If you are a small business don’t get carried away with the fact that you wont need set some moolah aside for your social media campaigns.
Irrespective of your size you will need to put in some funding to promote your business, whether you have to use it bring up your SEO ranking or make your mark on the various social media platforms.
Here are some ways in which you can budget for your marketing, put together by Hostgator.
What are some effective ways to spend on social media?
Spending money on social media marketing boils down to a few different strategies, all or one of which may work best for your small business:
- Use your budget to boost and purchase advertisements.
- Hire an additional employee(s) to be your official social media marketer.
- Pay someone to create photo/written/video content for your brand.
Here are six reasons why creating a budget for social media is an excellent decision.
1. High ROI Potential
Over the last two decades the world of advertisements and marketing strategies have rapidly shifted towards focusing on the Internet.
And where do people spend most of their time online? Social Media.
Platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram know this better than anyone and have provided incentives for businesses to purchase advertisements for less than you would pay for most other advertisements based on potential reach. Due to social media’s targeted approach, you’re much more likely to have the right potential customers viewing your ads.
2. It Gives Your Business Direction
The best businesses take the needs of people, however large, and fulfill them on a regular basis. The best advertisements figure out who these people are, and send them directly to your business. As previously mentioned, social media excels in targeting by seeking out audiences based on data patterns, or as we call it in the tech world, analytics.
As your business ages, you can use analytics to determine which products, services, and advertising strategies are (and aren’t) working for you. Paying for ads or hiring a social media analyst will be key in being able to use the data beneficially.
3. Unlimited Reach
The thing about social media ads is they don’t have a specified limit for how many people can view them. Since ads are integrated right into the social platform there’s an unlimited potential for people to share, tag, and re-post your content all over the Internet.
This is why companies create advertisements that often have nothing to do with their product until the last few seconds. If you can engage people for 15-30 seconds with something memorable, no matter how ridiculous, the amount of people who will see it can be endless, and for years after the time it’s released. If your business doesn’t have any team members capable of creating dynamic content, this might be an area where you should focus spending your budget: hiring creative content creators.
4. One Click Away
Printed advertisements have been on the decline for a number of reasons:
- Tracking ROI is difficult and usually comes down to word of mouth.
- The expected reach for print ads is more finite, and can be capped at how many copies are printed.
- Print ads lack in-depth analytics about who is seeing them, and where viewers are coming from.
Internet ads, however, don’t have to deal with any of those pitfalls. Best of all, if someone feels the need to take action on your advertisement they’re only a single click away.
5. Developing A Customer Relationship
Have you ever left a comment on an advertisement you saw in a magazine? Me neither, an artfully-drawn mustache perhaps, but never a comment I would expect someone might reply to.
With social media you have the unique opportunity of creating advertisements that also develop a personal relationship with your customers. If anyone has a question, or something to compliment you on, you can answer it on the spot and thank them personally for using your service.
6. Looking Towards Permission
Even though this whole article has been discussing the benefits of ads, I have to talk about advertising as a whole. People are sick of ads.
