4 reasons why you need more than social media marketing
By Lesley Allan
Imagine, you have spent years building a community of thousands of dedicated, engaged customers. It’s taken countless hours of content creation, clever captions, and dances to trending audio in pursuit of virality. But it’s all gone in an instant – your community, your customer base and your source of income. Your social media accounts have been hacked.
While it’s important to have a social media marketing plan, relying solely on your Instagram account to build your business is a huge risk. Aside from the social media Gods constantly changing the algorithms, you could be just one hack away from losing all of your hard work.
Here are four key reasons why social media shouldn’t be your only channel for marketing.
1) Any of the social media platforms you are on are not yours.
This means that neither are your followers. It takes a long time to build a following these days and some platforms are harder than others i.e. think of your Facebook business page. Things change all the time on social media. The algorithms change. Videos are in. Images are out. Images are back in. Accounts get hacked. Accounts get shut down.
I know of at least four prominent business coaches who lost EVERYTHING when they got hacked .. one of them had 50K followers … gone. Luckily she had a huge email list, but imagine if you didn’t have a backup plan and you lost everyone. That’s your whole business and a lot of hard work, gone.
So what’s the lesson here? Email is queen and if you haven’t started building a list of subscribers yet, this is your sign to get onto it today. There are so many email clients out there and some like Mail Chimp and Klavyio have free plans available.
2) You have no control over who sees your content
Unless you are a big corp with thousands of dollars to spend on ads – because that’s what Facebook wants its customers to do – then you are at the mercy of Facebook and how they push your content out. While some social media experts will suggest they know what makes the algorithm tick, we have no idea of exactly what the perimeters are that we need to fit into for Facebook to show our content.
I don’t know about you, but spending hours creating and posting content multiple times a day on top of my primary work, with the hope that you will get your content in front of your ideal audience isn’t that appealing to me.
3) The spray-and-pray approach rarely pays off
Where are your ideal clients? Where do they tend to consume content? Before putting all of your energy into one channel, it’s worth asking your customers how they prefer to hear from you. A quick customer poll or survey can give you a great starting point for building a focused multi-channel marketing plan. Social media marketing is definitely going to have a place in your strategy, but you want to build a list you can own and target! SMS marketing is having a big moment right now, so even if you’re not ready to add that channel to your marketing mix, it’s a good idea to start collecting phone numbers so you have a list ready to go when the time is right.
4) If you’re not repurposing your social media content, you’re wasting your efforts
When I look at the stats on my client websites, the majority of website visits come from Google searches, not social media.
Here’s an example of one of them:
This means that if you’re not repurposing all the content you posted on social media to your website, then is hidden from Google and doing nothing for your search results. Think about it, when you are looking to buy a service or a product, do you search Instagram or Google? While you might first take a peek at the brand on Instagram, say, for example, a new local cafe, when you’re in the market for a bookkeeper, or business coach, you probably find yourself first turning to Google. When people find you via Google, they are actively looking for your services and more likely to purchase.
How to diversify your marketing efforts
Relying on social media alone to market your business is risky. There are loads of other ways to market your business outside of social media and start building a list of customers that you own. Here are some places to start:
- Networking with other business owners
- Writing valuable blog content on your website by following best SEO practices
- Word of mouth referrals
- Joining Facebook groups that have your ideal clients (obviously DO NOT spam anyone or DM them without permission).
If you have a website, you can direct your audience to the source of your content in your marketing. This way, once they’ve consumed your helpful tips, they can read about who you are and what you offer. You can also then offer them something for free in exchange for their contact details, e.g. free shipping or a 10% off code, or a downloadable guide, checklist or template. Taking this approach enables you to build a following of die-hard fans that will lap up your content through a channel that you own and have control over.
Let’s get focused on building our email lists, joining some Facebook groups, engaging with other small businesses and freelancers (like other FG members) for strong referrals and getting to a networking event this month!
About the author
Lesley blends strategic web design with soul to help women level up their online presence so they can focus on what they do best! She focuses on service-based businesses, coaches and freelancers. Lesley is passionate about helping women get their businesses launched for the world to see. She says, “my greatest strength lies in simplifying business ideas and creating a website and business that is clear, concise and just makes sense.” Get in touch with Lesley if your online presence needs a boost. You can connect with her on the Gem Directory and follow her on Instagram.
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