Nancy Cawdrey’s Social Media

When I first met Steve Cawdrey, he was open to the idea of using Social Media to market Nancy Cawdrey Gallery, but he was definitely reticent. Steve, like everyone else who doesn’t truly understand the nature of social media marketing, wanted to know about ROI (Return On Investment). After all, he’s a business man. His job is to generate revenue. Simply put, he wanted to see results and he wanted to know how long it would take to see them. But as someone who has been using Social Media Marketing for a number of years, it’s almost maddening to me to hear this question FIRST.  Why? Because there’s a misconception that Facebook, Twitter and any other social media platform is similar to the ad campaigns of days that are now long gone.  Social Media is absolutely NOT a numbers game. Social Media, when used correctly, is about building relationships, creating your personality, providing on-line customer support and company branding that will eventually lead to increased revenue. Your strategy, simply put, it to build relationships.  Your tactics are what follows.

Most businesses depend first and foremost on revenue, and it’s very difficult to explain to someone unfamiliar with social media that being social and making money are totally natural and compatible; all in good time.  It’s how you DO social media, and in what context you do it that separates good social media marketing from bad. Social Media is not about self promotion. It’s about greeting the customers who walk through your door, but the doors have transcended all notion of space by way of technology.

Social media allows you to amplify your reach in ways that marketing on television and and radio cannot. For example, last week we saw that 13 people from Italy have liked our Nancy Cawdrey Facebook Page ( http://on.fb.me/lTnavR ).  For us, the joy is in seeing that our brand has reached Italy. The frustration is in not quite knowing how we did it. One thing is certain, social media does NOT have boundaries. So if we want to take our Social Media Marketing to the next level, we could start speaking to our Italian fans on Facebook using their native language which Nancy speaks fluently. The challenge lies in the fact that we want Nancy to focus on what she does best, which is to paint. In addition, Nancy isn’t a big fan of technology. She prefers to interact with people who visit her in her studio or at gallery’s where her artwork is on exhibit. This leaves the social media up to me, and I don’t speak Italian. However, if we were to engage with our Italian guests on Facebook, we could potentially start building relationships with more people in Italy, who will potentially start sharing our links, who will hopefully be curious enough to start perusing the website: http://bit.ly/pjS1ml.  Next thing you know, Voila!  The Nancy Cawdrey brand is alive and well in Europe.  Here’s the point of this little example: your audience is global and if you want to increase your revenue, you will not take this for granted. So it’s my role to be thinking about how to capture this market and build these “likers” into long term relationships. (P.S. – Steve can’t come to the phone right now, he’s studying his Italian).

So, although the ROI from using Social Media isn’t immediate, it IS  measurable and the investment is typically far less than the investment made when using a combination of print, television, radio and billboard campaigns.  In fact, when you’re thinking in terms of investing in traditional media, you ask the salesperson “how many households will this potentially reach?”  And when doing so, you’re looking at two things: the actual household numbers and the actual printed MEDIA itself, which can be very satisfying.  People who hesitate to invest in Social Media are typically skeptical because they don’t see the shiny ‘tactile’ bobble that comes through printed material. If you want to see fast results using social media, create a video, post it on You Tube or Vimeo, and watch the number of viewers grow incrementally. Like I said, there are several tools to measure your social media investment.

Let’s be candid, the first several months after introducing a Facebook Business Page are extremely time consuming and labor intensive. You must constantly be getting to know the people who’ve taken the time to actually “like” you while reviewing and readjusting your targeted demographic. When it comes to leveraging social media to increase sales, you must develop and appreciate your new online relationships and navigate your target market using the precise combination of social, intellectual and technological skills.  Using these new relationships, coupled with good old fashioned ad campaigns that incorporate promotional components can yield results and make your message stickier by being authentic and engaging, versus just promotional. At some point, you’ll reach what I call your “sweet spot,” which is the spot where momentum starts to kick in, and THEN once you’ve created the personality of your brand and you have a captive audience, you can start to incorporate your promotional tactics, which in the case of Nancy Cawdrey gallery, will be a variety of contests and promotional giveaways to the people that we appreciate for taking the time to look at Nancy’s work via our Facebook Page. ( http://on.fb.me/lTnavR )

In summary, Social Media is about thinking in terms of the big picture, your long term goals and the brand that you’re creating using technology as the platform. You can’t ignore someone who likes you on Facebook. If you do, you’ve just missed an opportunity to greet them at the door.