As a marketing planner and strategist, I absolutely believe in the power of benchmarking key areas of your marketing and your business. You definitely need to have something to reach for in order to know if you are behind, on track or exceeding your expectations and necessary goals. But there is one benchmark that many are adding to their plans that I actually want to dispute.
Every day more and more people in business are adding Facebook Fan Pages and Twitter handles to their marketing plan. Great. I agree, Social Media can be a wonderful set of tools to broaden your marketing reach, develop qualified leads and get new clients/customers. But there is a danger lurking among this process for many of you. It’s the danger of believing that he/she who has the most Fans or Followers at the end of the year wins.
I understand how we can fall into this old trap. The old school, industrial age way of doing sales was always very focused on the ‘law of large numbers’ methodology. Your odds exponentially increase as your list increases. Basic math stuff, actually. And yes, there is still some truth to this methodology. But the world is shifting. Actually as it is shifting, it is also reverting.
The power has been and still is in the list. But instead of looking to simply build a bigger list, I encourage you to simply build a better list. This means, of course, going back to the basics with your marketing and sales. To actually attract the perfect fit for your product or service, you have to know and understand your multiple target markets. You cannot seek out the people if you don’t know who you want to meet. By spending more time up front on this process of your marketing, all strategies will have a better shot at delivering a stronger return on investment.
Look at it this way. Instead of focusing on growing hundreds and even thousands of Fans and Followers, focus on building relationships one at a time. Which one would you prefer:
- To Have 100 ‘Fans’ and ‘Followers’ in your tribe hoping that at least 20% are interested in your product or service;
OR
- To have 8 out of 10 Raving Fans and Evangelists in your tribe who not only love you and what you provide, but they are also out marketing and selling for you.
Building relationships one at time takes time. Yep, it does. It takes patience, care, authenticity, participation, interaction, and persistence. Like I say, it’s simple, but it’s not easy. If it was, more people would be doing it.
So let go of benchmarking your Fans, Followers, Connections on the social media tools. Stop focusing how any and put that energy on how can I strengthen my community, my tribe. Go for Quality and Quantity will take care of itself.
Pamela
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Good advice, Pamela. As a marketing/pr professional for the last 16 years, I can tell you that our focus has always been on developing great relationships with our patients, knowing they will become loyal to us because we provide them the best of care. This takes time and a lot of hard work. But in the end, they come to us for their health care needs and refer family, friends, co-workers (even strangers they meet at the supermarket or church!) and rave about the care & education they receive from us. The numbers become secondary! We plan to carry this philosophy into the world of social media as we continue to implement our internet marketing strategy.
Ann Finelli
Marketing & PR
Team Health Care Clinic, PC