There’s a song that goes like this: “Love and marriage. Love and marriage. They go together like a horse and carriage.” Much like Yin and Yang, salt and pepper, spoon and fork, spaghetti and meatballs, and a host of many more, social media has a partner, and that partner is telemarketing.
Remember home TV shopping? “Call this toll free number and you get not one, not two, not three, but four items for the price of one.” More than half of the callers don’t immediately say, “I want to buy one. Here’s my credit card.” And that’s the end of the conversation. They ask questions. They try to scrutinize the advertised product or service. How boring or exciting the call center agent will determine the sale. It may be the opposite of telemarketing but it’s still a telephone-based, voice-based and emotion-based approach to closing the sale.
Encompassing social media is blogging, Facebook posts, Twitter tweets, Instagram posts, Tumblr posts, and whole caboodle of activities that has spawned a new dimension in conversations. What was the marketplace of the olden times where bards and traders congregate not just to sell their wares but to tell stories of lands past people’s horizons and create conversations of questions, answers and more stories. Today, it is social media that has replaced conversations as a means to learn more about lands beyond. To quip my favorite sci-fi show, “To explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, and to boldly go where no man has gone before.”
If social media is to write a message, telemarketing is to close the gap between the written message and the real message, and between the stranger and the person. You see, social media is nothing more than reading, yet despite the doomsayer’s pronouncements, advertising through television and radio has not died its unnatural death. And despite attempts to manage telemarketing in developed and developing countries, calling you by phone to sell or market you something is still alive and well.
If social media can initiate the message, telemarketing closes the deal. If social media looks impersonal, telemarketing is personal. People will still want to talk to someone to be convinced beyond doubts that your product or service is something worthwhile to spend on and use. Fine, what about print and billboard advertising that generates sales? Haven’t you heard about the death of Newsweek’s print medium? The New York Time’s circulation plummets every year? In 2011, there were 1,382 dailies on the market, down from 1,676 in 1985, in the United States[1]. Fifty-one percent of Americans prefer mobile distribution of print media content. Need I continue?
Try selling something only through social media. The experiences of a few companies I know say it’s just like e-mail or text-message blasting – hardly anyone replies. Well, about one percent, more or less. Let your website or blog sit it in for a year; then, you’ll get results. Hurrying up your revenue objectives using some blasting scheme and it’s bound to fail-over or die. The human voice is still key – excited, sublime, formal, happy, sincere, real, truthful, trusting, honest, and pleasing, to say the least. A written message doesn’t emit those emotions and will never create feelings. Without these two, there is no sale to be made.
Social media is the initiator; telemarketing is the closer. It is not that social media is free or cheap. It never was. It’s just an assumption everyone tell themselves but when you start calculating productivity, efficiency and periodic expenses versus yield, it will show you that social media by itself is not the trailblazing success story to closing a sale. Never, ever discount the human voice as the instigator to making it.
So, how do you marry a horse and carriage like social media and telemarketing?
Plan your social media campaigns in such a way that the end activity is a verbal conversation with your prospective customer, complete with human emotions, good speech and diction, and awesome product knowledge. Don’t ever let an order taker talk to your customer. Despite the tendency to continue the written conversation, most of these will stop and you wonder why nothing happened to it.
Don’t be a cheapskate on telephone calls because skimping on this verbal medium will result in hardly any sale you expect. Skype or Viber may be free but not everyone uses it, not every downloads it on their mobile, tablet or laptop, and not everyone wants to talk over it. Google Hangouts? The really techie people use it but most of everyone’s market do not hangout in Hangouts. No matter how smart a smartphone is, the average user isn’t smart enough to use it. Dialing a telephone number is still the best activity to generate sales.
There are exceptions to the rule. The young kids are more adept to every digital medium than their grownup counterparts. Still, if you talk to them, you get more results than a never-ending thread of written messages that waste your time, most of the time.
Talk is cheap if you plot the entire campaign on a spreadsheet. It’s not cheap if you just imagine it in your head. Sales is a numbers game, and if the odds of closing a deal is higher even if the cost of talking is higher than the cost of writing, any intelligent business owner will go for talking to the prospective customer.
Social media and telemarketing – it’s really like a horse and carriage.
Photo by Petr Kratochvil via publicdomainpictures.net.
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