We have constantly heard how much impact social media has on small businesses and how much it is being used by brands, but does social media actually close the sale for new business at the end of the day?
One report from HubSpot shows that “There are 8 million active advertisers on Facebook, the vast majority of which are small and medium-sized businesses” (Source).
So you know that social media is pretty crowded with the new business, but is the ROI actually making it worthwhile to invest in social media.
If you have a small business then you may often ask this question to yourself.
But big brands like Coca-Cola, Nike are getting the big pie of this, Why?
Because these brands have awareness for decades and advertised before social media in the forms of guerrilla marketing etc.
(Source: business2community)
We all know how Coca-Cola is good at advertising so it is only obvious that it can perform much better on social media selling happiness.
But the reason we are talking about this is that they have such a wide distribution and fanbase, which makes it harder for the new entrepreneurs to showcase their products.
Why is social media hard to resist:
In the above section we were talking about how the ROI is not as much as exaggerated but why is social media marketing still hard to ignore:
Easy:
Creating profiles and accounts is easier, so it can set up in 2 minutes, the user experience is actually great and the tools are where you expect them to be, so it is like a monkey with half a brain can operate it.
Cheap:
One of the biggest reasons is that social media marketing is actually one of the cheapest forms of marketing ever!
The entry cost is literally zero, the user base is insanely wide and not to mention social media channels are available in almost every country so reaching out to users has never been easier and cheaper.
Tutorials:
Let that be marketing blogs or YouTube channels there is a wide variety of information on how to operate social media effectively for campaigns etc.
And they are free!
Organic reach:
Paid ads are effective but believe it or not organic reach is still very much alive in platforms like Linkedin, TikTok, etc.
So if your content is actually good and optimized it could show up on Google search results without paying a dime.
But even after all these reasons, there are still mistakes done by many small businesses when they are starting their marketing journey.
The problem new entrepreneurs make:
The space on social media has become blurry for the entry players so their efforts should not be limited to only posting and engaging with comments.
So many of them invest a lot of money on paid ads thinking it would deliver great ROI, and while they may get great traffic there is a little metric that can tell them if it is actually worth it.
“Traffic” is how we are sold the concept of social media marketing!
But if you are selling “Beautiful candles” and the traffic comes from people who are in their 80s would it matter?
A lot of businesses when are starting to promote their services or products they often fall into the trap that social media marketing is the best and easy way of advertising ever.
So they do irrational things like:
Signing up on social media channels where the user base is a lot but not sure about their targeted audience.
Paying to drive traffic on social media profiles.
Instead of thinking of long-term advertising methods, they spend tons of money on ad campaigns.
Not measuring the ROI of their efforts or doing things that can’t be measured.
Buying followers and likes and boost their posts with no “call to action” most commonly seen on Facebook.
One of the biggest misconceptions that people make when it comes to social media is how many followers they have, how many likes they can get.
People think that having a huge pool of followers can help their business achieve awareness.
But these are actually vanity metrics that don’t actually determine your success on social.
Missing out on the ultimate goal:
The main goal of a business is to make money.
At the end of the day, your efforts won’t matter if you can’t get profits from your marketing efforts.
And these statement is often ignored by a lot of newbies, they get distracted and often forget to focus on important things.
Having a great Facebook page or millions of followers means absolutely nothing if none of them buy your services.
Social media can become an expensive hobby instead of an investment for your business.
You won’t get away with your shareholders simply by saying “Oh look we made no sales, but our Facebook page has 30,000 followers now”.
They don’t care about that.
But does this mean you should not use social media for marketing?
No, any form of marketing let that be billboards on streets, if they are not driving results or brand awareness, it needs to be re-think that is the message here.
A business works better when you are constantly measuring your efforts and adapting to improve instead of latching onto every shiny thing that comes your way.
Being smart with social media:
Here are few ways to mindfully use social media for your businesses.
Creating posts, campaigns whose ROI can be tracked by real metrics.
Driving traffic to the actual call to action.
Claiming your business profiles on social media, as your brand is one disgruntled customer away to get into crisis.
Building a real fanbase instead of buying followers or bots.
Measuring ROI every 6 months, if you don’t know how here are some ways.
Using social media to listen for customer complaints and monitoring your brand conversations.
Have a few automation in place so that you can focus on other aspects of the business.
When using social media it is easy to get sidetracked that is why it is important to limit your time on it or delegate the work with specific instructions.
But be sure to not forget the ultimate goal, to help customers instead of shoving down a product down their throat.
Caring for customers is the ultimate marketing strategy that works in every generation regardless of tech, so be sure to not ignore it.
Thank you for reading!
