Why Marketing Today is Better than Ever
Marketing Tips Social Media Marketing
Are you taking advantage of today’s widespread marketing opportunities?
Today’s marketing opportunities are amazing. You can achieve so much with so little! The options are accessible, affordable, and effective – provided you know how to manage them. One business that I know was able to flip their $5,000 marketing budget into a $500 budget with amazing results – but more about that later. First, let’s look at some traditional marketing comparisons.
Traditional Marketing
If you come from a traditional marketing background, you might argue that today’s marketing isn’t necessarily better than that of the past—it’s just different. There’s some truth to that. Once upon a time, people weren’t bombarded by media from all directions and you could place a print ad, radio spot, or run a television commercial with some guarantee that it would reach a widespread audience. It was a pretty straightforward way to reach people.
Nowadays, you could approach things the same way but…
The cost!
Traditional marketing is expensive! Really expensive.
And is that cost even worth it?
Does traditional marketing still get the results that your business is looking for?
Do those old school advertising spots still garner the customer interest that they once did?
The fact is, you can expect to spend at least 5X more on traditional marketing like print, radio, posters, billboards, and a lot more on television, and you won’t necessarily get the results that you’re looking for. Studies* continue to show how the effectiveness of old marketing techniques is dropping. 44% of people now ignore direct mail marketing and over 90% of people opt out of email subscriptions. 86% of people skip over TV and radio ads.
Think about your own behaviour. Have you become desensitized to these old school, hard sell methods?
The trickiest thing of all when it comes to traditional advertising is that the results can’t be tracked accurately, if at all.
Do you know how to calculate your ROI? What does ROI really mean?
Everyone throws around the term ROI, but are you really calculating your return on investment? Do you know how to check? Are you monitoring and confirming it? Or are you tossing around your advertising budget blindly, without really tracking the analytics to see if you’re getting results?
Today, technology has made marketing opportunities abundant, inexpensive, and effective. When implemented and managed effectively, your return on investment is all completely trackable. You can now attract new business and retain existing customers through personalized and well-crafted social interactions, and it’s cost-effective and trackable.
$5,000 vs. $500
Social media has a 100% higher lead-to-close rate than outbound marketing* and a well-executed social strategy can achieve incredible results at ⅕ of the cost of traditional marketing, if not more.
I recently convinced a client who was about to spend $5,000 on subway ads to invest in social media instead. There wouldn’t have been a clear way to calculate the effectiveness of the subway ads, but with a boosted ad budget of just $500 we were able to generate a huge response with tracked results:
Between Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn, we achieved a combined reach of over 200,000, meaning that their ad was visible over 200,000 times in people’s social media newsfeeds. That generated 2,486 visits to their social profiles, 7,499 visits directly to their website, and created 8,788 views of the various pages of their site! The subway ads would have cost 10X more money and they never would have had metrics to track the return on the investment.
Break out of the “pay, hope, and guess” marketing cycle
Businesses get trapped in the “pay, hope, and guess” marketing process. They spend money on marketing but they don’t have a firm way to track the effectiveness of the ads. It’s a cycle of pay, hope, guess, repeat. If you’re stuck in this cycle, you’re not alone. So many businesses still are, but you can break out of it to save money and grow your business effectively.
Calculate what’s working & what isn’t
The best part of online marketing is that you can see what’s working, what isn’t, and easily course-correct your campaigns to get the most bang for your buck.
Today’s marketing potential is better than ever before because all of the guesswork has been eliminated from advertising. Unlike print, radio, posters, and billboard advertising, you can collect data to show you who’s clicking, what hooks them, and how much time they’re spending on your website. Finally, you can put an end to running ads blindly and hoping for the best.
So the question is, are you still stuck in the “pay, hope, and guess” cycle? Shift your focus to social media marketing supported by real metrics and analytics that will tell you if you’re really getting a good return on your investment.
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