In simple terms, marketing can be defined as an act of promoting one’s products or services in order to boost sales. This term is believed to have entered the lexicon in the late 1800s and since then, this practice has come a long way.
What started off as simple advertorials in periodicals, knows no boundaries today. Technological advancements, along with the advent of social media, have made it possible to reach out to masses anywhere and anytime.
This sheer ease of tapping into one’s target market using digital media, has turned other, more traditional forms of marketing such as like billboards, mail, radio and TV less popular, if not obsolete.
The recently released data from Magna corroborates this fact. For the first time, the global digital ad spending beat TV advertisement in 2017. Presently, the digital ad spending amounts to 41 percent (highest among all forms of marketing) of the total market share, whereas TV ad expenditure constitutes 35 percent. And by 2020, the share of digital ad spending globally is expected to cross 50 percent.
Not surprisingly, a huge share of digital ad spending is held by social media marketing.
This blog is about four bulletproof reasons why social media marketing is essential for your business, and why it is absolutely worthy to invest in it:
1. Almost All Your Customers Are On Social Media
The world’s population stands at 7.5 billion today, out of which 2.5 billion are either kids below 15 or elderly people above 65 years of age. Naturally, they are not the target group for most of the businesses.
Now, the remaining 66 percent of the population falls in the age bracket of 15 – 64, which is considered to be the most economically viable group. Interestingly, more than 3 billion people are active social media users, which corresponds to roughly 40 percent of the total population.
Hence, going by statistics, if one chose to focus only on social media marketing and would completely neglect other platforms, one could still reach a significantly large chunk of the market: a big challenge, but also a great opportunity.
2. Social Media Marketing Is About Money Spent Well
Imagine yourself marketing your products or services through a newspaper ad or a television commercial. As these media involve an indiscriminate approach and do not have the option to target one’s audience with precision, most of the arrows shot will miss the mark. Resulting in loss of money.
Social media platforms, especially Facebook, offer a very well-crafted process for targeting your customer base. You can choose a particular city, region, location, and age group as well as people with certain preferences, academics from certain universities, those who have liked your competitors’ page etc. with ease.
Obviously, such precise targeting results in better conversions and a lower Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC).
3. Gives You Global Reach
Unlike other marketing techniques, social media offers you global reach, through just a click. With the world becoming a smaller place with every passing day, social media is the easiest way for businesses, both start-ups and well-established ones, to make their presence felt globally in a much cheaper and more effective way.
[Tip – One can make use of social media influencers to reach out to large numbers of people within very little time. Social media influencers are those having a large number of followers on their accounts and branders/advertisers use their credibility to reach out to their potential customers.]
4. Instead of Drawing People In, It Brings Productas Out to People
Earlier, marketing was more about pulling people toward you. For example, road shows, putting canopies on streets, partaking in exhibitions, organizing a fare etc. worked on the principle of pulling people physically first and then telling them about a product. The effort that went into drawing people was huge and cumbersome at the same time.
Social media marketing works on a totally different principle. It literally takes a product to the customer, without making any effort to pull them physically. Users get acquainted with the product, without making any effort and without realizing that anyone is trying to convince them to buy it.
With average people checking their social media feeds as many as 14 times a day, you have a huge opportunity to exploit this space and make it work in your favor.
Final Point
Statistics suggest that the coming years belong to none other than social media marketing. This is nothing short of a blessing for small and medium scale businesses that can use it as a launching pad and compete with the veterans of the industry on an equal footing.