...but I don't have time for social media.
Posted by Dale Berkebile on Tue, Apr 06, 2010
Over the last year as we have been talking to a ton of prospects'. We are hearing them complain saying "…but we don't have time for social media". I will tell you that using social media to generate business is time consuming, but when a prospect makes this complaint, all I hear is "…but we don't have time to enjoy success" or "…but we don't have time to get rich".
Really, you may not get rich over night and using inbound marketing (blogging, social media and seo), but I can guarantee this is the best thing that has happened to marketing in years.
Ok, it may take six months or a year before you see high levels of new business coming in, but you will see many other successes in the mean time. Things like increased traffic to your web site, comments on your blog articles, retweets of your twitter posts, more followers, fans and connections- all of these things are starting to build a community and brand loyal following or evangelists that are willing to spread the word about your brand for free, just because they like you or your brand.
I have seen several companies struggle with this system, but in my opinion the key to success is 98.5% persistence.
In our experience we have seen a 1-2% conversion rate of web visitors to web leads and a 1-2% conversion of web leads to clients. So this is kind of a numbers game. You need more web visitors in order to get more leads from your website. The more leads you are getting from your website, the more new business you should be able to get.
The more time you make for inbound marketing, the more time you will have to count all that extra cash your web site is bringing in.
Keep in mind it doesn't matter how long the sales cycle is if you put an inbound marketing system like ours in place, you will bring in more leads then you can shake a stick at. Your sales team will be swamped with new leads to work and start closing. The sooner you start, and the sooner you commit to blogging weekly (at least 1 article per week), tweeting your thoughts and blog articles and connecting with people, the sooner you will be able to count your money and laugh all the way to the bank.
