When it comes to attracting customers, how important is paid advertising on social networks compared to other media? Adam Borgstein, founder of Pen Name Consulting, answered this question in detail.
Social networks have created a great opportunity for entrepreneurs: it has never been so easy to get your message across to hundreds, thousands, or even millions of people. But if you want to reach all these visitors to resources, it will be worth a lot of effort.
Why is this not the best option?
This is a simple case of supply and demand, and social media platforms limit the latter. Organic reach, that is, your ability to communicate directly with an audience that prefers to follow you and interact with your business, has been virtually nullified. For example, on Facebook, this covers an average of less than 5 percent of your visitors. Facebook simply doesn’t show your messages to most subscribers, unless you pay for this privilege. This is one of the reasons why social media advertising is becoming more expensive as brands outweigh each other in a competition for user attention.
Social media provide not so many advantages. If you have a limited budget, all this can severely limit your growth and expansion opportunities.
This does not mean that you should completely abandon the use of digital platforms. Paid social media ads are a great source of marketing ideas. With a small amount of money, you can easily check the headlines, images and offers for different audiences. This is valuable research. However, if your entire development strategy depends on paid subscriptions, you can harm your business.
But there is another way!
You just need to diversify your strategy. In the digital world, there are many ways to attract customers: paid content, receiving email newsletters, organic search (earning traffic using interesting content), public relations, influential marketing and attracted media. Start by identifying several channels on which you want to focus your efforts. Ideally, at least some of them will not have to spend a lot of money.
This way you can check what works when creating a multi-channel approach that will pay off in the future.
At many marketing agencies, experts start by analyzing data and consumer information, and then use this to support tactics that allow customers to win SEO through organic content. Social networks can be the perfect platform for those who don’t want to make an effort, but search engines are still the best friend of the business. The main task is to tie this to a strategy that makes it easier to get email addresses. Only then is it worth focusing on paid advertising on social networks to increase direct sales.
Practical example
For example, there is a client for whom marketers have created 40 original articles designed to drive traffic to his site. At first glance, this may not seem like the best way to increase revenue. But over the course of two years, these 40 articles allowed the brand to occupy more than 12,000 keywords (instead of 2000), ranking among the top three Google results for nearly 400 different search topics and stories.
This influx of traffic facilitated direct sales on article pages and added thousands of email addresses to the company's database, which were used to advertise in the newsletters.
It was a combination of reasonable SEO planning (knowledge of keywords for targeting), generating strategies (creating pop-ups or other subscriptions for a site visitor) and positioning product offers on certain pages (for example, native advertising that sold products related to the topic of a particular article) . Thus, the traffic was technically “free”, as was the addition of emails to it. And only after that the content can be uploaded to social networking platforms and directly sold to consumers advertising based on their well-known interests.
Final word
If you give up all your efforts to create paid advertising, you underestimate and undercut the long-term growth of your brand. And when you press all the levers at the same time, it becomes increasingly difficult to find out which data collection channels have the highest rate. But when you diversify and segment your strategy, the opportunities for growth can be felt endless.