I often come across negative feeling toward social media from businesses stating that social media does not make sales. While I am used to such comments, I always take the time to explain the AIDA Model, the various type of Assisted Conversions and defining the importance of the first interaction, assist interaction and last interaction. While being very effective at teaching those businesses about the importance of social media, nothing is better than data to explicit your vision.
Today, I will deliver you extra data from marketingcharts.com that will provide not only great insight to align your social media strategy, but also arguments that you will be able to use when educating your clients!
Explain them the AIDA model
An effective web marketing campaign has to take in consideration the AIDA model. When trying to market your product or service, you should always raise awareness to make people knowledgeable of the existence of your solutions, stimulate interest from those potential customer, create desire for your solution and finally stimulate the action of actually buying your solution.
From the model, we see that there is quite a gap between the entry level and the desired outcome, which is the action of converting/purchasing. Therefore, if you attribute the failure to convert to your attention mechanism, you will have a hard time tracking your performance!
That normally does the trick, but lets go further and blend things a little!
Support with the Assisted Conversion and data!
Not all clicks are made equal!
First interaction: The first interactions are the first referral on the conversion path. It rarely generates a sale right away, but it serves as an initiator for the other interaction level. It is really important and it represents your first step of your conversion process!
Generally speaking, social media tend to fall in the first interaction category because it aims at large audiences and deliver little information at once. Here is a nice example that is not about Facebook for a change!
The report shows that 17% of the American consumers discovered a product through Pinterest. This is a prime example of a successful campaign to raise awareness and create a first interaction. This 17% might not ever have heard of those new products if it would not be for Pinterest.
Assist interaction: According to marketingcharts.com, 65% of the US consumers interact with brands to discover the latest news and products and 24% do so to receive customer service. While not generating a sale right away, we observe that customer service help to retain or reassure potentials customers.
Again the goal is not to close to deal right away but to make the potential lead move deeper in the funnel so that it actually desire the product. We call this action of supporting the sales effort an assist interaction and we would credit the traffic
Last interaction: While not being the most common occurrence from social media platforms, we still observe conversions from mass communication from them. According to marketingcharts.com, 53% of consumers claim to have had at least one purchase influenced by YouTube videos.
Conclusion
To say that social media does not sale would be a fallacy. It does manage to generate sales but their main use is to raise awareness, not to close.
We observe that social media contribute to your marketing effort and at all level but tend to excel at entry level of the conversion path.
The final word would be that if you expect your Facebook account to increase your sales by 10%, well, you might not be looking at the right tool for this goal. However, if you want to increase traffic or brand awareness, those are what we could eventually become SMART goals for your social media platform.
I hope this article will help you in your web marketing efforts and if you have any questions, feel free to ask!
Latest posts by Gabriel Touchette
- 5 myths about inbound marketing - 9 September 2014
- 10 Steps to Rock your Facebook campaign - 1 August 2014
- A Day Without Internet - 28 March 2014
- Leadership and Management for Inbound Marketing efforts - 12 March 2014
- Social Media – adoption rates Vs perceived effectiveness - 6 March 2014
