Social media marketing? Fine, but please…measure, compare, and be brave enough to do your own thing.

The question I most often get in my business is “should I advertise/market in (insert the latest media craze here).”

The answer is always the same: it depends. If resources were unlimited, you would be everywhere right? But since that is not the case with most small or medium-sized businesses, every marketing decision must be made….drumroll please…

in relation to its potential return compared to other options.

I know this sounds obvious but I think the pressure is so intense on small businesses now that they feel if they are not applying resources somewhere people are talking about, they will lose.  And they fail to recognize the enormous opportunity costs of  knee-jerk reactions with their precious marketing resources.

Consider this: a professional service firm targets C-suite executives as decision makers. The firm feels strongly that their potential clients are not actively seeking information on their services in Facebook. So they stay the course of doing targeted mailings – which get results. Then one day the firm principal meets someone at a conference who raves about how many people they have on their Facebook page. The principal gets nervous that if they are not using Facebook they will seem “old school.” So they drop the mail campaigns and spend considerable time trying to cultivate likes and pushing content. In six months their efforts have paid off. They have gotten a couple of calls from people in the biz that lead to contacts etc.  Well, what happened to the contacts with the C-suite executives they have been reaching successfully through the mail?

What was the opportunity costs of the resources applied to social media?

This is the question, that in my mind, no one is answering.

Everyone knows they need to have a presence on all the big sites – but no one seems to measure their efforts – and compare them to other options.

I think if a business owner likes social media on a personal level- and they have time to invest – then it’s a no-brainer – they’ll get a return. But if they don’t want to do it themselves, and they have to hire some one to do it long-term- then they better measure it – just like you would measure the success of a direct mail effort or newspaper ad.

There are myriad ways to market your business – success is determined not by you jumping on the latest trend – but by you making an objective assessment of what will provide the most return for every dollar– period.