Marketing Runs Deep: Episode 9

Hey everybody, this is Bryan, CEO and founder of AutomateBIG and welcome to another episode of Marketing Runs Deep. I look forward to teaching you a little more about a favorite topic of mine that has expanded my world. You see, when I started my marketing career, I was very interested in marketing at a general level and then I got interested in tools, like technology you could use to be able to automate and make your marketing run, work for you very well.

When I got deep into that, I found, you can't just do the technology that I talk about or the technology spans quite a wide variety of systems of software. Still, at the same token, marketing automation to make you money and sales, there's this funny thing called social media that a lot of people have ignored and now no one can ignore. There are still businesses that do ignore it, which I think is interesting. I also understand that it's not an easy pill to swallow; there's a lot of work that has to go into your social media. I want to be able to dive in today, teach you some special points about where does social media fit in, where does it fit into your marketing mix and how do you make it work for your business?

Let's jump right in. First and foremost, the thing to remember in social media is that there are many ways to do it now. There's advertising, they're also organic posts, right. On your organic side of the fence, that's the one I find that more people have a struggle with. Advertising, most people understand that even if you're not using it. It's like, "Okay, I put an ad out that gets people to click on and then when they click on it, I have to give them to a page where I'm going to sell them something or get them to opt-in." So that is the system for an ad on social media. I think that's pretty straight forward.

The organic side, even though everybody sees these posts and says, "Okay, I'm going to emulate that social media figure or that influencer and I'm going to do what they do." You can't always replicate that in the same way because sometimes you've got to realize your following might not interact the way theirs does. You've got to interact in a way that's going to help your audience.

Where social media fits into your business is so critical. You see, it comes back to a point that I've discussed before, and that is when you have more eyeballs looking at what you're doing, the better you're going to do. I mean, I know that doesn't sound like rocket science because it's not. Realize that if you personally are not, and you don't have enough people looking at what you're doing, then it doesn't matter. That's why a lot of people don't scale up their social media, especially on the organic side. Because they're like, "Okay, I've got like a few hundred followers. Okay great. But, every time I post, no one cares." True because no one does care at this point. But if you want to get people to care, then you have to do something more.

For the organic side, I just want to dive in deep. The goal is that your audience is large enough that when you say something, people take action, that's the whole of social media. That's really the whole of most businesses. If you have a business and you say, "I want to share a message with the world." Or, "I have a product or a service I want to share with the world." Then you want people to take action when you share that message, so get a bigger audience and social media is a phenomenal way to do that. At its core you need to have content that people will comment on and share.

Those are the two most important things, regardless of anything else. Yes, you want people following you, you need more people to follow you. Followers come because other people are sharing what you put out there. If what you share isn't making people want to comment or making people want to share that with their friends, then you need to rethink how you're approaching the organic side of your social media. Capeesh, we good on that? That's a critical part. The organic side of social media fits in because even if it takes you five years to get 40,000 followers, 100,000 followers, 200,000 followers or a million followers; when you get there, you will have a platform that when you speak into it, people will do something... if you train them that way.

That's a good caveat. That's a good thing to note because if you don't train them that way, then it won't be that way. I do know people that have a couple hundred thousand followers. What they do is, they share a post to get a lot of people to like that post, then they go say, "Hey, join me on my webinar." Or, "Look at my product." Or, "Check out the thing that I'm offering." They might get upset because it's not like what they were sharing. Right, so you have to train them. You do need to provide valuable content on the organic side, but you don't train them so well that the only thing you do is fluffy, organic, valuable add like give them something to take action on. Make sense?

So that's where it fits in. If you have a big platform of people that are following you, you make a lot of money and have the opportunity to influence a lot of lives, which matters a lot. The advertising side of social media states the same thing.

Here's the thing that not everybody thinks, maybe you do think about, but I don't think that it's as well-spoken in the industry. It is that when you have multiple thousands or millions of followers, it gives you access to things you didn't have access to before. What I mean by that is you have people that reach out to you, you have relationships that come to you, you have opportunities that come to you that wouldn't, if you didn't have those platforms. I mean, take a YouTuber that has been on YouTube for five years, then all of a sudden their channel hit some stride and was doing really well and now they've got a lot of followers and now they're getting sponsorship deals and all kinds of things. It just provides you with other opportunities that right now you might not see.

I'm not here to paint the perfect picture of what those opportunities might be. I am saying that as you gain a lot more followers, many more opportunities come to you by way of, at a minimum, partnerships of people wanting say something to your audience and you can say something to their audience. Sponsors where people will provide you content. There's a lot of cool things that come from that. I've seen it happen to people that I've worked with in the past where they've had a lot of millions of followers. Yeah, it's a great thing to use.

Social media is important in your business and even if you are not using it the way you should, please note that you must get on this bandwagon. You must. If you want to survive 20 years from now in your business and you're not using social media, you will be so far behind, it's going to be laughable. Social media fits into your business. It's very important. There's a lot of automated tools you can use to help you. There are teams that you can use to help you. That's some of the stuff we do at AutomateBIG. At a minimum, get in there and dive in.

I'll give you one last tip on the content creation side of social media of what to do and how to get it moving. Go live as often as possible, at a minimum once a week. Post every day. Many people will tell you to post more than one time of day and I do agree with that. Not everybody has the content creation mechanism in their business to do this but post at least once a day. For instance, "Hey I'm doing this thing or this is a service that I'm creating." Or create partnerships with other people and say, "Hey, this person is offering this new thing and wants you to see it." That's something you need to add in your mix often.

If you do it, if you add value to people's lives for three months in a row and you build up a good following, doing that, and then you say, "Buy my thing." They're going to kind of turn their backs on you, not going to like what you did. You need to train them upfront. This is who you are and this is how it goes. If you do that, you'll find a lot more traction, you'll find a lot more interest in what you do. And this is just one small way to AutomateBIG regarding your social media.