Where do you spend your time when you’re on your phone or computer? For most, it’s email, social media, or browsing the web. As a business owner, it’s important to understand how critical it is to leverage these channels for marketing. What’s even more important, understanding how to allocate your time to the channel that will convert to increased revenue.
In this article, we’ll break down the pros and cons of email marketing and social media so you can make an informed decision on how to best allocate your time to market your business.
Email Marketing
Starting off, let’s talk about the pros and cons of email marketing.
Pros:
- Higher Viewership: It’s easily accessible via cell phones, laptops, and tablets making it easy for your target audience to view your content. If you’re producing thoughtful content, your viewers are likely to open your emails.
- Targeting: You can customize target audiences and send different emails or subject lines that resonate with that specific target audience.
- Free-to-use: Unlike other forms of marketing, it’s free-to-use. If you’re looking for additional management or automation tools, most platforms offer free trials. Check out the top email marketing tools for small businesses here.
- Measuring Success: Track analytics to see how successful your email performed. You can leverage open and click-through rates to gauge email performance.
- You Own Your Lists: You own your lists. By thoughtfully growing a list of new or existing customers, you know you’re reaching an audience that’s interested in your business or product.
Looking for help? Check out the top email marketing tools for small businesses here.
Cons:
- Cluttered Inboxes: Everyone receives a lot of emails. If you don’t spend the time customizing your emails and producing thoughtful content, they’ll likely get lost in your recipient's inbox.
- Design Problems: Emails appear differently on different platforms. A perfect-looking email on the computer may look compressed over the phone if not adjusted properly beforehand. This can be combated but it will take time to adjust the format of your emails. Try a platform like Constant Contact to leverage email marketing templates that perform well on different applications.
- Time and Effort: Creating quality emails takes time and effort. There are email marketing scheduling tools and content creation tools that can help. Try leveraging an email marketing tool or a local agency that specializes in email marketing so you can spend more time focusing on running your business.
Social Media Marketing
Now, let’s dive into the pros and cons of social media marketing.
Pros:
- Low Cost: Similar to email marketing, posting on social media is completely free, and boosting posts is affordable when compared to other types of marketing.
- Bigger Audience: When you post from a public account, you have the potential to reach a much larger audience than with email marketing but far less targeted. If you utilize tagging and keywords, your posts are likely to reach the appropriate audience.
- Engage With Users: You can engage directly with your audience by liking, commenting, tagging, and following the appropriate users.
- Going Viral: If your content is engaging, social platform algorithms could push your posts viral which could drastically increase new business. To do this, it’s important to consistently post and humanize your brand to the public.
- Ease Of Posting: Nowaday’s there’s an abundance of scheduling and content creation tools to leverage to help you remain consistent and help your brand stand out. Check out this list of the top social media tools for small businesses to help.
Looking for help? Check out the top email marketing tools for small businesses here.
Cons:
- Targeting: In contrast with email marketing, you can’t control who sees your posts. Because of this, you have to make your posts more universal to appeal to as many as possible.
- Time Consuming: Posting consistently can take time. Try leveraging a social media management tool like Social Pilot or a content creation tool like Canva to help. Or, leave it to the pros and leverage an agency so you can focus your efforts elsewhere.
- More Difficult to Track: Tracking engagement is difficult as views and likes may not convert to clicks or new business. You can track the correlation between posting and new business. To keep your data in one place, try leveraging a social media management tool to keep your analytics in one central location.
To sum it all up, staying on top of the latest social media trends is a challenge yet incredibly important to support your business's growth.
Need some help? Check out these resources.
Join a group: Join the following groups to ask your most pressing questions and share your best tips.
Explore local resources: Check out local agencies on Alignable that offer social media or email marketing services.
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