond but can also act relatively quickly in changing content or social media strategy.
If you can't measure something, then it's virtually impossible to determine whether it's working. Tracking metrics in a Google spreadsheet is a task that can easily be delegated to an employee, contractor or intern; all it requires is a planned out regimen and training time.
One of the best ways to save time with the latter is to record a video on your computer screen as you go through the motions of tracking the metrics; this video can be easily shared with a long-distance contractor or employee and referred back to for clarification after training.
Closing Thoughts
Implementing a solid social media regiment and delegating these tasks will save you time and increase your bottom-line revenue over the long term. This is one of several areas in business where it's possible to "get more done by doing less". Focus on the highest value activities in your business, and consider delegating everything else.