Why Your Small Business Should Ignore Social Media and Instead Invest in These Smarter Marketing Strategies
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| Smarter Marketing Strategies |
Everyone seems to be trying to get you to use social media if you own a small business. Small businesses are being pushed hard to embrace social media marketing by platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
Digital marketing gurus are putting a lot of money into trying to persuade you to pay a lot of money for their social media marketing services.
You've most likely experimented with social media marketing. It's possible that you have a Facebook business page. But you have a sneaking suspicion that social media is a ruse.
You’re wrong.
Social media marketing isn't a complete rip-off. For most small and medium-sized enterprises, social media marketing is a complete rip-off.
What Does Social Media Marketing Mean?
The principle of offering free material to grow a following underpins social media marketing. This is a tried and true method. However, social media marketing shatters this otherwise successful strategy.
For starters, building a social media audience isn't the same as generating a commercial asset. You're generating a valuable asset for the platform's owner. If the social media network goes down next month, so does your audience. Policies on social media platforms can and do change on a whim. What is free today will be paid for tomorrow. Several years ago, Facebook yanked the rug from under businesses, making it hard to reach your fans without paying to boost your postings.
Second, social media isn't the best way to sell. You should do more than just publish your own material, according to any think paper about how businesses should use social media. You should be regarded as a reliable source of information or amusement. However, making money simply by being social and making a good impression is difficult.
However, as a tiny business, none of those indicators can be properly monetized.
Your tiny business will not benefit from social media marketing. It will eat up all of your free time and money, leaving you disillusioned and ready to give up on internet marketing altogether.
The goal of social media marketing is to generate likes, shares, comments, and followers through posts. However, as a tiny business, none of those indicators can be properly monetized.
Social media pay-per-click advertising is a completely different animal than social media marketing. Paid advertising can be effective, but for small businesses, paid or free content marketing on social media sites is a terrible investment.
How Big Consumer Brands use Social Media
Large corporations such as Arby's, McDonald's, Target, and Ford invest heavily in social media marketing. These are astute businesses. Why would they put money into something that isn't working?
They don't.
What major brands want and get out of social media differs from what small businesses want and get out of it.
Investing in brand awareness is one of the marketing methods used by large corporations. They want their brand to be linked to specific emotions, life stages, and decisions. Big consumer brands are unconcerned about social media's ability to generate sales. They are concerned with making a good first impression.
Because of their size, the number of various markets they operate in, and the fact that they are primarily focused on customers, these brands can afford to pursue this strategy.
You’re Not a Big Brand
Your small or medium-sized business isn't a household name. You don't have the resources or time to cultivate a long-term demand for your items and brand. You can't afford to invest in brand recognition because the competition will crush you.
Your business isn't well-known. You should avoid wasting money by attempting to implement their marketing methods.
Instead of focusing on metrics that please your ego, you should focus on marketing techniques and approaches that truly make a difference to your bottom line.
Boost Profits by Making Sales Not by Leaving an Impression
What is the value of alike to your company? Why don't you give us a like or a follow? Here's what some back-of-the-envelope calculations yielded:
Likes = $0Followers= $0
Leaving a positive impression does not result in any revenue. If you wish to increase your profits, you must sell more items. This is how small businesses stay afloat. They sell enough goods or services to cover all of their expenses and make a profit.
You don't have any venture capitalists backing you up. You won't be able to profit from an IPO. You'll have to make your money the old-fashioned way, by selling items that others need or want.
While this may seem obvious, most social media marketers overlook it. Consider what would happen if you woke up tomorrow with 10,000 genuine Facebook admirers. What kind of impact would that have on your company?
It wouldn’t
You'd still have to try to persuade those followers to buy something. What method will you use to contact them? You can write a lot of posts, but if you want more than 5% of your fans to see them, you'll have to pay to promote them.
You'll start losing fans if you make all of those posts sales posts.
With social media, you're in a no-win situation.
You still have to do the job of making a sale, no matter how much time and money you spend on social media.
Rather than squandering time and money on social media marketing, you should focus on three separate strategies:
1. Paid advertising on social media networks is the first step. 2. SEO with a long tail 3. Email marketing with a direct answer
The specifics of how you implement these strategies will differ based on the nature of your organization. Companies that sell to other businesses have distinct sales funnels than those that sell to consumers. These strategies, on the other hand, will help you connect with people who want to buy from you, not just people who want to read intriguing content.
Paid Advertising on Social Media Channels is Different
Paid advertising is the real social media gold for small and medium enterprises. Writing and boosting is a time-consuming, costly, and ineffective method of attracting paying clients.
Paid advertising gets to the root of the problem. You have the opportunity to directly ask your target consumer to do something. It may be as simple as clicking a link, but it gets them off of social media and into your website, where you have complete control over the terms of participation.
The ability to micro-target is the largest benefit of social media advertising. You want to target a specific group of people. It's simple to speak directly to their needs when you use micro-targeting. The buyer will sense that you are conversant in their language. They're looking forward to seeing how you'll give the one item they really want or need.
Customers should be directed to a specified landing page rather than your website when using paid advertising. You want to direct them to a landing page where they can purchase a specific product or service, or you want to collect their email address in exchange for something valuable.
Advertising can lead to direct sales or help you establish a list of contacts to whom you can sell in the future using methods you control, such as physical mail or email.
Paid social media advertising is one of the most effective strategies to boost sales quickly. Spending as little as $5 per day on social media advertising can yield big effects for most businesses. However, you'll need to spend time and money testing advertising and audiences. Paid advertising isn't a magic bullet, but it does produce genuine results and a demonstrable return on investment, unlike social media marketing.
Using Long tail SEO
Paid advertising is an effective way to drive traffic and make quick sales in the near term. However, if you want to establish a long-term business, you'll need other tools.
Long-tail SEO can give you with small, consistent income that grows over time as your organization grows.
The purpose of long-tail SEO is to get organic traffic to your product or service pages from search engines. People that want to buy what you're selling will come across you. Like social media marketing, long-tail SEO isn't glamorous. It takes a lot of time and work. It does, however, deliver.
Long-tail SEO entails building tens of thousands of sales pages on your website, each of which earns a small amount of revenue each month.
Advantages of Direct Response Email Marketing
The most cost-effective method of digital marketing is email marketing. Sending an email campaign costs nearly nothing. When done correctly, sending out an optimized sales sequence to your list can produce thousands or tens of thousands of dollars.
However, in order for this strategy to work, you must first create a high-quality list of prospects and consumers, as well as understand direct response marketing.
You ask your prospect to perform a specific, quantifiable action when you use direct response marketing. It could be for the purpose of making a purchase. It may be registering for a free webinar.
The goal is to persuade your prospect to take one action that will move them closer to a buying decision.
Direct response marketing (DRM) is a multibillion-dollar marketing niche. It's effective.
You can convert your small or medium firm into a selling powerhouse by combining paid advertising, long-tail SEO, and direct response email marketing.
None of these procedures are simple. However, they are all straightforward. Even before you've mastered the approach, you'll notice results with each one. Each of these strategies makes it simple to track your progress. Your return on investment is simple to calculate.
This is crucial because effective experiments require good data.
As a business owner, you only have so much time. Don't squander a single second on social media promotion.
Instead, concentrate on marketing that yields measurable outcomes. Instead of focusing on strategies that offer you a dopamine rush from likes and shares, concentrate on tactics that help you make money.
Dopamine cannot be used to pay bills.
