We hear it all too often. The one where a business invested in social media-based advertising, just because they heard that if you aren’t doing ads on Facebook, you aren’t reaching your audience and you’re missing out on potential business.
FALSE!!
Social Media is most effective when you have a real, organic audience actually interacting with your business already. So, for something like a cafe, restaurant, or a brewery where people are physically patronising your business, it’s extremely effective as a communication channel. If you’re not a publicly-facing business, growing a social media presence is much harder, as customers have little reason to engage with the content you post.
Creating, establishing and maintaining a reason for customers to engage your social is harder to do when your business is niche or not traditionally public-facing (think: something like a diesel mechanic or a plumber). It’s harder to do, but there are ways you can indirectly reach an audience when the details of your business aren’t as splashy.
Essentially, social media isn’t right for everybody. It may be important to have a presence but in some cases, it may not be worth spending your marketing dollars on. Google ads, email marketing or radio advertising may be more worthwhile.
For businesses that aren’t public-facing, we recommend incorporating your social media presence and growth strategies into your overall marketing plan. That means using it as a platform to engage your audience, rather than to sell something to them. This involves finding a particular “hook” that will make people want to follow you on social media. It may result in you promoting something completely different to what your business does. For example; a plumber’s social media feed probably won’t be the most glamorous in the world, if it focussed on pipes, sewage and septic tanks….but thinking outside the box and creating a blog series called “Krapchat”, offering valuable information in the context of educational comedy…all of a sudden, you have a reason for people to follow you.