Every day, I teach people about how to use interactive media. I tell them that getting the attention of the world is hard, and you can’t run around and grab 6 million people by the lapels of their shirts and say, “Hey, look at what I’m doing!” There’s too many people out there. You can’t email 6 million people and tell them that you’re awesome. Heck, statistics suggest that you probably can’t even get 600 people to follow you on Twitter.  Running around from social media tool to social media tool without discipline, strategy, and coordinated effort is a sure-fire way to waste time, money, and opportunities. So what do you do? I’m going to answer that question by starting a series here that outlines the exact same lessons that I teach in my seminars: The 7 Tools of Social Media Leverage.

Archimedes said it first:

Give me a lever and a place to stand, and I can move the Earth.

You don’t need to move the whole earth, but you do need to move your market and shift it a little closer to you.  Tackling your market all by yourself is a lot of work; but using a lever and finding the right place to stand, you can make all of the difference for your business and your market.  Some people have already figured this out. They have their website, social media, opt-in marketing, and paid advertising all running together and building on each other to make their company a dynamo of business.  This isn’t a series for those companies.

This is a series for the guy who’s been trying to figure out how social media is supposed to make him money, how he can justify the time that people keep telling him he needs to sink into Facebook or a blog. This series is for the entrepeneur who spends all day working on her business and doesn’t want to spend two hours poking on Facebook, following on Twitter, and spending time on LinkedIn that she doesn’t have. In short, this series of posts is for most of us.

So any lever consists, fundamentally, of two parts: the lever (which lifts the load) and the fulcrum (which provides the turning point for the lever whereby the force on one end moves the load on the other). Without a fulcrum, all you have in your hands is a stick. So before we start using the social media tools to build a lever, let’s develop the fulcrum first.

The Fulcrum

What’s the fulcrum of your interactive marketing efforts? Your website. It’s the point around which all of your interactive marketing  moves, and there’s no point to going any further unless you’ve got a website that can take the leads you’ll be generating and convert them into money. You’ll notice that in the diagram above, the fulcrum is represented by a triangle; that’s because there’s three parts to the fulcrum that your website represents:

1. Content: Use a content management system to create and maintain the content of your site. It’s so easy to set up a professional CMS like WordPress or Joomla nowadays that there’s literally no reason why you’d want your content in a static HTML site. Part of what you’ll be doing with your new website is realizing that content in your CMS-based website doesn’t have to be static–and shouldn’t be! Your website should be;  treated as a living thing. The tool I recommend? WordPress for most small businesses
2. Measurement: In order to know what works and what doesn’t, you need to measure what changes effect your clickthrough and your conversions. Measuring or analyzing the aggregated traffic to your site to see what trends emerge is called Analytics.  This goes beyond simply putting an analytics package on your website and includes putting tracking codes in all of your advertisements so that you send out through the web. The numbers themselves won’t improve your business, but they give you the knowledge you need to do so.  What tool do I recommend? It’s hard to go wrong with Google Analytics, which is not just one of the standards of the field, they’re also free.
3. Sales: There’s content that you write to establish your knowledge or share your passion, but there’s also content that you write to get someone to give you money. These are usually not the same thing, and when you’re paying to get traffic or attention to your website, you generally don’t want to drop your visitors off on your main page with no idea why they should care about you. Take your new visitors who are arriving on your website to a page created specially to address their motivation for clicking on your ad. This will, all by itself, get you more conversions on the ads that you’re already running. What tool do I tell my clients to use? I’ve recently become a fan of Unbounce.

Don’t worry about trying to complete your interactive marketing plans until you’ve gotten these need addressed. If you’ve already got a Facebook page or if you’re already paying for advertisements on Google, Yahoo, or Bing and you’re seeing a positive ROI, you might be tempted to ignore addressing these three needs. Don’t.

“But I don’t have time to create landing pages for all of my ads!” you may say. So categorize your ads by basic type and create a landing page for each type. “I don’t understand the point behind most of the information that Google Analytics throws my way–it’s too overwhelming!” Don’t worry, we’ll get there together. But get your website prepared to make money first.

The Lever

The lever is made of 4 parts, and there’s a reason for this: if you went to a hardware store and bought a 10 foot long dowel that’s an inch around, you’d have no problem breaking it over your knee.  Buy 4 of them, wrap them together, and try the same stunt, and you would likely find that you couldn’t anymore. You can shift more people your way by using multiple channels than you can with 1 channel.  So what are those 4 parts?

1. Online Ads: PPC, SEM, or even some crazier non-traditional stuff like what IZEA.com is doing, you need to get the word out to people by making use of someone else’s reach to attract attention that you don’t currently have.  What’s the best online advertisement? That’s like of like asking “What’s the best color?” The short answer is: “It depends.” What’s a good tool to get started in online advertising? Google AdWords.
2. Opted-in Marketing: The best consumers are the ones who want to hear from you. They’re easier to market to, they click through in higher percentages on ads and they buy more when they do. Find out how they want to hear from you and get their permission to do so. Whether it’s email addresses, SMS numbers, mailing addresses (because some people still prefer paper catalogs), or even social media, you want to relate to your customers in the arena that they want to hear from you. How do you figure out where that is? Well, if you’ve installed an analytics package like I mentioned above, you can measure what returns the best results and focus on that kind of messaging. That said, I’m a fan of email marketing as a starting point, and recommend MailChimp with very few reservations for small businesses, and ExcatTarget for larger ones.
3. Social Media: I’m a guy who trains about social media, and the fact that I’ve placed “social media” #6 out of the 7 tools that you need to get social media leverage should tell you something. Social media by itself is a great way to sink a lot of time and effort into something and see nothing come back out of it, unless you’re approaching social media from a results-driven perspective. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, BeBo, YouTube, and so on are all great–if you need them. The message I keep coming to when I teach “Social Media Leverage” is that you need to find your audience online, and then cater to where they want to be. You don’t want to try and force a thousand Facebook friends to follow you on Twitter; they’re happy where they are and you should make plans that communicate to them on the channel they’re on. What tools do I recommend you use for social media? The classic triangle is Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn (depending on what it is that your company does, of course), and there are a number of smaller social media sites that may be worth investigating as well.
4. Trending Media: Trending media? That might sound annoyingly vague, but there’s a method to the madness. When there’s a new hot media type that’s just getting popular (like mobile or hyper-local are now), it’s usually cheaper to use them intelligently to reach your market than it can be to get the same reach with a traditional media.  So if you’re reading this in 2012 or whenever, take a look around the Internet and see what’s new and trending then and think about how you can use it your advantage to communicate with your audience. s of the current date of writing this article, hyper local advertising and mobile advertising solutions are good places to look for niche advertising that carries punch beyond its price. Also, purchasing an inexpensive video camera and using social media video can pay off unexpected dividends.

So, with a fulcrum to shift everything around, and with those 4 tools to use as a lever, anyone can find that they are able to shift their market a little closer.  The next logical question to ask someone who makes his training other how to use social media is: how the heck do you use all of those tools?

Let’s leave something for the next article, shall we?