Business marketing 101: Why social media alone won't cut it

Over the past ten years, social media has changed the game when it comes to digital marketing for businesses. Previously, small business owners needed to rely on expensive marketing tactics—like radio ads, magazine ads, and TV ads—to connect with their audiences and showcase their products or services.

When social media hit the scene, it gave up-and-coming brands an easy (and cheaper) way to promote themselves. Like everything in the digital world, social media has evolved rapidly. In fact, an entire job industry has formed around it, from content creators and social media managers to community managers and paid ads specialists. But despite the power of social media, it's not enough to rely solely on it to grow and sustain your business.

In this article, we'll look at why social media alone is insufficient and how a holistic digital marketing strategy (including a business website) is vital for your business's long-term success.

You Can't Always Convert Customers on Social Media

Social media is a powerful tool for engaging with your audience and getting your brand out there. But here's the catch: you can't sell services and products directly on social media.

While some social media platforms, like Instagram, offer built-in shopping features, not all businesses can activate these features. To use commerce features on Instagram, brands need to adhere to a set of guidelines—including maintaining a minimum number of followers. This is why you'll often see big brands with built-in Instagram Shops but fewer small brands with this functionality.

Social media is like the storefront of your brand in the digital world. Just like a physical store, it's where people can catch a glimpse of what you offer and get to know your brand's personality. So, how do you convert followers into paying customers? With a business website! If your social media is your storefront, your website is like your checkout counter.

Your business website lets you go all out in showcasing your products or services. With a Savvy website, you can provide detailed descriptions, informative specifications, enticing visuals, contact options and payment links. 

You Need to Create a Customer Journey

Picture this: you stumble upon an exciting brand on social media. Their posts are engaging, their products seem fantastic, and you're eager to learn more. But wait—where's their website? 

There are currently over 200 million business accounts on Instagram and Facebook, and there are no barriers to creating a business account on the platforms. While this is great for small businesses, it also means there are no built-in features to ensure all the businesses on their platforms are legitimate. So users need to do additional research to verify a brand's credibility before handing over their hard-earned cash. 

Usually, this means users will research a brand by visiting their website or looking them up on Google. This is known as the customer journey, and it's an essential part of building trust with your audience. If your brand doesn't have a website or appear in search results, users may assume your brand is untrustworthy and take their business elsewhere. 

The solution is simple. To ensure your business is appealing to potential customers, you need to have a presence on multiple social media platforms, have a functional business website, and use SEO strategies to ensure you appear in Google search results. This way, when a potential customer stumbles across your brand on social media, they have all the information they need to make a purchasing decision.

Likes, Shares & Followers Aren't Enough

Likes, shares, and followers on social media are easy metrics to track your audience's growth and engagement. But when it comes to growing a business, you will need more than these metrics to keep your business afloat in the long run.

In the world of digital marketing, these metrics are often called 'vanity metrics,' meaning that they can be measured (and probably will make you feel good), but they don't represent a real return on investment. To truly thrive, you need to dig deeper and focus on what matters most: conversion! While social media helps attract attention, it serves as a gateway to something more substantial—your business website.

Social Media is Constantly Changing

As we all know, social media evolves faster than you can say "hashtag." One day, businesses are pouring money into Facebook, then the next, their entire target audience has moved to TikTok. In the world of social media, today's big-shots are tomorrow's has-beens, and there's always the risk of a fresh new platform bursting onto the scene to steal the spotlight (and your followers).

But, along with the major changes in social media platforms, smaller changes happen every day. For example, in 2021, Apple released updates to their iOS system that barred advertisers from tracking their users. The result? Facebook's parent company, Meta, lost over $250 billion in advertising revenue. But this change didn't just hurt the social media company—countless small businesses lost out too. Because advertisers could no longer target iPhone-owning audiences, optimise their ads, and gain insights through analytics, advertising on Facebook offered less value to businesses, while running ads became more expensive.

Algorithm changes happen constantly on social media. Another example is, in 2022, Instagram began prioritising Instagram Reels to claw back users that had migrated to TikTok. Suddenly, a business's reach and visibility plummeted if they weren't posting Reels. Ultimately, third-party entities control social media platforms, and they can change the rules any time they want.

But you can still take control of your business's future! Sign up with Savvy today to create a website tailored to your business, showcase your products or services, and engage directly with your audience without being at the mercy of ever-changing social media algorithms.