We live in a world where the attention of consumers is the gateway to business success. Speaking of which, two billion people actively use Facebook on a monthly basis with an average time of 20 minutes per visit. Let’s just agree that a ton of attention is going to them right now. Also, if my math is right, attention is key to business and social media gets a lot of attention. This means that social media marketing is KEY to business success and you’re losing right now if you aren’t leveraging it. Attention is marketing in a nutshell. If you think about why marketing companies do what they do, it’s because they initially want your attention. In fact, if you look at marketing funnels nowadays the first phase is to draw attention and get people to know you even exist. How does social media do this you ask?
Social Media Marketing Builds Credibility
Social media marketing builds your brand’s credibility. Think about how you develop credibility without it for a second. You create a solid product/service that’s effective, good quality, and satisfies the consumer for starters. Then you hope that people start talking about your product/service with their friends and family. Eventually, friends of distant cousins twice-removed turn into your customers because they understand your credibility through word-of-mouth. With social media this whole process can be accelerated, BIG time. It basically augments word-of-mouth marketing by reaching people faster and for longer all while spreading like a wildfire. Liking or sharing content on Facebook opens it up to the news feeds of entire friend’s lists, giving you the chance for exponential reach. As long as you can speak to the interest of even 10% of these people and convert on 1% of them that’s a huge win for most businesses! Best of all, if your content becomes viral (which is like hitting the jackpot but with much better chances) then it has the potential to reach millions.
Social Media Marketing has Exponential Reach
If you’re still not convinced, then what if I told you Facebook knows more about you than you do? Okay maybe not to that extent but they know a lot about their users. As you begin liking different posts, commenting about certain topics, and adjusting your profile to include new personal characteristics, Facebook keeps tabs on it. The reason they do this is the same reason they’re a multi-billion-dollar company – information about users generates their revenue through Facebook ads. If you haven’t used their ad services before then hear me out when I say that they revolutionized marketing. If you have a business page on Facebook and you want users to see your content, then you need to pay money. The more money you pay the more people you can potentially reach. Here’s the revolutionary part: since Facebook has access to details about its users and what they like, you can target your marketing to people based on such details. For example, we posted an article on Facebook about a great date bar recipe for one of our clients. When creating the Facebook ad, we targeted the post to females aged 18 to 40 who had an interest in yoga, health & nutrition, and lived in Mississauga, Toronto, and Brampton (areas that our client services). The response to the article was phenomenal. It had over 400 impressions including likes, shares, and comments. It also increased the client’s website traffic by 700% during the 1-week span of the ad since users had to click “learn more” to view the entire recipe which would take them to the website’s blog post.
Social Media is Where the Market is at Right Now
When it comes to numbers and return on investment you’d be hard-pressed to find a better marketing outlet than social media. The problem is that people get too romantic about the way they market their services because that’s how they’ve always done it. Even if it used to work before, the market changes and if you don’t adapt then you’re not going to survive. TV commercials were an effective way to market products/services 10 years ago. But technology improved and the market followed suit. It began with the remote control which allowed us to tune into another channel while commercials came along. Then smart phones popped into the market and everyone began directing their attention to social media during TV commercials. You need to go where the market goes and right now that’s social media without a doubt.
