Traditional advertising can be so costly.
According to Pew Research Centre, “as of January 2014, 74% of Canadians were
using social media.” The decline of print advertising and the rise of
social media channels is forcing business owners and the like to keep up with
the growing trend of social media used for advertising. We need to catch our
target markets attention and we only have 30 seconds to do that due to lower
attention spans caused by social media.
Today more people than ever before are talking to
their family and friends through these channels before making major
purchases. Why not make your life easier and use the multi media at your
finger tips. The good news is, it is actually quite inexpensive to advertise
online. Pinterest, Instagram, U Tube are all free of charge.
Facebook charges very little in relation to the more dated ways of sending
messages through television ads, monthly newsletters and newspapers.
Another invaluable perk to using Facebook as one of
your advertising tools is you can choose the demographics who receive your ads
on their pages, making your advertising dollars go even further. What you
need first is a business page which you can link to your personal page. This
business page has a section called Overview. At the bottom of the page
there is a link which says create ad. That link allows you to search out age
groups, male or female, peoples interests that you want to target, education
level, language, city, and many more! Once you have chosen all of your
criteria for who you want to receive your ads, you are then ready to go! You
can pre pay your account and start reaching the right people.
There are countless ways to use the search tool on
Facebook. Market research can also be very costly. Say you were planning to
teach a Spanish cooking class to a group of singles and you were wanting to
hire Spanish people who like to cook to come and present their favourite
meal. You can use this tool to see how many single people speak Spanish,
are interested in cooking in a certain area and put together an ad that would
be displayed on their pages only. This is invaluable information when
wanting to stretch our advertising dollars as far as we can and who doesn’t
want to do that.
So what are you waiting for, get your social media
plan in action. Do not let the initial discomfort of leaving the old methods
behind. Your pocketbook will thank you and you will have much more time on your
hands to spend doing the fun things in life. There are also Social Media
planners to put these plans together and it is their job to manage all of your
online media accounts. Results can be measured, which gives the peace of mind
to know where those advertising dollars are going and what is working and
not. The trick is to stick with something long enough to see if it works!
Consistency is key.
