Remember when Direct Mail Marketing was all the rage? We squeezed our budgets to afford dynamic designs and impressive images. We racked our brains to create messaging intended to reach out and grab our buyers’ attention at a single glance. We paid a premium for the perfect paper and packaging to serve as a vehicle for our messaging. And then we paid for production, printing and assembly… Oh, and let’s not forget about those postage costs! There were quantities to be determined and deadlines to beat, all so we could get our messages in the mail by some magic hour in hopes of reaching our prospective customers in time.
After all that, we hoped to receive a 1 – 3% return rate from our investment. If we were lucky, 1 – 3% of everyone who received our message would become a customer and buy what we were selling.
Beyond that tiny, magical statistic, we told ourselves that the 97 – 99% of our audience that didn’t buy this time, would buy next time. Or maybe the next. Because after all, statistics indicated that people need to see our message about seven times before they will buy from us. As long as we subscribed to that school of thought, we were doing our job by tallying up those all-important impressions that would lead customers right to our door.
Statistics then were all over the board depending on who was publishing them, and they still are. Just like “optimizing” direct mailings back in the day meant adding a “personal touch” to the packaging or content, or at the very least, changing the colors used. Some companies spent more than 50% of their marketing budgets on mailings. Despite all the effort and low expectations, we continued to mail our messages out to the world because it was just part of the process of attracting customers.
Oh, how far we’ve come!
Just to be clear, we aren’t suggesting that direct mail marketing is passé. In fact, according to a Forbes article written by Steve Olenski, “physical media” still has a very important presence in any well-rounded marketing plan. We couldn’t agree more about that, by the way.
So why the delicate diatribe above?
To some extent, we’ve forgotten that it often takes a lot of effort to get a little return. Today’s marketing style is largely driven by expectations of immediacy and instantaneousness. We get impatient when we don’t get the ROI we expected, and we become frustrated every time a certain social media platform shakes things up. Again.
So what’s changed since the golden days of the infamous 1 – 3% return?
Well, before, our mailing lists had had relatively finite potential in the form of a set number of contacts. Now, we expect to reach everyone in the world because, after all, we have limitless access to current and prospective audiences via the internet. We have very high expectations for “reach”. We’re always trying to decipher “organic” versus “total,” and we’re willing to pay a premium rather than just relying on a free platform in hopes of spreading our message further.
While statistics and analysis have, and always will be, important marketing considerations, the proliferation of graphs and charts and promissory statistics may have us all running a race we can’t win.
Think about it this way: Social media is largely intangible and uncontrollable. We can set up our sites and interact on them, but we don’t really own them. Somewhere, there’s a wizard behind a very shiny curtain that controls the social media universe as we know it, and that makes us nervous.
To counteract our lack of control and need for speed, per se, we devour articles and information promising statistical performance. We’re eager to employ the latest and greatest advice that we hope will catapult us into social media stardom. We’ll do anything that will get us more Likes and Followers. We’re not content to accept the tawdry hundreds of interactions we receive online each month. No, we need more. Because the statistics tell us we do.
Admit it. You’ve wanted to check at least one of your analytics resources since you began reading this article. That’s O.K… We’re not here to judge. We’re just here to bring some perspective by connecting yesterday’s dots with today’s algorithms.
Social media management is by no means free – it takes time, planning, and talented human capital to make it all happen. But aside from the design elements, ads and pay-per-clicks, and all the things you can choose whether or not to pay for, you don’t have to pay to be in social media. (So far, so good!)
Expense aside, as speedy as our world has become, social media – like direct mailing – is still just one part of your marketing options. People still need to see your message several times before they’ll do business with you. Some sources indicate that it’s actually takes more time and requires more impressions to convert today’s prospects because they have so much more information at their disposal.
Social media isn’t the singular answer – it, too, is just a part of the process of attracting customers.
Similarly, statistics don’t hold all the answers. In fact, we often hear marketers complain that stats create more questions than answers.
So, what do social media stats really mean? Well, what do they mean to you?
- What does it mean to your business to have a steadily-increasing social media following?
- What does it mean for one of your platforms to significantly out-perform another?
- What do interactions on Facebook tell you about how people perceive your brand?
- What percentage of your Twitter followers responded to your recently-Tweeted promotion?
- What percentage of your Instagram followers participated by posting photos of your product?
- What percentage of your followers are current customers?
- What is the conversion rate of one of your social media avenues versus another?
Are you getting the picture?
Don’t focus too much on the “science” of social media. Despite the seemingly instantaneous sense of gratification they may provide, you have to balance the hard-and-fast stats with huge, colorful helpings “art,” to be successful in social media – regardless of what the pie charts say.
Remember the earlier direct mailing analogy? If you can relate to the attention to detail and the pure professional passion that goes into orchestrating the perfect mailing, you’re well on your way to understanding the finer points of social media success – sans stats.
We know it can all be a little confusing, but we’ve found that breaking marketing strategies down to a more Filament-ary level makes everything more effective. Want to learn more? Just call us!
