Absent From Social Media? You're in Trouble!

Social media is the future of marketing, there is no doubt. 

Last month, I heard Gary Vaynerchuk point out that the $85B industry that makes up television ads cannot measure sales like Facebook Ads and newer online forms of advertising.  

Social media marketing is critical to your future business success. 

In traditional marketing, the gold standard for success was achieving 'word-of-mouth' advertising - a method which instantly granted huge benefits at little to no cost for the advertiser. 

When an individual sells your product to their friends, you don't pay them, you don't compensate them, and their friends know that the product that is being recommended to them has met the challenge of their friends' discretion. 

It has value, and they can take that to the bank.  And that's exactly what you're trying to achieve through your social media campaign.

Facebook, LinkedIn, Snapchat, Twitter, Instagram, and dozens of other platforms have advertising built into their platforms for you to use.  These option include Pay-per-click advertising, as well as pay-per-impression or pay-per-conversion advertising (on some platforms). 

• Pay-per-click advertising offers you the option of presenting your ad on the social media platform in question, then you pay for the advertisement only if a potential customer clicks on the ad.  Rates vary, but it is not uncommon for PPC advertising to run as high as 30 cents per click or as low as 5 cents per click. 

• Pay-per-impression (or PPM, pay-per-mille) advertising is different in that it presents the advertisement and then you are charged for each time the ad is presented.  Billing is usually accomplished in the low pennies-per-thousand presentations range, but can range as high as several dollars per thousands presentations.

• Pay-per-conversion advertising is not available on most platforms, yet, but is similar to pay-per-click advertising.  However, in pay-per-conversion advertising, the customer is tracked past the click-through to your ad to see if they engage with the content that you are presenting, be it a webpage, blog-post or sales page.  If the customer signs-up, purchases, or otherwise engages with your content, that is considered a conversion, and payment is charged.  Payments in this program, on the few platforms where they are available, run from 50 cents per conversion to several dollars per conversion.
  
  

Return on Investment is one of the more critical factors when determining whether to launch a particular marketing campaign.  Social media offers a huge advantage over traditional marketing campaigns in two ways:

1. Low cost: social media marketing is configured to support low-cost solutions, including very low rates for impressions and clicks, and direct control over those costs.  Only have $1000 to spend on social media advertising?  No problem, just configure your ad campaign to run to a maximum of $1000 (available on most platforms)
2. Tracking: unlike other marketing strategies, social media marketing allows you to directly access the results of your marketing campaign.  In print or television advertising, the marketing firm dumps dollars into a campaign, runs that campaign, and then attempts to measure whether it was successful by analyzing the results before, during, and after the campaign runs.  In social media marketing, the results are directly observable.  Each marketing platform provides statistics on the number of times each ad was presented, clicked, and engaged.  You can directly measure your return on investment.
   
   

Finally, social media connects you to your clients in a personal way.  It gives them investment in you and your company in a way that traditional advertising just can't. 

Properly setup, it allows your customers to develop a personal relationship with you, providing feedback, insights, and empathy to you and your company throughout the product development, implementation and retirement stages. 

​Your customers can be the greatest source of new ideas for your company and their strategic, long-range directives.

Find out more about how we can help your social media strategy, learn more about working with us.