5 Reasons You Are Taking a Gamble With Social Media Marketing

Are You Playing With Fire by Only Using Social Media Marketing For Your Business?

There has been a trend over the last few years to solely grow your business by using social media. Social media marketing has proven useful time after time for many businesses. It is an incredible tool that we as marketers are thankful to have. 

But here's the thought, just like any other thing in life, you can look at the pros and the cons of using only social media to market your business. 

And while there are pros, there are also many cons you need to be aware of before it's too late and you have destroyed your marketing.

What Is Social Media Marketing?

Social media marketing is the use of one or many social media platforms to get to know and attract your perfect customer to generate sales and website traffic. 

Using social media platforms correctly by creating above-average content, involving your audience in a conversation, and running campaigns have traditionally paid off. 

Some examples of popular social media sites used for marketing are Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube, and Snapchat.

While social media marketing has proven its successes time and time again, there are many downfalls. 

As we move past and recover from 2020, those downfalls are even more important now than they ever have been. 

It is time to increase your marketing efforts by spreading out your resources efficiently and effectively and using other resources. 

5 Reasons It's Time To Expand Beyond Social Media Marketing Now

1. Difficulty Converting Leads for FREE

When your business puts all of its marketing efforts solely into social media platforms, you are rolling the dice. This is because of the lack of ability to generate leads from these audiences. Social media audiences tend to come from a large pool of people who may not be your ultimate target audience which leads to dud followers. 

And consumers are far savvier these days than they were just a few years ago. They know how to ignore your content on social. And the social algorithms are most likely not helping your efforts either. 

Sure, your businesses' social accounts might have a large number of followers and maybe even get a bunch of likes, but what does that mean if they aren't converting to sales? 

And what happens when a popular competitor comes to town and your followers flee? 

2. Big Tech Policy Changes 

A few weeks ago we wrote a post about Apple's new data-sharing changes. 

Facebook then came out and said that on their platforms, these changes are going to impact the way businesses advertise. 

This is worrisome to us and should frighten any business owners who solely rely on Facebook and Instagram ads. The ads that your business is running might not be reaching your perfectly-targeted audience anymore. 

3. Not All of Your Target Audience Might Be on Social Media 

In today's tech-savvy society it feels like everyone around us is on social media. But the keyword there is "feels". In marketing, we need to always remember that feelings aren't facts. 

In fact, there are plenty of user segments you may want to target, that don't have or use social media regularly enough to benefit from your social media marketing efforts. 

Have you noticed the news about people leaving social media platforms in huge numbers?  

4. Tools and Profiles for Businesses Are Being Restricted or Removed 

With politics becoming quite intertwined with social media in the last year, Big Tech made some changes that affect the way businesses use social media. 

Companies like Facebook are removing profiles and also tools that proved useful in the past. A great example is what happened to hashtags later into 2020. 

Facebook who owns Instagram, turned off all recent posts under certain hashtags in hopes to reduce false news. 

Hashtags are a huge benefit when growing a brand's presence on social media as they help connect people with the same interest even when you don't have a huge following already. 

We believe this and many other, seemingly small changes, to these platforms are the start of the demise of "easy" and "successful" social media marketing as we know it. 

5. Content Creation Is A Tiring and Daunting Task

"Content is fire, social media is gasoline" is a great quote by Jay Baer that we really like. This quote is true and accurate because again without excellent and useful content, social media can't do its job. 

Content creation is a daunting task, that if not done correctly, can fall flat. 

We tend to see our clients falter by trying to create content themselves and, in turn, not having enough time to create great content and enough content in bulk, so they run out of steam and eventually stop posting altogether. 

This burnout can be a great business's demise and it can hurt your public image very easily and negatively impact interest and future sales. 

How Can You Turn Your Gamble Into a Win?

The best way to avoid these risky downfalls of social media marketing is to spread your efforts out more broadly. 

There are MANY ways that digital marketing is a win for your business beyond social media. 

With the help of our partners, Shane Shirley Media has proprietary digital technologies that can help elevate your business starting the moment you reach out to us. 

We can start with a free digital marketing audit valued at $2500 that will help you see all of the pros and cons of your existing marketing plan. 

Then we will give you all the tools and advice you will need to get your business to survive this rocky business world in 2021! 

We are in the business of building businesses. 

Reach out today to Shane Shirley Media and let's get started!

Guest Post by Reece Smith, EVP