We all know Social Media is popular. But before your business goes down the path of investing resources and budget into this marketing channel, you need to know what to expect. Most importantly can it be profitable for your business.
Social media marketing can be profitable for your business when you apply best practices with your marketing strategy. This includes specific targeting to your audience, applying messaging appropriate to the social media channel, and consistency.
However, that is a lot of “if’s” to reaching profitability. Although these best practices apply to any type of marketing, let’s dive deeper, to ensure your social media marketing strategy has the best opportunity to become profitable fast.
What Social Media Channel is Most Profitable for Your Business
It’s easy to say the social media channel you focus on and put your heart and soul into, it the channel that will be most profitable. And while this is true, there are some channels that marketers tend to lean towards based on demographics, audience size, and familiarity beyond all others.
It makes sense to know these facts before you start down that path of building your platform on any channel. However I do stress, you can have the most powerful marketing channel available, but unless you invest appropriate time and resources into the channel, you will be disappointed with the results.
That being said, let’s see how marketers perceive the top different social media channels according to Hubspot.
| Channel | Audience Size | Special Notes |
|---|---|---|
| As of Q1 2020 – 2.6 Billion Active Monthly Users | – Over 1.6 Billion people globally connected to a business – Facebook is the primary content distribution channel for marketers today. | |
| As of Jan 2019 – 500 Million Active Daily Users | – Instagram has the second-highest ROI amongst marketers – Over 2/3 of their audience is 34 years or younger | |
| As of Jan 2020 – 690 Million Registered Users | – 43% of their audience is female, and 57% male – 2019 saw InMails become the third-largest candidate outreach method | |
| As of Jan 2020 – 166 Million Active Daily Users | – Among the top-3 channels for ROI used by marketers |
What Single Most Tool is Critical to Profitability in Social Media
To understand the profitability of any channel you are marketing with, you must deploy to ensure you get a clear understanding of a measurement tool to track the full sales process. Tracking (with Google Analytics or similar) must be at the forefront of every campaign action you take.
Specifically, you need to understand what messaging is resonating and resulting in a user taking action. You must understand the outcome of the interaction and the role the channel plays in your sales process.
In some cases, marketers will find certain campaigns and channels perform better-supporting conversion rather than attributing the direct conversion to the channel. This is important to know as you allocate budget and resources, but also as you consider the messaging you will use.
The more granular you can break out your campaigns, and establish a method for tracking, the more meaningful the data will be and benefits you will receive through acting on that data.
7 Steps to Follow to Make Social Media Profitable for Your Business
Now lets outline the process you will need to take towards making your social media marketing campaign profitable.
- Choose a channel to focus on. The key here is, “a channel”, not all of them (unless you have the resources and budget to do them all justice). Although tools can assist with content distribution to multiple channels, decide which you are fully committing.
- Brainstorm campaign strategy. Look at your competition and see what they’re doing (consistency, design, creativity, and concepts). Create a list of fresh approaches and ideas do you have.
- Look outside of your industry for fresh ideas that you can apply in a unique and creative way to your industry. Look broad here, you want to really look for ideas that are not currently being done in your world. Remember that social is a lot about being creative.
- Finalize the ideas you will apply initially. Think in 3-month intervals at which point you can evaluate results and refine them. Keep in mind that you want to consider the consistency of all the ideas you will deploy and the resources and time commitment you will need to commit.
- Have identified your initial strategies, categorize them. So, for example, you may have a sharing strategy, where the goal is to encourage your followers to share updates with their audiences. You will likely have a call-to-action category, these are the typical sales type updates geared towards driving growth.
- Identify tracking. How will you track each category of updates and posts? This can be as simple as using campaign tracking URLs for your analytics, to using social channel analytics for understanding exposure to action ratios.
- Identify using the tools of the channel, where possible, create your targeting segment. This should be your ideal audience. The group that will benefit the most and takes action on your product or service offering.
Once you have laid out your initial plan, identified how you will track the progress through ideally an automated process for tracking, its time to launch your campaign and start seeing the results.
Ninja Strategy for Making Social Media Profitable FAST
One of the challenges for marketers is having the patience to wait for data. During the course of launching a campaign, waiting for results to start to flow and data to come in, followed by analyzing the data, and applying what you’ve learned to improve results, all takes time.
This can be a tedious process. And although everything happens a lot faster online, when compared to traditional marketing strategies (newspaper, radio, television, etc.), this time to react can result in lost performance, increased expenses, and overall expensive lessons.
This is where Social Media has a magic component, based on the nature of the way it works. When applied properly this ninja strategy can accelerate your results and overall profitability. Specifically, I am speaking of the immediacy of social media.
If you get your targeting wrong, or the messaging is not resonating, or maybe the landing page is repelling rather than welcoming the visitors you’re attracting, knowing this sooner rather than later can be the difference between profit and loss.
Typically a message on a social media platform has a much smaller lifespan compared with many other marketing strategies. Often what is considered a negative can, in fact, be positive. That short lifespan lends itself to immediate response and using real-time tracking tools you’re able to see almost immediately how your strategy will perform.
Target your message, post your headline, test your call to action, evaluate the traffic coming to your landing page. Depending on your audience size, you will have realtime feedback on your campaign potentially within minutes.
No more waiting days to determine you headline is not garnering attention, or call to action is weak. You have immediate data for which you can take action on, test alternatives, and build the most profitable campaign possible.
Final Thoughts On Social Media Profitability
Depending on if you are building your audience over time, or buying your audience through ad campaigns, social media can definitely be a lot of hard work.
It is a strategy that welcomes a great deal of testing, and finding the right mix of targeting, messaging and offer for the atmosphere of the channel can be somewhat challenging. Using the testing tools available to you, and committing to refining your campaign, can lead to incredible results and profitability.
It is important to know that social media is not free. Despite what you may at first glance believe. Although you may not have to put out cash (although this tends to be a faster growth option), you do need to prepare for the sweat equity you will need to contribute.
That being said, social media can be one of your most profitable strategies when approached with this mindset.
Additional Recommended Reading on Social Media
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