Why do so many businesses now have a Facebook and Twitter page? Simple, that is where the majority of people are spending their time! Whether they are using their Iphones or using internet from their PC at work or home, at any time of the day or night you will find a huge crowd hanging-out on social networking sites! The mistake that some businesses have made is to think that you can rely on “just” an advertising campaign that uses the traditional forms of advertising like TV / radio / billboards / newspaper, without adding a concentrated effort on social media marketing to coincide with these campaigns. To be effective in today’s market you need BOTH!
The results of traditional marketing have long been tracked and no one questions that having a creative TV commercial for your business that runs during a popular show or on a sports network during an important game gets your message out to the masses rapidly, but where are the profit margin numbers for Facebook or Twitter? We can track clicks on many on-line banner advertisements and the traffic to our websites and blogs, but unless you are paying for an ad on Facebook you are left with only the weekly report of how popular your business page is, so how do you know? The truth is that right now you actually don’t know for sure other than the incredible testimonials that small businesses with no advertising budgets have shared with others on how they have grown their business from a grass roots campaign on Facebook and Twitter. My own company has had great success through social media marketing and I am presently helping many of my clients go boldly forward with adding this to their marketing mix.
When I hear from local businesses that they do not have time for social media marketing or they doubt the impact of using Facebook or Twitter, I am reminded of the early years of my selling TV commercials in the local market to the owners of car dealerships. I had a tough time convincing the owners of car dealerships to consider running TV ads on the local cable channels like CNN, USA and ESPN because they were convinced that all they needed was a newspaper ad since they saw many of their customers bringing in the ad when looking at cars. How could a customer carry the TV commercial in the door to prove the effectiveness of television advertising to the car dealership owners? I needed to help them see that an ad with “site, sound and motion”, that didn’t cost more than what they were spending in the papers, could be very powerful in helping to sell cars. Do you remember in 1998 when Volkswagen reintroduced the “Beetle”, they used television ads that moved people and got them excited again about the VW Bug which had tremendous impact on selling a retired old brand of automobile in a new fun way!
So, like the local auto dealers years ago who struggled with taking some of their advertising dollars from the newspapers and boldly buying commercial time on ESPN, USA, CNN and other great networks, today you have to ask yourself why you have not jumped in to using social media marketing with your traditional advertising. If you need to have years of statistics to prove that this will enhance your brand and ultimately help you to sell more of your products, then you may find that you miss your window of opportunity to get out ahead of your competitors and gain market share. And, by the way, the local car dealers who moved quickly years ago in buying cable TV advertisements saw that they did significantly better than the ones who only used the newspaper.
All my best to your success!~Charlene
