Show notes from episode 53 of the podcast.
“Don’t fall in love with the medium – fall in love with the mission.” – Seth Godin on a recent episode of Akimbo (recommended listening).
Our mission as business owners is to reach customers and exploit profitable marketing channels. The mediums and the ways to do that are always changing.
Its about being supple and embracing change. As a small business owner we have the ability to shift gears and change a lot quicker than our bigger counterparts so we need to use that to our advantage.
People often ask me how I can get away with totally ignoring social media in today’s business environment. The answer is simple. It doesn’t make me money and I don’t rely on it to make money. Its hyper competitive and the ROI for me isn’t there.
Social media is an opportunity and not everyone should ignore it – don’t get me wrong. But here is an argument…
As a business owner you only have the mental and physical capacity to focus on so many things. You can only do 1 thing at a time. There are only 5 hours a day to build your side hustle while working full time. You have to pick and chose the opportunities you go after because you can’t go after them all.
Followers are getting harder and harder to reach and you have zero control. Starbucks spent millions of dollars building a massive facebook following and now they have to pay for advertising to reach them. Starbucks has no control over this following. Facebook can change anything anytime and they have zero say in the matter. And guess what? These platforms like to SELL ads.
Likes and follows don’t equal sales. You should be measuring your success in sales and value. Many times the ROI on acquiring followers and getting likes does not pay off in the long run.
It’s getting more and more competitive to advertise on social media platforms. Ad spend is blowing up. Global social media advertising spending increased 32% in 2018.
Total ad spend on social platforms is increasing fast:
- Global social media advertising spending increased 32% in 2018.
- That spending is predicted to grow an additional 73% in the next five years.
- Facebook’s advertising revenue was more than $55 billion in 2018. For Q4 2018, 93% of that ad revenue came from mobile ads.
- Instagram brought in an estimated $6.84 billion in mobile advertising in 2018, up from $3.64 billion in 2017. An INSANE 87.9% increase!
- Twitter’s advertising revenue was 2.6 billion in 2018, an increase of 25% over 2017.
- In 2018, YouTube generated $3.6 billion in video ad revenues in the U.S. alone, up 17.1% from 2017.
- Pinterest is expected to bring in $771.4 million in U.S. ad revenues in 2019, an increase of 39.4% over 2018.
- Snapchat made an estimated $660 million in U.S. ad revenues in 2018, up 18.7% from 2017.
Source: Hootsuite
Does this sound like there are a lot of untapped opportunity for advertising? Not to me it doesn’t.
So what should you consider doing for advertising? Get creative. Find out who can refer you business and go see them. Traditional sales strategies can be implemented and you’ll have a huge advantage if you get face to face with a potential customer.
We grew our business mainly by affordable guerrilla marketing like door hanging flyers, sidewalk chalk, lawn signs and shaking hands. It is tough but it works and nobody is focusing on it anymore!
Content marketing and local search optimization is also a big factor. Google rewards companies that produce great content and have good interaction statistics. Lucky for us most service based businesses are dominated by mom and pop companies that don’t know anything about keywords or content. Learn it and implement it and you’ll dominate.
Your Google My Business page should be your #1 focus. You need quality reviews with photos, interactions and posts. This should be your version of social media!
YouTube video content on your niche should be a focus as well. Its the 2nd largest search engine in the world and is part of the Google family so when linked with your website and Google My Business location its a winning combination!
A note if you do decide that social media is worth pursuing:
Understand the difference between vanity metrics and conversion metrics.
Likes and follows are vanity metrics and don’t mean much.
Conversion metrics tell the story. You use them to calculate your ROI and to analyze how much money in sales and profit the ads or posts are generating for you.
Overall social media doesn’t make my 20% of activities that generate 80% of my results so I ignore it. That is not to say it won’t work for you! Everyone is in a different situation obviously so you should get more advice and give it a test run to see for yourself what works and what doesn’t!