We often get calls from clients who want some of the cool, cutting edge marketing services we offer. More often than not, though, we end up convincing small businesses that the wave of the future just isn’t for them yet. Take a look at these two interesting charts published by MarketingSherpa.com. The first one shows budgets of companies and what they are planning on spending their advertising money over the next year. You’ll see that 40% to 50% of companies say that they intend to spend more on mobile marketing and social media marketing.
If you take a look at this next, chart, though, you’ll see how organizations rate the effectiveness of different lead generation techniques. Check out the last three. Everybody knows “Print is Dead”, and if that is the case, Social Media and Mobile Marketing are basically zombies.
Does this mean that we don’t recommend social media or mobile marketing? Absolutely not. However, as with anything, this has to be looked at on a case by case scenario. Unless your business is one of the 12% that Social Media is the perfect answer for, you will probably see faster and higher ROI from things that might be cheaper and less time consuming that a big social media campaign, like PPC, Email Marketing, or optimizing your website for higher conversions.
If you are a big business it doesn’t matter – you have the budget to spend across the board on keeping your business growing, and any medium that has even a small ROI is worth putting energy into. For a small business on a limited budget, though, it is critical that you choose to spend your advertising dollars in the right place – the one that is going to show you the fastest and highest return. For most small businesses that place isn’t social media or mobile marketing.
Want to figure out what your businesses “Lowest Hanging Fruit” is? Just contact me.