How Social Media Helps Grow A Business : My Personal Story

Guest post by Ryan Renfrew.

Ryan is an entrepreneur and writes about his passions, Lifestyle Design and Personal Development at his blog www.ryanrenfrew.com.

What uuuuup? Hope your having fantastic day.

I’m sure by now you are well aware that many small businesses are jumping onboard the social media bandwagon. If not, what rock have you been hiding under? Fear not, I’m going to show you how using social media marketing can ramp up your lead generation and convert prospects into paying customers.

As any good marketer will know there is no such thing as the ‘Magic Bullet’. There is no single thing that will sky-rocket your business to astronomical heights. Your marketing efforts are very much like a wheel of a bicycle that has many spokes. The more spokes your marketing wheel has the stronger it becomes.

There are two major kinds of spokes, online spokes and offline spokes. So which are better? Which should you concentrate on? There is no straight up answer, both have advantages and disadvantages. What works well for your business may not work well for my business.

Lets have a look and compare some marketing spokes of www.fitbodybangor.com (my personal training business).

I ran 3 different offline marketing campaigns and 1 online social media campaign in consecutive months, each campaign lasted a month.

Offline

1. Sales letter
2. Postcards
3. Flyers

Online

1. Facebook PPC ( pay-per-click )

Lets look at how they performed.

1/Sales letter
Units – 200
Cost – £30
Time – 10+ Hours (Writing, putting pages into envelopes and delivering)
Leads – 0
Conversions – 0

Although the sales letter was a relatively cheap way to spread the message it was a very labour intensive process.

2/Postcards
Units – 500
Cost – £80
Time – 10+ hours (Designing and delivering)
Leads – 3
Conversions – 1

Slightly better than the sales letter , probably due to the greater number of units. Still very time-consuming and more expensive.

3/ Flyers
Units – 2000
Cost – £ 40
Time – 20+ Hours (delivering)
Leads – 2
Conversions- 0

The flyers seem to be very ineffective, probably due to the scattergun approach of delivering them.

These 3 offline campaigns appear to have been a flop. Having said that, they were test campaigns therefore on a smaller scale to a full-blown campaign. Further campaigns will roll out substantially higher units, but will also incur greater costs and eat up a lot, I mean a LOT of time.

Social Media Campaign – Facebook Pay Per Click.

If you are unfamiliar with Facebook PPC, take a look at a facebook page now, do you see those advertisements running down the right hand side, those are paid advertisements. Every time a single ad is clicked on the advertiser is charged a fee. My adverts directed the viewer to my personal training sales page.

Units/Impressions – 435,334
Clicks – 464
Time – 5mins
Cost £71.21
Cost per click – £0.15
Leads – 20
Conversions – 3

Now lets dissect the stats. WOW, check these out.

• 435,334 impressions, this means that the ad were shown nearly half a million times!!! Now imagine the cost and time it would take to deliver this number of postcards?
• 464 clicks – When someone clicks on the ad it is safe to assume they are interested in the product or service, if they weren’t that interested then why would they bother finding out more about your offer.
• Time 5mins – This is my favourite stat of all. The ad took 5 minutes to set up, once it went live it took care of itself.
• Cost £71.21 – for 464 qualified prospects, ( 15pence each!!!) this is a bargain. Not to mention the time saved designing and delivering.
• Leads – I created a database containing the email addresses of leads so I can still communicate with the leads that didn’t convert.

So How Did The Offline And Online Social Media Marketing Campaigns Compare?

Distribution
WINNER : Social Media Marketing
The ad was displayed 435,334 times. This is staggering!!!!! It would be impossible for any of my offline campaigns to reach anyway near this volume. It is also worth mentioning that this reach could be greatly expanded at relatively low-cost by increasing the daily budget and appealing to a broader demographic.

Cost
WINNER : Social Media Marketing
Considering the reach and time saved a Facebook PPC can be as cheap as chips.

Time
Winner : Social Media Marketing
Lets see how long it would take to reach an audience of 435,334 with a sales letter – 4353 hours!!! Basically it ain’t gonna happen!

Leads and Conversions.

Winner : Social Media Marketing.

Not only did the social media campaign convert more, it also added to a database of qualified leads, which may convert at a later date. The offline marketing campaigns took a shotgun approach, simply dropping material through letter boxes and car windscreens. The social media campaign took a more laser like approach, I was able to target certain demo and psychographics within my niche.

Overall the social media campaign kicked mega ass. It was easy, extremely time-effective, and reached numbers unparalleled to offline campaigns. Having said that, I would not drop all, or indeed any of my current offline marketing strategies. If your current offline marketing is working for you then keep doing it!! But I would strongly urge you to seriously consider social media marketing. Like the Fit Body Bangor case study, you too could drastically reduce marketing costs and reach a whole new audience generating more leads and convert to paying customers.

Written by Ryan Renfrew

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