Why Is Social Media Marketing Is Getting The Attention And The Budget – Low Cost, Easy to Use, or Data Rich Insights

Over the past few weeks, I have shared how start-up Flashstock has benefitted from social media to stay engaged with customers, employees, and even improve product development and operations which all contribute to driving business performance across the company.

Our marketing team has focused its efforts on using social media as it’s the main platform because of the relative ease of use, low cost, and data-rich insight. Start-ups find social media marketing really efficient. At the beginning, most brands are looking to just create community and brand awareness. With existing networks built into Facebook and Instagram, for example, and almost 2.5 billion active monthly users combined, gives marketers unprecedented access to consumers and data. The platforms are free to join and provide simple to use interfaces that don’t take as much effort as a website to manage. With all of these active users, marketers also get great access to data that tells them everything they need about their target audience.

 

 

There are a number of reasons organizations use social media marketing. Low cost of entry is one reason, however that has been changing over time. In 2016 10% of marketing budgets were spent on social media marketing. That number is going to continue to rise more once senior marketing leaders are able to further quantify the value of social media marketing. Right now social media marketing is considerably less expensive than traditional forms of marketing. For the growing companies of the world, it is much easier and cost effective to set up a Facebook page or Twitter account to create a community and begin engaging right away. In business, “time is money” and in our hyper growth society, the expectations are that we grow fast.

Social media marketing has also brought the opportunity to make it easy for a marketer to set up a page, account, persona, and be able to adjust as necessary as you leverage a templated frame that you input your content into. Unlike a website, where all sorts of considerations need to be made from brand identity to navigation, enabling clients and prospects to come back because it is easy to navigate and explore, and that they will find value from it is desirable. With the continuous flux some start-ups are in, managing a website with little resource availability can be a difficult task. It is especially difficult when you are trying to launch campaigns, generate leads, and help generate revenue all at the same time.

A good website linked to social media channels is probably the right balanced approach. The more area you can cover, the better outcomes to business performance will be achieved. Understanding how to balance the approach is something that only data insights can provide and social media marketing is a great way to get that insight. A major benefit of using social media marketing is the ability to easily access all the information on your consumer base and understand in real time what is happening. The impact and results are live and monitoring tools help aggregate all the data so that you can easily understand who is talking about your brand. You can easily understand if the customers are taking action or not reacting at all and therefore, the platform gives ample time to reassess and redeploy with little to no spending. Again, unlike some traditional marketing tactics such as print or TV with large production costs, it would be an increase in expense to have to reprint an ad or shoot a new commercial because of poor public response.

Lessons for Others

Always remember that as a marketer you shouldn’t put all your eggs in one basket. Social media marketing is getting attention because many marketers are stretched for budget and find it an affordable and easy to implement a strategy. This gives the marketer much access to data insights on their consumer alone.

If you have concerns as to the accuracy of anything posted on this site, please send your concerns to Peter Carr, Program Director, Social Media for Business Performance.

---

References