As a web design and marketing consultant people question me about this constantly. I often hear statements to the effect of “I don’t need a website, I use social media to promote my business” or “I can just start my own Facebook Page or Group and promote my business myself.” That may be true, BUT there are a lot of reasons that this is not an effective strategy.
Advertising Goals. Let’s take a look at the primary goals of your advertising. If you’re doing a good job or keeping your existing clientele happy, then the goal of advertising is to attract new customers. Your business social media feed when used properly offers you a direct link to your existing customers to provide them with updates about you products and services, company news, etc.
What it doesn’t do so well without a lot of time and money (I’ll tackle those two in a moment) is attract NEW customers. Why is that? Because your social media feed provides a limited audience. But that I mean people who are specifically looking for your product or service. I know what you’re thinking…”That’s exactly what I want!” And you’re partially correct in the thinking; except that many people won’t like your page because it only serves a single purpose; advertising your business! So with all the other businesses out there on social media, the chances of the new customer clicking on your page are a shot in the dark at best.
Time and Money. Let’s face it, in business, time IS money. Even if you completely disagree with the notion that you can’t effectively draw an audience, trying to maintain a social media feed and establish an audience takes enormous amount of time. Couple that with the actual money you’ll need to spend in order to attract new potential customers and most of you a ARE going to spend A LOT of money “promoting” or “boosting” your social media pages or content. I would strongly suggest that before tackling the idea of doing it on your own, talk to somebody who has tracked the hours involved and the benefits they’ve achieved.
Identity and Authority. Almost every business should have their own website and domain name (www.mycompany.ca) . The history and evolution of the internet has shown us that very few things remain the same. We’ve evolved from earliest form of the internet with like AOL and CompuServe to services like Myspace, Yahoo and several other primitive forms of “social media” but one element has survive since the internet became public and before; the website. Facebook and Twitter will fade away…yes I know…hard to believe now but they will and it may not only be difficult to communicate with your customer base during the transition, you will lose all the content, industry authority and search traffic that you spent so much time creating as the search engines abandon those sites as well.
Knowledge and expertise. Okay, so you’re still convinced that you can attract a broad audience, time isn’t a factory for you, and you plan to link back to you own website; that’s great! You’re ahead of most. But do you really understand how people use and view social media feeds, how the networks rank contents or how to create an advertising campaign that target your best audience and translates into to profit? Trial and error isn’t only going to cost you a lot of wasted time, it’s also going to cost you a lot of money on advertising campaigns that don’t work
Alright we’ve established that self-promotion or advertising, or at least most of us have, so now what? If you’re interested in website design, hosting and promotion, I’d be happy to discuss a balanced effective approach that includes promoting your business though a dynamic and engaging website and complimented by further exposure within a much broader advertising network that includes social media.
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