The marketing industry has evolved so much, and the diversity of strategies are endlessly changing. From traditional manual marketing, because of the improvement of technology, digital marketing has also had its share of innovation. With so many possible choices, what type of marketing strategy could be the most effective? The most commonly used by marketers are email and social media. But which one would be the best choice for you and what’s the difference between each? Interested? Read on…
Before you start reading, let me ask you the following:
- What type of industry does your business belong to?
- Who is your target market
- What is your business goal?
You must be asking yourself — Why would this person ask me that now? You will know at the end of this article, but make sure to take note of those. Let’s continue.
What is Email Marketing
To put it simply, it’s advertising your business through email. Sounds so simple, is it? Well, sorry to burst our bubble, but email marketing isn’t an easy task to do. You must be thinking that just putting everything in an email should do it. It shouldn’t be that complicated right? However, it depends on your answers to the question above. You would need to counter check if this is the right approach for your business. Let’s talk about the PROs and CONs.
Pros
It’s more customisable.
Since the content area is more prominent and you can put a lot of info inside an email, you can custom it the way you wish. Either using images alone or purely text to make it more appealing. Or making it more personal with the approach, email marketing can do that for you.
More comfortable to build client or customer relationships
Since you target specific people on this, everyone in your email list can be potential customers or clients. Since personal approach can be utilised here a lot, this can reach your audience with a better perspective. This helps you build your connection to them, and this can convert them from prospects to clients.
Automating the process to this is more manageable.
With the innovation of most CRMs such as Ontraport, automation for these emails are now much more straightforward. You can just put them all in one sequence or campaign, and you do your other work without worrying about the campaign itself. It saves you time to monitor the progress.
Tracking the performance is more leisurely.
Since the majority of CRMs now can leave tracking marks on the emails you sent, all of them get tracked quickly and more accurately. It gives you a more in-depth idea of what your audience is interested in, and it will help you. Ontraport is the solution you can highly rely on. It gives you data on the activities that your email has such as if an email has been opened, who opened the email, which link was clicked, etc.
It’s cost-effective.
Since you can pretty much send an email to any of your contacts at the convenience of your time, and you do not need to pay any fee to advertise, this can be an excellent way to market. If you need to use CRMs, depending on the number of audiences, and your business needs, this can be a potential one-stop-shop for you which also saves you money in the process.
Cons
It can get ignored if it goes to the spam mail
Since most email providers have high security and filtering to their emails, there will be times that your email can get into the spam inbox. This can cause your email to be ignored and miss the opportunity for your prospect to know about the offers you provide. We can help out by providing you a checklist for this. Just feel free to contract the Marketing arrows and we’re here to help!
It can potentially annoy prospects.
Some of the business owners hate sales-like emails, especially if they get them way too often. If abused, email marketing can cause more damage than expected. Instead of having an aggressive sales-like approach, it would be best to avoid being a nuisance to your prospects and clients. Regulating the time and frequency of sending would be the best approach.
Not all who receives your email will open and see your content.
Not everyone has the time to open their emails daily. This can often be missed out, especially if your contact has a lot of newsletters he or she receives. This can cause your email to be piled down and just be ignored at the same time.
What is Social Media Marketing
From the title itself, you would figure out what this type of marketing uses as its platform. In the digital age, millions of people are into social media. This gave a breakthrough to what we call Social Media marketing. Marketers are taking advantage of the fact that people online see what they post. According to Social Media Today, a person spends an average of 144minutes in social media, which means a ton of opportunity to send out your posts to be seen. It sounds like a promising medium for your company, isn’t it? However, just like any other marketing strategies, there are a few points you may need to consider. Below are the PROs and CONs.
Pros
Cost-efficient
If you continuously post in social media regularly, then marketing here wouldn’t cause you a single dollar. However, if you want to do a paid advert, the lowest cost per ad is still affordable in comparison with doing a local billboard and tv advert of course. You can even custom the target audience in this matter.
Wider audience pool
Since there are billions of users of social media, they are all your potential audience. You can find a wide array of people using it, and you can be sure that your post will reach people.
Provides real-time interaction
Also, most people love to voice out their thoughts on this platform. Hence you can interact with them in real-time. You can take advantage of it by making them feel that you are reaching out to them and are willing to listen to their thoughts. The personal approach always wins in this situation.
Faster to execute
Since it’s just a matter of a photo or quick raw video you can produce on your phone anytime, you can quickly post it anywhere or everywhere. Everything can be done fast in the convenience of your mobile phone.
Cons
You may not hit the right audience.
Yes, there are billions of users in the social media platforms, but not all of them are your target audience. Unless you pay an ad for this, your free posts may have a high chance of not reaching the right target audience for your campaigns.
Tracking is still a bit broad.
Since most social media platforms can only trace numbers and in a whole scale, even in ads, it’s quite still difficult to accurately determine who the people who saw your post and are genuinely interested in it were. You can learn through interactions such as likes and comments, but with the viewers, it’s still very vague.
High chance of incorrect publicity
One wrong post can cause issues. The worst case can wreck your reputation. Remember that once you post something, just a millisecond of the time it was published, it can already be seen by millions. So basically posting unappealing or offensive comments or images may strike controversies for businesses.
Time-consuming to monitor
Since you aim to get more interactions from your audience, you’d probably have to monitor the activities to get useful data out of the post or campaign. Moreover, when you have inquiries coming in from each post. This can be time-consuming if there will be a lot of responses.
ROI takes a long time
Social media don’t show emails to advertisers, so identifying them and adding them in the list is quite difficult. And in addition to the items as mentioned earlier, there are so many possible audiences that are not your primary target and will not bother to reach back. So ROI for this can take longer since you would need to wait for the specific audience to reach to you personally.
In general, both can be effective depending on your industry and campaign goal. You can also combine them to get the best of both worlds. It still boils down to careful planning and management. There are a lot of strategies that can be used for this, and you can take advantage of both.
If you remember the three questions above, those will serve as your guide to what you really may need to use as your winning strategy. It can open a lot of ideas which can give you a path to your next action. Once you have figured out what you want, it would be easier for you. If you wish to have more clarity on this, why not talk to us and we can help out further with your plans.