One of the benefits of advertising on social networking sites is the possibility of connecting with your customers that mostly happen on a personal basis. Popular social networking sites include Facebook, Digg, and MySpace, to name a few. However, there are essential points that need to be considered when you decide to advertise via social networks. Here are some pros and cons of this method that you should look into.
List of Pros of Advertising on Social Networking Sites
1. Reaching Customers Easily
Unlike traditional marketing strategies, you will be able to reach potential customers easily. The fact that you can advertise through your blog, Facebook page or other online sources, the possibilities of reeling in leads are endless with this technique.
2. Building Brand Loyalty
Aside from building your brand through social media, it can also be used to promote your personality, provide interaction with customers, and show to them that you really care. For this reason, it will create brand loyalty among your customers. At the same time, it can also build relationships as well as boost your reputation.
3. Improving Your Products or Services
One of the effective ways of creating a stronger product or services is to encourage open communication. You can do this via public comments as you can learn ways on what you can do to strengthen your products and services on top of the competition.
4. Learning about the Target Audience
Comments regarding your products or services can help a lot to know how your business is going. Moreover, it is possible to conduct a study regarding customer analytics. You can find this very useful particularly when planning about more marketing campaigns like direct-mail postcards.
5. Cost-Efficiency
Compared with other methods of marketing, advertising on social networking sites can be a lot more economical. So even if you hire an online marketing team or outsource content of your social media, you still can save a lot of money from it.
List of Cons of Advertising on Social Networking Sites
1. Demands More Time from You
Basically, you need to dedicate your time to social media marketing sites if you want to maintain your product or services. In fact, you need to create, edit, approve and publish content so that you will gain higher yields. Most of the time, these demands can be outsourced for a fee if you don’t have the luxury of time.
2. Needs More of Your Talent
It can work out if you have the talent of developing exciting content targeted for various readers. However, you will end up just wasting your efforts if your content come out irrelevant.
3. Losing Some Control on Marketing Efforts
Published content can be available for anyone in which others can easily criticize you. So if you are unable to control these comments on your favor, then you could open yourself to potential negatives.
4. Delaying Return on Investment
This method can build brand loyalty and relationships, but it should take dedication and time. This is because it can’t earn instant popularity as you need to be willing to work on it on the long haul.
Brandon Miller has a B.A. from the University of Texas at Austin. He is a seasoned writer who has written over one hundred articles, which have been read by over 500,000 people. If you have any comments or concerns about this blog post, then please contact the Green Garage team here.