Product and content businesses with no social media marketing plans will drown in 2017. Social media has already become a monetizable battlefield with the next generation, and many businesses are capitalizing on the upside potential.
A business with a social media marketing plan will destroy competitors with no presence online.
In the last century, sales were made door to door, or in certain venues. Newspaper boys, door-to-door salesmen, and consumer product representatives were common. Nowadays, the Internet is the new neighborhood. The salesmen of the old days have been replaced by professionally crafted social media marketing plans, landing pages, and sales letters. Why go to the customer when they’ll come straight to you?
To Spend Money or Not?
The first decision you must make is if you will devote a budget to your social media marketing plan. If you have an online business and you’re converting 3% of the viewers into customers, you should absolutely spend money for paid traffic on Google and Social Media Sites (such as Facebook). Spend money for paid traffic until the profit starts to wean, and then take your foot off of the gas.
If you have no budget, there are other options to generate a presence online as well. Having Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram pages for your business will skyrocket the business’ online presence. Setting up accounts is completely free, but there is an option to pay someone to do it for you if you’ve got a higher budget and less time.
Social Media’s Impact on Business
Social media is both leisure and a business tool. For businesses, it can help by providing free advertising, brand awareness, customer engagement, high-converting leads, web traffic, higher SEO rankings, real-time information sharing, among many other things (most of the time for free).
There is a diverse array of social media options to use as well. Food and lifestyle businesses may fare well on Instagram, while content sites would do great on Twitter, using their titles or headings with the 140 characters allotted. You should play around the different platforms and choose the one that adds the most value to your operation.
Performance Metrics
You should set performance metrics for your social media plan before executing on it. It’s important to know what’s important to you, what you want out of social media, and how you will determine the effectiveness of a marketing plan.
A few metrics that can accurately gauge the impact of social media on your business are:
- Linked views
- Repeated visits
- Sales conversion rates
- Cross promotion (from other users)
Closing Remarks
In 2016, Waspbarcode conducted a survey of 1,000 small businesses nationwide. Their findings showed that the top three marketing tools used by businesses are websites, emails, and social media. Out of the three tools listed above, social media is the newest.
If a new tool is on the verge of trumping emails, the giant of last decade, there should be a clear focus on how to use that tool to add to the bottom line of a business.
Many older people do not fully understand social media, due to it being a new hallmark of the Millenial generation. Professional help is always available, and for those with a budget, an SEO consultant or marketing professional may be able to give strong assistance. You are the one who must make the call at the end of the day.
