Marketing your business takes work. Throw in social media as a major component of that effort, and it takes a tremendous amount of work. It also takes capital. Whether you handle your marketing in-house or hire a firm to do it for you, it’s an investment from which you should expect a return.
Before you spend your hard earned money, choose wisely and ask yourself: Would You Invest in This?
The Get Rich Quick Marketing Company
For a modest amount of cash, the GRQ Marketing Company promises to deliver 300 twitter followers/month, daily likes and fans on Facebook, and new LinkedIn connections that will not only connect with you, but give you a recommendation for your work. GRQ will also write all of your blog posts and deliver comments for each and every one.
What’s more, they will guarantee that you’ll get lots of “chatter” and love for your social accounts. They’ll even crank out an email newsletter each and every month to over 20,000 people who are ‘just your type’. You get all of this without you having to do anything, nothing at all.
Your social media program will be the envy of your cohorts and competition.
Small Investment + Fans and Followers = Successful Return, right?
Keep in mind that all of your followers gained by this company, by your investment in GRQ do not really know your company, did not seek it out on their own, and will not likely hire you to do business. The blog posts? They’re a mix of ‘scraped’ content from feeder sites or libraries of industry news; they are not what you would call original material. The comments are, as you can imagine, from paid folks who say the right things but who are not there for your material, nor are they acting on all of those ‘calls to action’ GRQ set up for you.
Other than a lot of “wow, you’re all over Twitter and Facebook now,” your investment in this social media company will result in absolutely NO new business. Moreover, it could quite possibly result in a negative Return on that Investment, not a positive one.
The Integrated Marketing for You Company
Along comes a new choice. Before you shell out money, the IM4U Company wants to meet with you to discuss your business, your current and past marketing efforts, what worked and what didn’t and why you want to now venture into social media. Before IM4U takes on your account, they also want to take a peek under the hood – check out your analytics and online accounts. Within a few days, IM4U returns with a recommended course of action and is ready to get started.
Brace yourself, there is no promise of a certain number of twitter followers, nor is there a promise of new ‘likes’ or LinkedIn recommendations. There is a promise to match the marketing efforts to your goals, to actively engage your community, and create content that results in new leads and sales.
IM4U meet with you, your sales staff, your customer service representatives, and anyone else that touches or comes into contact with your customer or target market in order to create content that tracks with the overall plan. They evaluate their progress with metrics tied to their campaigns, regularly communicating those results.
The Better Investment
You’re beginning to see a return on your investment in the way of increased sales leads, positive sentiment, higher quality leads and prospects, and, a shorter sales cycle. You even have new followers and fans, real ones that can turn into leads. What you also see is that IM4U is actually investing in your company and that makes all the difference.
The other company? Not so much.
Before you invest your money, investigate the long term yield over the short term glory and ask the tough questions. If the firm can’t answer them, or better yet, answers them too quickly with numbers and likes, watch your money. By the way, the same goes for the firms providing the service. If the client wants the numbers and likes, keep walking.
Image found via Flickr.
[...] might also think I’m referring simply to results or the business bottom line. Lord knows I’ve written enough about them lately to make you think that. But that’s not it either. That’s certainly part [...]