It’s a new year, which means the inevitable New Years resolutions!

The diets are inbound, time to hire a PT? Maybe you’ll learn a second language?

Or get round to writing that book! Even adapt to new ways of learning. Hopefully you’ll see your personal development go through the roof!

Yet why don’t we apply these to our businesses?

We languish and let the same old tired sales and lead gen methods stagnate, like left over Turkey. A question we get asked time and again (in fact it came up again today on a call).

How long should we be spending on this social media thing?

The question isn’t how long should we be spending on social. The question you should be asking is what do you want from it?

Do you want visibility OR do you want actual commercial interaction, pipeline growth and more importantly sales?

We see so many Linkedin trainers focus on the HOW of social media training without focusing on the WHY first.

I put an example post up last month about how the best use of your time could be utilised on social. It paints a familiar scene in a tongue in cheek way.

Simply put, social is far more efficient, measurable, allows you to have conversations at scale and most importantly generates revenue than any other form of marketing you are currently trying.

I won’t just back that up with a statement, down below is some data as well.

Let’s look at how much “time” you’re currently spending on legacy methods for lead gen.

Cold calling

How many hours a day are your sales team hammering phones?

The Bank of America’s Merrill Lynch have banned cold calling and have moved all their people to social selling. 

This is a large organisation that has backed that decision up with hard data. Not on a whim.

But surely cold calling has a better ROI than social selling? Not according to Merrill Lynch.

"They will also be encouraged to contact prospects over LinkedIn, which has a higher hit rate than cold calling”

I’ll say that again for those in the back - "They will also be encouraged to contact prospects over LinkedIn, which has a higher hit rate than cold calling"

Now let’s take a look at cold email.

Email marketing 

Hubspotarticle

(and don't forget they sell email marketing so they have a vested interest to talk this subject up) say in this

"Thank you Covid-19, we just broke the record for poor performance. According to Hubspot, the response rate to emails fell to a record low of 2.1% ...... Said differently, 98% of our efforts to reach new prospects failed.

With conversion down, what did we do? You guessed it, we increased the number of emails sent during the same period by 50%, according to Hubspot’s survey of 70,000 customers. We are playing a zero-sum game, and it’s literally a race to the bottom."

When a pro-email marketing site is writing articles like this, you know there is a problem.

Let me just reiterate this, Hubspot say that email marketing has a 98% failure rate.

And do you know why social beats these?

Because it’s HR, sales, Biz Dev, rev ops, marketing and personal branding all rolled into one.

Every (if you’re doing it right) keystroke, every conversation and every like. Needs to lead us further down the road of commercial interaction and sales. Otherwise it’s pure vanity or the old chestnut of we are doing it for “visibility” and “brand awareness” hmmm. Do those keep the lights on and pay the staff. 

No

I didn’t think so either.

Marketing love social (when it’s done right) because EVERY little snippet of data you want about a target prospect is all out there for you to see.

What many are not doing is capitalising on this.

We see many people being linkedin trained (something we don't do as a strategic social media consultancy) going away to do 2 days of training and then wondering why it hasn't stuck across their organisation.

That takes time to embed which a 2 day training course won’t do.

It comes about through repetition and gaining confidence in producing content (and this is the important part) for commercial growth. Sometimes you get lucky with viral content and think you’ve cracked it. What we coach is a repeatable mechanism for lead generation and EBITDA. Not luck.

So hopefully this given you some insight into not HOW much time should I be spending on social but more importantly WHERE should I be spending my time as a whole.

So how are you going to start the new year?

I know where I’ll be in 2022.

On social!