What’s more effective for promoting your business? SMS marketing or social media ads? It can be tricky to decide!
SMS marketing and social media ads are one of the fastest ways to reach a wide range of people.
People spend a reasonable amount of time on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and others. With the internet accounting for billions of users, it is easy to sell products online and market them.
But aside from social media marketing, offline marketing strategies like direct mail and SMS marketing can potentially increase your customer base and conversion rate.
SMS marketing has a high open-rate compared to other strategies.
But instead of picking one over the other, why not use both to reach more prospects, boost sales, and increase brand awareness?
Let’s take a closer look at the pros and cons of social media ads and SMS marketing. Plus how you can use both strategies to grow your business and customer base.
Benefits of social media marketing
The benefits of social media advertising for your business are massive. Here are just a few:
- Social media ads help you reach a broad range of segmented and high-value customers. Here’s how to achieve successful segmentation.
- It is affordable and cost-effective when compared to traditional marketing. But, it is costlier compared to SMS marketing when you consider the advertising spend required.
- You can split-test your ads and you have advanced analytics to help you optimize your conversion rate.
- It offers different content formats to engage your audience.
Drawbacks of social media marketing
Social media marketing has a lot of benefits for businesses and individuals, but it is not without its cons.
- Consistent social media algorithm updates can affect your ads performance and ROI
- If you are hiring a dedicated specialist, this will come as an added cost.
- It comes with high competition and this influences your ads’ cost-per-click.
- Social media marketing comes with a steep learning curve if you plan to do it yourself.
- It is hard to track social media marketing, although possible.
- It has a low conversion rate and a slower return on investment.
Benefits of SMS marketing
SMS marketing holds numerous benefits for individuals and businesses like:
- You can reach a vast number of people with SMS marketing. As a fact, 96% of Americans have mobile phones.
- SMS gets a super-high open rate and conversion ~ as high as 98% open rate.
- It is very easy to implement
- SMS marketing is affordable and cost-effective when compared to social media ads.
Drawbacks of SMS Marketing
With all the great benefits of SMS marketing, there are still some limitations and drawbacks you should be aware of.
- It is difficult to funnel SMS leads to your email list (an asset you own)
- You risk getting blocked or reported when executed incorrectly – it can be perceived as an invasion of privacy.
- You cannot group or segment your audience using SMS marketing
- Scaling your business with SMS marketing is a difficult task
- It is limited to one content format – short text – no long text, images, videos, and so on.
- Lastly, you cannot effectively track how your marketing is performing and what to change to make it better.
How to decide between texting vs. social media?
These two marketing strategies are unique. You can use social media marketing and SMS marketing for the same purpose, conversions, but the circumstances in which each strategy is relevant differs.
In a situation where you plan to improve both your online presence and footprint, social media marketing will be perfect.
In addition, social media marketing allows you to monitor the response of your potential customers properly using CRM tools. You get rich insight into their interests, community, jobs, and status, which can be useful for further marketing and retargeting.
But if you are not bent on improving your online presence or that is not the priority now, SMS marketing is a great option to get more personalized in your marketing efforts and increase conversions.
You can send more personalized messages towards particular customers. SMS marketing makes this possible.
Deciding between texting and social media largely depends on what you aim to achieve. This decision will determine which strategy is best and appropriate to implement.
Other factors to consider when deciding between SMS marketing and social media marketing include:
- Budget allocation: Both make it easy to budget, especially with initial A/B testing; you’ll be able to quickly determine which ad set requires more funds.
- Target audience: Social media marketing allows you to target your audience and not just run ads randomly. This helps to cut costs and produce the desired results.
- Competent team: Without a competent team, social media marketing becomes a difficult task. In a situation where you do not have a competent team, SMS Marketing will come in handy.
- Competition: The higher the competition, the less effective social media marketing might be. On the other hand, SMS marketing allows you to send personalized messages and reach your audience directly.
With all these in mind, you’ll be able to choose the most suitable strategy for your business.
And why not consider email marketing if you’re searching for a third online marketing strategy! The ROI on email marketing for every $1 is $42. You can manage your email lists, schedules, and campaigns with email marketing services.
How to use social media and SMS together
Utilizing social media marketing or SMS marketing alone will do a lot for your business but not as much as when both strategies are combined. Since they both have unique features, it is important to know how to use them together.
Here are some ways you can apply both strategies.
1. Building a customer database
With both strategies, building a strong customer database is easier. For example, you can begin an SMS marketing campaign in which ads are run for potential customers to text to win prizes.
This campaign utilizes both strategies. Doing this will generate more leads and result in a conversion.
2. Building your online presence
You can successfully build a strong online presence and brand awareness with both strategies.
Apart from running ads to achieve this, with SMS, you can influence the actions of people to like and follow your page and build a positive outlook for your brand.
3. Create awareness
With SMS marketing, you draw proper attention to your social media page, where potential customers can get to know your products and services, leading to a higher conversion rate.
The potential of both strategies is high because where one is lacking, the other will fill in.
Examples of well known companies and brands that use both strategies include IKEA and Domino’s Pizza.
SMS & social together gets the most bang for your buck
You need more than one marketing strategy to grow your business, scale, and create a high conversion rate. Utilizing SMS and social media strategies will produce the best results and give you your money’s worth.
As a business person, it is important to note that using one strategy to improve sales may not be best for every situation.
The more you learn to implement more than one strategy, the better it will be for you.
Guest Author: With 10+ years of eCommerce & marketing experience, Bhujal is passionate about helping businesses get more revenue and profit through customized strategies. Bhujal lives in Toronto, ON, and writes about online business ideas and scaling your eCom business at mydigitalkube.com
The post SMS Marketing vs. Social Media Ads: Which One Should You Choose? appeared first on Jeffbullas's Blog.
* This article was originally published here
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