I talk to a lot of people about social media. They all want it, know they need it and are often overwhelmed by it. Most just want to hand it off to someone and not think about it; and for a while I was managing it for businesses. My average cost was between $2,000 and $5,000 a month depending on what needed to be done; and it could easily exceed that.
First, social media is not an ambiguous figure stuck in the corner of a dark room that you poke a stick at, sometimes. It’s a serious and effective marketing tool that can grow your business. There are many components to social media such as setting up profiles on at least 4 or 5 social media sites, setting up a relevant content calendar, designing pages to coincide with your brand message, creating events, interacting with fans/followers, answering reviews, being the intermediary between customer and owner, timing posts, understanding third-party software, creating promotions, content marketing, organic SEO, video streaming, a little knowledge of HTML, photo sharing, blogging, social bookmarking, social message across multiple platforms. . . .only to name a few. Social media should be handled by persons who understand strategy and people who have enough smarts to find their way around a computer.
Social media is and will continue to be an investment. I don’t see this as a passing fad. At least not now.
In my years in marketing, I have heard small, local businesses complain about big box stores having a lot of money to be able to reach a lot of people through their marketing efforts. While those same big box stores still do that, small and local businesses now have more power than possible even five years ago. They can talk directly to their customers and potential customers at a fraction of the cost of any local ad. I don’t know how it gets better than this.
So let’s take a small, local business – many would not flinch at spending $2,000 – $5,000 a month (and sometimes a week) on average to advertise in something that may or may not work or even been seen; such as newspaper ad, television commercial, radio spot and so on.
Now let’s look at social media. You can talk directly to your customers. You can talk directly to your potential customers. You can get both of them to talk about you to their friends. You can write content to bring you to the top of search engines organically. You can ask your customers what they want and they WILL tell you. You can track almost everything. You can set your own ad budget and spend as little as $1.00 almost anywhere on the web and can hand-pick your demos and geographic limits . . . I see a whole lotta I cans no I cants here. So my feeling here is that it’s your fear that is holding you back and the only way to overcome your fear is to walk into it. Think about it this way – your competitor can always outspend you on traditional media such as print, tv, etc. But if you’ve been building relationships with your customers through social media for the last year, your competitors are already one year behind.
Now, I’m not saying you should hire me to manage your social media, in fact I probably would turn you down. What you should hire me for is to show you how to do it so you have control and you can hire someone internally to manage it for you. Keep in mind, this will be a full-time person(s), not someone who has a full-time job with you that you’re throwing this on top of. No no.
You can always call on me as a consultant to oversee your efforts and make sure you’re on the right track.
You can contact me right here.
Happy New Year!
Sing it, sister! I have a few clients who think if they ignore social media, it will go away. It’s not, but they might!
Thank you Paula. I think we’ve met before or at least spoke on the phone. It was years back with Michael at Dressed Up. Hope you’re well and thanks for your comment.