Okay, you don’t have to stop if you don’t want to. But what you should do is take a moment or two to re-evaluate how much of your time and effort you’re putting into it.
Social media marketing is important, of course, and social networking is also super useful when it comes to customer service, competitor research and a whole host of other areas. But at the same time, it’s notoriously difficult to generate a solid ROI from it – especially when you’re a B2B company.
There are many who’d argue that securing an ROI is counterintuitive when it comes to social networking. It’s social, after all, and so it’s therefore more about creating conversations than securing a direct sale. And this is true to some extent, but when it comes to lead generation and other dedicated campaigns, you’ll want to see a return on any budget that you spend on social media ads. Otherwise you’re just pouring your cash down the drain.
Create your own hub
Another of the issues with investing heavily in social media marketing is that you’re effectively building a hub somewhere else, instead of on a domain that you control. It’s comparable to using a yourbrand.wordpress.com subdomain for your website. You just wouldn’t do it.
Instead, consider investing those resources into creating great content and functionality on your website. Carry out testing on your most popular pages and tweak your calls to action to improve your conversion rates. Remember that these tweaks are a gift that keeps on giving – and that you can never fully optimise a website. There’s always something more to be done.
Social media has its place, of course, but so does SEO, blogging and digital advertising. Sure, social has additional benefits in terms of the community you’ll build, but it’s also an important source of traffic to – you guessed it – your website. If you can convert those social media visitors into email subscribers by bringing them into your website and hitting them with a compelling offer, you can start to develop a profile of them through your CRM system and ultimately nurture them from a lead into a customer.
A few words of warning, though: remember what happened to Myspace. Individual social networks will rise and fall in popularity, and the last thing you want to do is to lose a huge following because they’ve all moved on to a different social network. Spend some time working on your owned resources – like your website and your mailing list – instead. You won’t regret it.
Conclusion
Let’s get this straight – we’re not advocating for all brands to down tools and to stop using LinkedIn, Twitter, and other social sites. We just think that your time and budget might be better invested elsewhere. Like on your website, perhaps.
Feeling uninspired? Need a little help with lead generation? Help is at hand. Request a demo of Bant.io to find out how we can help your company to grow by sending hot B2B leads directly to your inbox. You won’t regret it.
Dane
Dane Cobain is a published author, freelance writer, book blogger, poet and (occasional) musician from High Wycombe, UK. Before going freelance, he worked as a social media marker, now specialising in writing about publishing, technology and marketing.