As social media has surged in popularity it was probably inevitable that professional services firms would begin to include it as a part of their marketing strategy. But is it effective? What are the key benefits? How do you develop a strategy? These are some of the questions we will address in this post.
Let’s start by defining what a social media marketing strategy is all about.
Social Media Marketing Strategy Defined
Social media marketing strategy is a written document describing how you will use social media in support of strategic marketing goals such as brand building, lead generation or talent acquisition. Social media marketing strategies typically contain the following elements:
- Business purpose to be addressed
- Target audience profiles
- Social media platforms to be used
- Implementation tactics
- Specific goals and measures to be tracked
Often, a social media strategy is part of a more comprehensive marketing plan.
The Strategic Uses of Social Media
Social media can be an important component of your overall marketing strategy. We have identified five primary roles that social media can play in a modern professional services firm.
NETWORKING
Social media’s original intended role, as an online networking system, is still important for professional services firms. Treat X (formerly Twitter), LinkedIn, and Facebook as an online cocktail party—a way to meet new people and develop important business and client relationships—but without the hangover. And, like a cocktail party, social media is highly reciprocal. People expect replies to their tweets, comments, and questions, and there is an expectation that you will share other people’s content as well as your own.
CONTENT PROMOTION
Social media is one of the easiest and cheapest ways to promote your firm’s content. Creating a social media marketing strategy to promote your content via different channels will help build your reputation and visibility—i.e., your brand.
A word of warning on content promotion, though—it’s important not to overdo self-promotion. Social media is reciprocal, and you need to balance self-promotion with sharing important content created by other industry thought leaders. While there seems to be no widely accepted standard for how much of others’ content to share, there is a bias toward education. Leave your marketing collateral on your website. Educate, don’t hard sell.
SEO (SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION)
Social media has become a valuable way to boost SEO. Think of it as another path to content promotion. There is no solid evidence that search engines are using social media popularity as a gauge of a page’s authority. That would quickly become a target for “black hat” manipulation. However by sharing content widely you attract “natural” links, which have a very clear impact on page authority. So boosting your social media presence should also help your page rank in search engines. Another hidden benefit of social media is that its content is searchable—at least for X and LinkedIn. That means that your tweet, which links back to your website’s blog, may be found by someone doing a simple Google search—another opportunity to gain website traffic.
RESEARCH
Social media is a great way to do research. Before you meet with a new client, interview someone for a case study, or hire a new employee, you should check out their social media streams. Regardless of whether they are a corporation or an individual, you will learn a lot about their personality, authority, reputation, and visibility. Social media is also an easy way to research marketplace trends and engage with the competition, keeping you abreast of their initiatives and, perhaps, allowing for advantageous collaboration. This concept of market intelligence is sometimes referred to as social listening.
RECRUITING
Social media is a natural recruitment tool, whether it be finding new employees or seeking out business partners. LinkedIn and Facebook let you post highly targeted jobs focusing on users with certain résumé attributes, and provides real-time analytics showing, among other things, who has viewed the post. And of course, LinkedIn is well known as a good place to search for a new position or to find the right talent.
Given these multiple uses, is social media in some way better than more traditional marketing approaches, such as face to face networking? Put another way, what are the benefits to making social media a part of your marketing plan? As it turns out there are several.
The Benefits of Using Social Media For Marketing
- LESS EXPENSIVE
As a starting place, most social media platforms are available as “free” applications, even if they also offer premium subscriptions with expanded functionality. And while they are not truly free, as staff time is required to actually use them, they do not require fees, travel expenses, and the vast quantities of professionals’ time consumed by traditional networking.
- EASIER
It also takes less time and effort to spend a few minutes each day posting or commenting on social media than traveling to and attending a networking event. Also, because social media is asynchronous, you do not need to be doing it at a specific time or place. The nature of the interaction is also different and less demanding for some. Many professionals find traditional networking socially uncomfortable. Social media is a welcome alternative for the introverts among us.
- GLOBAL REACH
By breaking the bonds of time zone and distance, social media allows even the smallest firms to pursue national and even international markets. This applies not only to networking, but to the visibility of your thought leadership and recruiting, as well. A firm from Montana can acquire clients from Manhattan to Mumbai.
- BUILDS YOUR BRAND
We have long defined your professional services brand as being the product of your reputation and your visibility within your target markets. Importantly, social media can help you hone your reputation and increase your visibility. Think more referrals and easier closes.
- SCALABLE
One often overlooked key benefit is that social media is inherently scalable.
Even if you are interacting with a single person you are visible (if you so choose) to many. You can accumulate hundreds or even thousands of followers that you can address with a single post. In addition those followers can share your content with others, making you efforts even more scalable. You can add scale without adding infrastructure or expense.
The ROI of Social Media Marketing
Because social media offers so many uses and potential benefits it’s not surprising that many professional services firms are weaving social media into their marketing strategies. A recent research study showed that more professional services firms use social media networking than use email marketing. And firms are using social media to promote thought leadership about as frequently as speaking at targeted events and conferences.
While widespread adoption may suggest a good return on investment, there is more direct evidence to consider. In the same study we looked at the marketing techniques used by High Growth firms (firms with compound annual growth rates greater than 20%) and compared them to the techniques used by firms that were stagnant (no growth or a decline). While both groups used social media to about the same extent, High Growth firms found social media to be more effective compared to their No Growth peers.
Clearly, there is something about how firms use social media that is impacting effectiveness and return on investment.
One clue comes from the same study. We found that the High Growth firms enjoy a decided skills advantage. Professionals from High Growth firms were 25% more likely to be rated highly skilled in social media networking.
This raises the intriguing possibility that social media training can drive much higher levels of success. Other research on employee involvement in social media also identified the importance of training. Firms with an established social media employee engagement program tend to grow faster. That kind of a return is hard to ignore.
Of course, the starting place is to develop your strategy. Here’s how to do it the right way.
