A lot of times when we do social media presentations we face the traditional answers, for instance: “that doesn’t work for us” ”we do not believe in advertising, “mmm… we tried it before, it doesn’t work” and the newest, “social media does not sell.” my sales people often ask me, why are they giving us the same answer? Well, things were a heck of a lot easier before social media. Before, if you were a large company, you’d create a campaign like “Geico pig” buy media all over and sat back to gather the most data possible and then do the branding analysis or response analysis. You used to put the same images in all media channels Radio, TV, billboards and internet. The worst thing that can happen is the “data” was always wrong if things do not end as expected, don’t forget to blame the season, message, or competitor, they are a pain in the edge.
Then after a 12 months you just start a new advertising campaign and the process keeps going over and over again.
Now what happens with small businesses?, well in the decade of the 2000s you name your business with an “A” so you can be the first option in the yellow pages, “the more As the better” plus you print some fliers (this still the numbers one source of business for some businesses, believe or not) sad right? Well, then there were the ones that take risks and buy some radio ads and wait for the people come in. This was the general role of advertising campaigns…
Ok, back to today days, there’s no such thing as a six month campaign, there’s only 365 day campaign, why? Well, with all the analytics and data from the response, you adjust your message DAILY and find ways to interact with your audience, for example, at the ad agency we run 3 campaigns simultaneously, we select different platforms and we keep the ones that deliver more and keep improving the message. The internet brings a lot of references, for the TV and radio campaigns, and social media for the online marketing. To do social media effectively, it takes time and a lot more effort than most people realize. This is the main reason why small businesses fail on social media campaigns, they are still trying to do everything themselves and which has a high failure rate since social media is time consuming. The analytics get more accurate and sophisticated by the day, even the best benefit of a product or service take a while to offer quantifiable data-driven proof that they worked.
Few businesses respect the social media channel. When they realize that it’s the future and until they see their aunt is using it, at which point they will make a big announcement praising themselves, as though being last in line is something to be proud of: “look what we are doing!” We know how advertising/social media works! From me? Too late pals!
Be involved in social media a soon as you can, run, jump on it as fast as a tweet!