7 Benefits Of Social Media Advertising

If you have been following this blog, you will know that I am passionate about inbound marketing, especially social media marketing. When we started offering inbound marketing as a service, we had a lot of excitement, because of the advantages it provided. The advantages were so immediate that we could not wait to get to the clients we were in our D-class classification profile. We opened up the box and found some rather interesting things that these clients said and requested from Enlyne Branding. When we started offering social media marketing as one of our services, we loved a couple of things it offered.

1. Accessibility
2. Price
3. Viral Potential

Accessibility

Social Media marketing (unlike Television and Radio and sometimes Print Media) was and is still accessible to everyone, whether you are a small business or not. If you currently run a Google search and you run search words that you know a big company services. You will see 4 or 5 small businesses ranking above it. This is what I love about social media too, the search codes they run are similar to those of search engines. You can get a sweet spot of real estate and you can get more hits than the big fish in your city

Price

The price is right and you don't constantly have to fight with big fish for a piece of your real estate, there is plenty of space and guess what, it is cheap. The price does not go up because your advert is placed next to a big giant and people might be able to click on your link and therefore you are charged more. This is wonderful about social media, it enables your brand to benefit just as much if not more than the big fish. 

Viral Potential

Even the smallest of businesses have the potential to go viral, and if you just browse the internet, you will be showered with an avalanche of ideas and e-books on how you can turn your presence online into a big success. And this excited us quite a bit.

But our excitement was short-lived, the small businesses that we called up and presented this service to, were not responding positively. We had all the stats, all the proof and mostly all the success of how it would benefit them, but they were still not convinced. So I went back personally and asked their decision-makers and asked them what is wrong with the offer, was it the pitch, the presentation, price or you just don't believe it in. I, personally was shocked by the response, and even more shocking was their psychology about social media marketing, that was found on nothing. They said a lot of things, but one that stood out was, why was the big companies in their industry not following suit, and based on this, social marketing will never take off. We are far into the process now, and they can't stop calling us.

So after this, I formulated the 7 benefits of social media advertising and we emphasized on these points and finally they saw the light.

1. You Pay What You Use - Unlike other forms of marketing, you only pay for what you were exposed to. So if clients click on your link, only then will you be charged for advertising. 
2. You Decide Your Budget - Set your budget and when your advertising reaches that amount, you will stop advertising and you will never find this kind of flexibility in any other form of marketing. 
3. Easy To Access - It is thee easiest form of advertising to penetrate. Other forms, you need to send your ad in a certain format and you need to send well in advance. Although sending your campaign in advance is good practice, but because this is online, your ad is grouped and placed on pages with people who have indicated similar interests. This is why social media marketing is called "the marketing of niches" because it is able to target a specific audience and are able to get better results. 
4. Self Help - From day 1, social media marketing was about doing it yourself. You don't need fancy designs to post your ad, most companies just post their logo and the link in which they are wanting to lead you to. So your designing costs are cut to zero. So what we did is that, we said, we will train the clients and they would be able to manage it themselves. 
5. Survey's - Additionally, on the same account you can run mini surveys, where you can gauge the interest of your audience on your product or service. And again, this you can do at a fraction of the price that normal advertising would do. 
6. Global Reach - while other forms like Television, Radio and Print Media are only limited to either local or national, Social Media marketing you can choose how far you want your advert to reach. You can choose continents and you can choose just your local city, at no additional charges. Like a local guest house we did a social media campaign for, we decided to do it nationally and she increased her sales by 300% and she spent less than 5% and she actually said it was cheaper than when she was only advertising on the local paper. 
7. Analytics - Social Media is able to give you stats that no other form of advertising is able to. You are able to view where the people are viewing your advert, what key words they used, what is the referring site and even more impressive which browser are people viewing your ad from so that you can make your website that browser friendly. Like the saying goes, "If you can't measure it, you can't manage it."

There is no other form of marketing that will give you the same results with the money that you are paying for social media marketing. So big companies are now having continuous campaigns on the social media networks, but there is more than enough space for you and 1000 of your competitors, and the only thing that will separate you from the rest, is your creativity.