The comment above is from a LinkedIn post I made a few days ago.  In it, I praised a restaurant owner for their post, which attracted about 200 consumers to comment. 

But here’s why this comment stuck out to me. Every month or so, Brian comments on the same thing and challenges what we do. Now, there’s a chance I’m taking his questions and comments wrong; after all, digital communication is something we all misconstrue all the time.  

But, it motivated me to look for proof of the tactics I preach about using social media engagement to build a database.  Now, when I say “go look,” that means opening one of hundreds of client dashboards, so it was pretty simple 🙂

Here’s the long at short of the story. 

1st – Use your marketing to gain engagement.

2nd – Use that engagement to build a database.

3rd – Use that database to drive sales.

The dashboard below is an excellent example of what can happen.  All marketing is used to gain attention; in this example, that attention came in the form of 223,034 Facebook impressions.  

1st – Those impressions created 9,511 Facebook engagements

2nd – Those 9,511 Facebook engagements built a database of 3,903 customers

3rd – The marketing emails, texts, and Facebook messages sent to those 3,903 customers drove 610 front-end visits and $23,130 in sales.  

So, Larry, I think that shows you “the money!”