Is your Social Marketing failing miserably, and you can’t figure out why? Like most MSMEs are you also wasting time in Hit and Trial?
Social Media marketing is ideal to promote your business. It is cost effective in bringing new visitors, and helps you retain the audience in one place. Back in the day, ‘Above The Line’ (ATL) Marketing platforms such as Radio & TV, and Print media were expensive and difficult to monitor. Further, ATL marketing did not allow easy consolidation of customer data for retargeting purposes. The only way to retarget customers were ‘Below The Line’ (BTL) Marketing methods such as Face To Face, Door-knocking, Emails, Phone Calls and SMS; also not economical.
In the last decade, there has been a heavy emphasis on Digital Marketing Solutions like Social Media to combat these problems. Now every business, big or small, can post content on their page to engage with new and existing followers through Likes, Comments, and Re-sharing. Till date, this has been an invaluable Digital PR asset for businesses to connect with customers. However, in recent times, this easy practice of posting content has stopped working for many businesses, and digital community development has become a lot harder. Are you experiencing this too? Then read on!
Has Something Changed?
Yes, of course, a lot has changed, and a lot more will change in times to come. As Digital Marketing is evolving with easy techniques emerging every day, it is also becoming more difficult to get the results that one desires. Here are some of the most painful reasons your social marketing is failing.
Social Networking sites like Facebook and Instagram have shrunk the organic reach of page posts. Now, only a fraction of your page audience will see the posts thereby lowering your organic engagement. Naturally, this will impact your community development results negatively.
To increase your reach, you would need to Boost or Promote your posts by spending some money.
What are the results going to be from boosting this post?
Well, unless your post is about a product, service or an offer, there is going to be no measurable result apart from Likes and Comments. Would you still spend money on community development or would you rather focus on driving sales through Ads.
To capture the market and interest, Social Media platforms offered lots of free organic engagement on every page post. Once they had you hooked, cheap advertising solutions for you to make easy money were introduced. This was an easy replacement for traditional marketing. With a growing demand for Digital Marketing, Social Networking sites have now evolved. They offer more streamlined solutions with detailed campaign planning, targeting, automation, and reporting tools. However, this comes at a higher price and requires proper understanding of the Ads dashboard. Initially, PPC (Pay Per Click) marketing on social media sites was a lot cheaper, and almost anyone could get a good result. Now, the costs of advertising are not only higher but also more difficult to control due to increasing complexity in data, and lack of skills.
Social Media Marketing is fast becoming an avenue suitable only for businesses that can pump money into Digital marketing, and hire professionals to manage Advertisement campaigns. SMEs that benefitted from organic Community Development, now need to have budgets for Social Media marketing. Platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are pushing to monetise their services, and they want you to run ads rather than just publishing posts. After all, they are a business, and need revenue to sustain. In the current environment, even if you understand everything, and want to spend some money on Social Marketing, you may not get the desired result.
Why is that?
When Social Marketing was a new trend only the tech-savvy folks caught onto, it was less competitive, and content from a very few businesses appeared on social timelines. With new entrants, and constant digitisation of the marketing practice, now, almost every second business is trying to get on the Social Media Marketing bandwagon. This causes market saturation with repetitive content overlapping the same audience across all the digital channels. Back in the day, it wasn’t cheap for businesses to advertise on Radio, TV, or Print Media. This meant that there was lesser saturation, as the audiences were able to enjoy more entertainment driven content than commercials. Now, every single business is chasing after the same customers, who are not only spoilt for choice, but also unable to buy from every Ad they see.
What impression does your business make during all this saturation?
Digital Community Development is an effective PR exercise for every business. Good brands that care about their customers’ sentiments, make honest efforts to engage with the community. They focus on stories and well planned content to build successful marketing campaigns. Today, most businesses are shamelessly trying to hard-sell by screaming the typical “buy from us” type of tag lines.
With little to no creativity or context in marketing campaigns, businesses expect customers to simply throw away money at endless product-centric ads and offers. If this is your practice too, then surely, even your engaged customers are bound to hide your Ads. After all, how much can a consumer consume? Don’t you think people get tired of your non-stop sales pitch? In other words, if you want to build a sustainable marketing plan, you need to stop blowing your own trumpet, and start building a community.
Why are your campaigns not converting?
You may be a well established business with a good reputation. However, the landscape has changed, and you need to be on top of the game. With plenty of new online competitors as well as big players like Amazon, your existing customers have more options to choose from. If your strategy is not up to the mark, then chances are that you’re losing your market share quickly.
If you are targeting your existing customers through Social Media, then you need to understand your customer data accurately. Re-targeting already engaged shoppers with discount offers could mean that you’re pointlessly giving away your profits. If you are targeting new customers, then your strategy and value proposition needs to be on-point, otherwise you are just burning your cash.
If you are a new business, then clearly no body knows you. To get past this hurdle, you need to raise awareness, build your credibility and leverage it to gain trust, so new customers can purchase from you. In many cases, potential customers will try to contact you, seeking information. This may just be because they need to establish whether your customer service is reliable. If you are too slow in your response or do not given them the attention they need, you will lose the chance to convert them.
Therefore, don’t blame the marketing if your business is flawed, and you can’t figure out why people don’t like or engage with you. If you are a business owner, then do yourselves a favour and rethink your entire marketing strategy before you burn a hole in your pocket and then lose trust in marketing just because you lack awareness.
