Everyone's a Social Media Expert These Days... Or Are They?

Question: How good is your social media marketing? Are you getting sales, email subscribers, and inquiries every day?

We are!

Two years ago, I Love Road Cycling was a fan page with a few hundred fans and a few posts from the Tour de California. We pretty much were invisible on Facebook.

At the time my wife and I were riding maybe 150 miles a week and were enjoying becoming cycling enthusiasts. I also run a boutique marketing agency and we thought "wouldn't it be cool if we could build out a small community of riders and get to meet other cyclists?" Maybe we could sell a few t-shirts to cover the costs.

What happened in the past two years is nothing short of amazing. Amazing because on part time basis, with a few thousand dollar budget we've become THE BEST FACEBOOK MARKETING AGENCY IN THE CYCLING INDUSTRY.  

Check out these stats.

1. We have a Facebook Fan Page with over 70,284 fans! You can check it out here. https://business.facebook.com/iloveroadcycling

2. We have an active email list of over 10,097 names. (more on this later)

3. We have a closed Facebook Cycling Group with 27,356 members. https://www.facebook.com/groups/704580389624526

See if this sounds familiar.  You have a Facebook fan page. You have a few likes. You might even have a few thousand likes. If you don't have 50,000 likes, you haven't even started yet.

You probably also hear that Facebook doesn't even show your posts any more. You post something and you get a few likes/shares/comments. The reason you get a minor amount of engagement isn't because Facebook is holding you back. It's because your content sucks. Sorry, but it's true.

Check this out. Here is our engagement on the I Love Road Cycling Facebook fan page. See that bar chart at the right. That's our engagement number. Hands down better than any of the companies listed.

A month later here are our stats. They are even better!  I wish I had Trek's marketing budget!!!  Bottom line is on a part time basis with a tiny marketing budget we are crushing these big brands. I don't want to get anyone fired but...

Here's another one. (taken a few minutes ago)

So what? What does it mean?

It means a few things. With that kind of engagement we know people are following, liking, commenting and sharing our content. That's the tip of the social marketing iceberg. It means you are connecting with people.

It also means so much more.

1. If you have more than 10,000 fans, you can get some excellent demographic information about your audience. What else do THEY like. You can find out exactly what they like, read, live, spend, earn, drive, and so on. Think that would help you with your marketing?

2. You can create a target audience for your Facebook Ads. Target everyone who liked, commented, or shared one of your posts. If your engagement sucks, then this audience will be small. Who's audience do you think will be a bigger target and a better fit? I Love Road Cycling at 14,900 or company Number 5 on the list with 49? That's only for 1 week. Who wins after 6 months? 3 years? (shoot me an email and I'll do a comparison of your page vs your main competitor and we'll see what's up)

3. Use your page to build your email list? We have people joining our list daily. Then we send them emails so they get to know us... and then they buy from us. Simple. Here's a metric you might be interested in. Each email address is worth about $4.00 NET to us each year based on sales attributed to our email campaigns. Right now new emails cost us about $.87 to acquire. Hmmmmm.

4. Most importantly, you have a big enough group of people who are fans to SURVEY. Ask them what they prefer. What they want. What they don't like. Make better marketing decisions.

Secret Social Strategy #1.

Do you have a private Facebook Group? Do you why you want one? We get 30 to 50 people per day asking to join the I Love Road Cycling - VIP group. The very first thing they do is tell us what brand and model of bike they ride (because we ask). Right now we have over 27,000 members and over 43% of them are active in any given week. 

Secret Social Strategy #2.

This one is a bit of a trick because it involves email marketing. Take your email list. Upload your email contacts to Facebook and now you have a new list to target market your Facebook Ads to.

People see your email. Then they see matching Facebook Ads. Your campaign is way more powerful this way.

Secret Social Strategy #3.

Spend some money on Facebook Ads. Right now this is one of the most powerful strategies for marketing online. All of these elements are related and integrated and you can't excel if you only do one... poorly.

The bigger and more engaged your fan page, the bigger your email list, the bigger your closed Facebook group... the more effective your Facebook Ads will be.

Finally, don't even get me started on what to do with all this traffic that will flood your website. If you don't have a powerful conversion sales funnel, tools to increase your AOV, your conversion rate, and your reorder rate.

You can't even begin to have ecommerce success online these days without having your community in place.

We do this work for you as a service. If you want to see if it could work for your company book a quick call with Mitch. If nothing else, you'll get a few pointers that can get you on the right track.

Bottom line. This works. Don't let your social media "experts" tell you Facebook is not showing posts. They're just not showing YOUR posts. Cyclists see ours all the time :)

Click this link to book a quick call or we'll see you at Interbike.

Book a call time to see if this would work for your company.