Social media is an effective tool to help companies grow their business in several ways. This playbook offers specific examples that show how social media can help:

• Increase on-line visibility
• Gain market insight
• Improve search engine rankings
• Increase traffic to company websites
• Generate leads for your sales and marketing teams.

Increase Online Visibility

Let’s begin with on-line visibility. What is it? Visibility essentially means how easily you can be found… how easily can others see you. Traditional marketing methods generally focus on reaching customers… you do the work… while inbound marketing strategies help make it easy for your targets to find you. By boosting your own on-line visibility, you will:

• Attract more traffic to your vehicles
• Generate more leads
• Create conversations with your customers, the market and prospects, and
• Convert leads into customers

Gain Market Insight

Market Insight is important because it allows you to see what content from your company is being retweeted and being viewed on your social media channels like Twitter and Facebook. Let’s look at how you can obtain this insightful information in a matter of minutes.

This very basic concept tells you exactly what your customers and followers are interested in. When looking at market insight, make sure you monitor your total reach and analyze what is retweeted or viewed to determine which content is most interesting and useful to your audience. Let’s look at how you do that with Twitter and Facebook.

In the example below, all of the tweets from @charlikmatthews twitter account are monitored with the top tweets and the audience reached. To track your own tweets, you should take advantage of social media management tools like Hootsuite and SproutSocial that provide this report.

Facebook Page Insights illustrate how users engage with your pages. Facebook automatically sends you a report each week of your key metrics. You should look at:

• Engagement rate. This is the percentage of people who clicked, liked, commented or shared one of your posts. By tracking post performance you can optimize your content based on what drives fan engagement.
• This is the number of people who saw your post, including organic and paid, as well as fans and non-fans. Sharing engaging content will help boost reach among non-fans.
• Optimal posting time and type. Knowing when fans are online and the type (photo, video, etc.) of posts with high engagement rates can help optimize your content strategy. Meaning, give your followers more of what they like!

Improve Search Engine Rankings

Search Engine Optimization, or SEO as it is commonly referred, is more than just a buzz phrase in the marketing world. This process of optimizing the content on your company website and the content generated for social media posts has a critical impact on its effectiveness. It’s not enough anymore to just have a company website with a lot of words and pictures to describe your company and its products and services. Keywords are terms people…YOUR CUSTOMERS… use to search for information, products or services they need.

Start by working with your marketing team to develop a list of key words and phrases in your industry. You will want to use those words in your on-line copy as possible. They serve as trigger points for people searching for information.

Help your customers and prospects find you by optimizing your content. Work to create as many reciprocal links as possible from trusted sites on the web, including as trade magazines that you may already be advertising. A person searching typically clicks on one of the links within the first or second page. If your company website doesn’t come up on those first two or three pages, you have work to do.

Increase Traffic to Your Website

The more people visiting your site… the more opportunities you have to create a new relationship. Google Analytics is a great tool and can help you identify traffic patterns on your web site to show you how many people are visiting your site, where they are spending the most time on your site, etc.

As you begin to look at your site’s most popular pages, you can get a better understanding of the content on your site that is successful and those pages which might need to be reworked to achieve better results. You can also learn to direct people to the content you want them to see. Most advertising packages typically include online banner ads. Make sure to link those banner ads to landing pages on your website that will generate leads.

Generate Leads

Make your website work for you. If your company has a website that currently acts as an informational tool (essentially a digital brochure), consider reinvesting in the site to make it a lead generating tool! Here’s how:

• Host and post information about seminars and webinars… people love to learn!
• Offer a newsletter…. That will help you create new and fresh content on a regular basis.
• Encourage visitors to post comments…. it’s great tool to learn first hand what is on people’s minds.
• Write a blog…. build your industry thought leadership by voicing an opinion on trends impacting your customers.
• Provide useful information in the form of white papers, case studies, and how to videos… help your customers do their jobs better.

The secret is to create landing pages where your new potential customer exchanges their contact information in order to sign up for a seminar, register for a webinar, subscribe to your newsletter, download a white paper or technical guide, or access how to videos for exclusive members.

For assistance with your social media marketing, please contact www.EmpoweringPumps.com to learn more about how we support social media marketing within the pump industry.