Social Media is more important for a small business than it is for businesses with big marketing budgets. Every business sells something in the form of products, services, or ideas to achieve one primary goal, profit.
We do marketing to reach and convince our potential customers to believe that our product is offering the right value for their money. If a marketing effort doesn’t result into sales we consider it a failure and an unproductive expense. A good marketer always ensure two things:
- That he has designed an appropriate message for his/her customers.
- His message is reaching to the people who fit his customer profile.
Ideally marketing should consist of all traditional and modern ways of reaching the target customers but due to budget constraints we try to include only those that ensure the required results. The effectiveness of Social Media Marketing has been questioned since its beginning but since its one of the low-cost ways of marketing, smaller businesses tend to depend more on it in their overall marketing efforts.
You might find some people saying that social media has been a total disappointment for their business but so is the case with people who didn’t get results from any other marketing efforts too. Most of the time the reason of such failures are not the ineffectiveness of the medium but insufficient knowledge of effectively utilizing it which can be dealt with either by learning or by getting professional support.
Since through social media sites you can narrow down your geographical and demographical preferences and reach millions of people fitting your customer profile, the importance of social media for promoting a small business is substantial.
One just needs to know what to expect. If you do it right and do it consistently you will be getting a lot more traffic to your website, you will be getting a lot of leads, your brand awareness will be sky high in your network, and your potential customers will start feeling loyal even before using your product. This is what marketing does, it makes the product sale easy.
It introduces your product to the potential customers in a likeable way. As a matter of fact social media provides you an opportunity to contact your customers more frequently than any other media. Customers may not buy your product instantly but it has to be there when they finally decide to purchase.
