Whether you own a business or are employed by one, the one thing you will notice is how important sharing content is for getting your brand out in the real world. This is to get recognition not just by people locally but people worldwide.
Companies use Social Media platforms such as TikTok and Instagram to build a user base every day so why shouldn’t you?
Why Is Online Marketing Important?
It’s come to a point where it is no argument that creating a social media account can be very profitable for your small business and its exposure. This is not just for brand awareness but also for grabbing the attention of potential customers. There are many different types of platforms you could use to “show off” your brand on social media at the same time there are plenty of different ways to advertise your products or services online.
This can be shown in real life with some examples. The first example is Dollar Shave Club. In 2011 Dollar Shave Club was founded by Michael Dublin, It was no longer than a year later in 2012 where they uploaded their first one and a half minute advertisement, This was Immediately a hit. At the time of writing this article, the video has reached 27.5 million views and has reoccurring viewers over 9 years later!
That video and paid partnerships with large influencers have launched their business heavily to the point where it is now a billion-dollar company. That is just one example, there are thousands of companies that have killed it with their online marketing campaigns.
What is the difference between platforms for online advertising?
There are so many different platforms that you can take advantage of in order to grow your business so which is the best for you?
Social networking is a very important thing to use but It needs to be used right, so choosing the types of social media you use and using that platform optimally is very important when digital online marketing.
Here we will be going to explain the difference between some of the biggest social media platforms being used today and the platform you can use to advance your social media marketing strategy.
Snapchat
Snapchat can be used for online marketing via the platform’s stories feature. This works by you as a business uploading a short video or image as an advertisement onto the app, this links to a website, and people will see this advertisement while scrolling through their stories. From this, they will be able to get to your site through that.
You can do this organically and this works by you owning an account to post the advertisements on, your followers will see this advertisement through you. This is great for fans and followers as they can always be reminded of your company and it can encourage reoccurring sales.
You can also do this on the paid route to advertise on Snapchat it costs $5 a day however instead of only your followers seeing these advertisements you get your business out to the public. This is really good as it means you get new followers and customers.
Snapchat can also be a good tool for “eye-grabbing” advertisements as when a Snapchat advert plays it is shown in fullscreen and is a lot more immersive than ads from another platform such as Facebook or Instagram, where adverts are displayed in squares.
Snapchat is a brilliant tool if your target audience is younger people (usually under the age of 30). That means if your business is selling life insurance to people then Snapchat is not the right platform for you.
You can market your business on Instagram in multiple forms. There are the stories and the timeline features. This is good as the people who use Instagram are not consistent.
They will always prefer the use of one feature whether that be the stories or timelines. Having your advertisements on both is a great idea. But this is heavily dependent on the type of content you are uploading.
For example, if you were posting a video then it would be much better to upload that to an Instagram story, as this will result in a lower click-through rate thus meaning you will get a larger customer base. However, if you wanted to upload a picture advertisement then it may be better to upload your advert to the timeline, as once again it will get a lower click-through rate.
Instagram is good for targeted ads with Facebook as it takes advantage of the Facebook pixel which is used on a lot of the sites on Google so you get a higher engagement rate with their adverts compared to using a platform such as Snapchat.
Facebook is very similar to Instagram in many ways. They share the same functions in that they both have a story and newsfeed feature. The main difference is the demographic of Facebook.
With Instagram the main demographic is users under the age of 34, mainly appealing to teenagers. On the other hand, Facebook appeals to people older than 30.
This means if you were trying to market a business that was targeted at a younger audience then you would be better using Instagram.
Facebook and Instagram are different in the fact that it doesn’t matter whether you upload the video to the timeline or not as on Facebook videos are able to be expanded and that means that the engagement rate on videos is much higher on Facebook timelines over Instagram timelines.
YouTube
YouTube is a great platform for online marketing as it is the engagement of users. Youtube is a platform where videos are used to communicate with videos and with it being this way it is very engaging. Video is a great way to share information as it takes advantage of 2 different senses. Sight and hearing.
If you are able to take advantage of these senses correctly then you can not only grab the user’s attention but you can almost always get them to click on your content to use your service. This was shown with the example of Dollar Shave Club as they were able to get millions of new customers from their first advert.
Once again the trend for youtube doesn’t change from the other platforms as their main demographic is people under 35. So although it may be a great tool for advertising to young people it is not a great tool for advertising to an older audience.
Twitch
Twitch is an odd platform because only recently businesses have decided to use it as a way to market themselves. The main way is through paid advertisements. This works like youtube in the fact that it is a short video however it’s not as profitable due to Twitch Prime.
Twitch Prime is a feature of Twitch where users pay $5 towards a streamer and on their stream, they don’t experience adverts. because of this twitch has been deemed a redundant platform for advertising on.
This hasn’t stopped people though. There are some companies (notably Elgato and Fiver each streaming different content). They do this through their own Twitch channel and have promotional events run through the stream which includes running giveaways and more.
Another problem with Twitch is the demographic. Twitch’s demographic is mainly “gamers” who are male and around the age of 18-34. This is a problem as companies can miss out on their preferred audience.
With Google advertising is argued to be one of the most difficult things to pull of successfully due to all the variables in place. The main way online marketing is done is through search engine marketing (sem) this is a process where you have a website up on the internet and you fashion it so it shows at the top of the results when you type something related to the business in.
This process can be tedious and complicated. however, it is one of the better ways to market your business as you can target your audience more accurately using keywords. This is a preferred way to market a business as the results yield a higher customer base. However, that is one of the only reasons this method is preferred.
Although using Google is great for getting customers, it is terrible for brand recognition. This is because people only discover your business if they search for it. That means people of a niche will know who you are but people who are not part of the niche then they may not know your business.
Conclusion
Social Media is a very large place full of many different people using multiple different platforms. Our brand Be My Social can help you grow your business on social media.
To conclude we will organize by age. If your target audience is 18-30 then your probably best using a platform like Snapchat TikTok, Instagram, or YouTube. However, if you are looking for an older audience then Facebook may be the choice.
Finally, it is no argument that you should use google no matter what business you run. Google is such a helpful tool for getting customers that you need to take advantage of it!
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