Grant Cardone
For anyone who has ever wondered if social media is a shallow wasteland of inch-deep ideas and superficial pondering, think again.
The truth is that, for marketing purposes, it is one of the best places to capture audience sentiment, track real-time engagement over multiple platforms, and measure your marketing success against almost every other channel.
Entrepreneur and influencer Grant Cardone should know. The author and speaker (who also runs a popular event called the 10X Growth Conference) told me recently that marketers who scoff at social media are likely not aware of those perks.
“The benefits of social media is that it allows the creator to control the volume and velocity of the messaging as well as a real time response on how the audience receives the messaging. TV and radio are still either unwilling or unable to even give you a real count as to who heard or saw your messaging, much less provide real time engagement,” he says.
Cardone has a point. As a quick tangent, it’s worth explaining how this all works. Let’s say you have a new company called Wonderbar. You have a million ideas on how to promote your new brand. As Cardone mentioned, you can certainly run radio and television ads, but the actual transmission is relatively untraceable. Anyone can view or hear the ad from anywhere, but the industry has not come up with a great way to track every interaction.
With social media, every click, view, like, and comment is traceable. “Reach” is an exact measure of how often the content appeared in front of people. Wondering if Wonderbar is a hit with a certain demographic audience? You can find out. Pumping out a new campaign to offer a free sample? Social media lets you trace absolutely every metric. In fact, only email marketing offers more robust analytics on how a marketing campaign has performed.
There’s one big difference. I’ve been saying this for years, but one of the key reasons why Facebook is so successful from a revenue standpoint is that the ad management system they provide is second to none. Email can’t touch it. You can show an ad to a very specific target audience, then compare that campaign to another target audience.
Interestingly, Cardone mentioned how tracking on social media is valuable for both organic and paid social media. In fact, he noted how organic content is far more beneficial. The reason, of course, is that an organic post can go viral and reach millions, whereas a paid social ad only extends as far as the spending amount allows. With organic, there are no limits.
“I will take the reach from organic over paid any day of the week,” says Cardone. “I have never considered social less valuable than paid and anyone who says it clearly does not know how to effectively run a social program that converts and monetizes traffic.”
Cardone was also quick to point out that tracking is not the end goal. A common problem with those who run social media campaigns is that they think success involves a boatload of likes. In fact, we all do this. We think a campaign must have been valuable if there are hundreds of likes and comments.
Cardone says that is probably the least important aspect.
“The problem with social media is there are so many people who are satisfied with views, likes and comments,” he says. “None of those mean much to me. I am interested in reach, repetition of messaging, and the offer converting the relationship to either a customer or an investor.”
As with all marketing, Cardone says you have to also think about the audience first. Will they respond the most to reels and stories? Do they prefer livestream videos? With social media, you can do a deep dive in the metrics and find out. He says marketers need to use all social channels and then track success on every platform. Frequency is important. He says you won’t be able to capture an audience if you only post once or twice per week.
Cardone also mentioned how it’s important to use all digital platforms. He noted how his company sent out over 400,000,000 emails in 2021 alone. Often, the sweet spot of digital marketing is when all of the digital platforms support and augment each other. He also said YouTube is the one platform he would pick among almost all others.
The challenge is getting started. My fake company called Wonderbar might not be ready for TikTok or Clubhouse, but Cardone makes a great point: The sooner you get started building a following, tracking engagement, and seeing conversions, the better.
