I hear all the time that people are still skeptical about investing time and money in social media marketing campaigns. I mean, seriously? What more evidence do you need? Stop throwing out the “But, how do we measure ROI with social media?”. Just ask Vitamin Water, JetBlue, Dell, and Southwest how their investment in social media has worked out for them. Increased SALES is how you measure the ROI, and just ask the local restaurant or retail store that’s running an effective social media marketing campaign how it’s working out for them. It’ll still take a couple of years for the dissenters who hold onto old-fashioned marketing methods, so for those of you who still need to be convinced, here are 50 ways why social media marketing is here to stay: (in no particular order)
- It’s two-way marketing
- It’s a great customer service tool
- It gives the customer a voice
- It eliminates the need to spend a ton of money on focus groups. Your following IS your focus group
- Ask a marketing research question, and you get instant data.
- The only cost to produce it is hiring great talent
- Complaint resolutions are documented for other customers to see
- The viral nature of it is closely related to the viral nature of word-of-mouth marketing
- It IS word-of-mouth marketing, but in a digital sense.
- You can make mistakes and explain why you made it
- Intimate contact with your loyal customers and target market
- You can focus on a very specific target market
- It sends traffic back to your website
- It builds inbound links to your website
- It’s great for search engine optimization
- Facebook pages can be used like a forum
- Ability to create multiple Twitter profiles for multiple uses
- Allows you to respond to what’s being said about your brand/business
- It’s more natural than traditional marketing channels
- You control the message
- Endless creative promotion possibilities
- Allows customers to participate in product development
- It has the ability to reach a large amount of consumers on a perpetual time line.
- It can reach a large amount of customers and fans in real-time.
- Customers can respond and react to new business information and products in real-time.
- It has the ability to increase sales
- It has to ability to attract new clients
- It can help you establish yourself as an expert or authority in your industry
- Allows you to respond to complaints before negative word-of-mouth takes place.
- Allows employees to be brand evangelizers.
- The technology is free and open source
- Social media is now adopted by most age groups.
- Allows a competitive advantage over your competitors that aren’t using it
- Allows a competitive advantage over your competitors that are abusing it or not using it correctly
- Gives the ability to update customers about promotions and specials in real-time.
- It has more than just a monetary return on investment.
- We are social creatures.
- It helps you build trust with the consumer
- Experimenting won’t cost you a lot of money
- It’s not as time consuming as you might think
- Your customer’s opinion counts
- Did we mention the technology is free?
- It spans across all media, including photos, videos, audio, and text
- It’s SO MUCH LESS annoying than text/SMS marketing
- Its effectiveness BLOWS text/SMS marketing out of the water
- Did I mention text/SMS marketing sucks?
- You’re building an army of loyal customers we affectionately call “regulars”.
- Builds team/employee morale
- It can be used as a recruiting tool
- Facebook has over 400 million active users worldwide. Twitter has over 75 million users. YouTube and Facebook are the #2 and #3 most visited websites in the world. Every second a new blog is created. Need I say more?
If you haven’t embraced social media for your business yet, then you’ve been living under a rock. It’s here, and it’s here to stay. It has a real return on investment, it WILL grow your sales if done right, and it DOES require someone who knows what they’re doing to run a successful campaign. Are you convinced yet? If so, check out my company’s website at Presence Media, and give us a call or contact us to discuss starting a social media marketing campaign for your small business.
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thanks a lot fir the post!