Do I Have To Advertise On Social Media To Have a Successful Business?
Well, it depends. One of the main goals of online advertising is to get more traffic / leads / potential customers for your business. The answer to your question starts with your customer: Is he or she on social media?
If the answer is no, then I would advise to not use social media advertising. Why spend money in places where you have no chance to get new customers?!
If the answer is yes, you’ll probably need to utilize some level of social media advertising. (And for most businesses the answer probably is yes.) At the beginning, this is even more true because new businesses don’t yet have enough brand awareness to attract customers without some sort of push or pull from advertising.
A good way to test this is to run some test campaigns, do your sales increase? Is your ROI high enough to keep running ads? Is it worth it?
THE DANGER OF RELYING TOO MUCH ON ADS
But, there is a danger to building all of your marketing efforts on advertising — when you stop advertising, you stop getting new customers. That’s why I believe a balanced approach is ideal.
At the beginning, rely heavily on advertising to get new customers, while in the background, you create marketing assets that help build a strong online brand and help you get organic traffic. Overtime, you can scale back your reliance on social advertising as your organic reach gets stronger.
I can’t think of a situation in which you can stop using social advertising. Stopping ads altogether will likely somewhat impact your sales… unless you build virality into your product. That’s when your product actually advertises itself when people use it, thus eliminating the need for paid advertising. An example of this is Dropbox (though the company does now use paid advertising).
Here at AdLaunch we believe video ads really do help you reach new customers online and build a strong brand. After all, that’s one of the reasons we built it — to help small businesses owners and entrepreneurs grow their businesses online.
Visit our website and see how AdLaunch can help your business at www.adlaunch.com.
