Why Marketing is More Than Social Media

While social media presence is a primary concern for many growing small businesses, it is far from the whole picture. At Serendipity & Co, we emphasize engaging, omni-channel marketing strategies that work together across multiple platforms to ensure sustainable business growth. Our team engages with current marketing trends, platforms, and content varieties to ensure that we create innovative and holistic strategies for your business.

There are several key factors that small business owners should consider when developing an omni-channel marketing strategy that extends beyond regularly posting social media content. 

Here are a few questions to ask yourself before creating a holistic plan that allows your business to reach and retain wider audiences.

What is your ideal Return on Investment (ROI)?

While social media can be an effective tool for creating awareness and conversion within a defined customer base, it is not necessarily the best or only way for businesses to actively achieve high ROIs. Social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn and TikTok are important avenues for building brand awareness as well as advertising products and services, but social media platforms can only go so far in terms of ROI. It's also not always easy for small businesses to measure the impact of social media awareness campaigns.

Omnichannel marketing campaigns that incorporate multiple tactics aimed at specific audiences as well as wider, more general audiences can ultimately increase your ROI. Here are a few examples of successful marketing tactics beyond social media that are proven to boost sales and increase a business’s ROI.

Email Marketing

Email marketing allows businesses to send targeted messages to specific segments of their audience, like retail and wholesale customers. Creating a comprehensive email marketing strategy is ideal for sharing information about new launches, top-selling items, and encouraging sales with an audience that already loves your product or service.

Serendipity & Co works with our marketing clients on methods such as email strategy evaluation, wholesale and retail marketing, email overhaul and trigger email creation. Read more about how we increased retail sales by simply updating a brand’s creative and messaging for a wholesale email program in our Wholesale Email Increase Case Study.

Content Strategies

A cohesive content strategy across all channels is the primary driver of engagement and long-term ROI. A high-quality content strategy can become a cost-effective way to drive traffic to your website, generate leads, and establish your business as an industry leader. Your successful email campaign can become a Facebook or Instagram ad, blog post, video or even a page on your website.

Content that lives on your website can also be optimized for search engines to drive organic traffic to your business. A successful content strategy not only generates leads, but it also establishes your brand as a trusted source of information by developing a strong, consistent relationship with new and current customers.

Search Engine Optimization and Market Analysis

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is another great example of a digital marketing method that can increase your ROI. Optimizing a company’s website and content for search engines increases visibility in organic search engine results and can drive more traffic to your website. SEO not only increases brand exposure and awareness, but it also leads to higher conversion rates and a lower cost per acquisition compared to some other marketing methods.

A reliable competitive analysis can also inform and optimize your marketing and SEO strategies. We assist our marketing clients with insightful market research and competitive analysis to ensure successful campaign development and execution across all channels.

What are your Conversion Goals?

There are many key elements to consider when creating a conversion-based campaign over an awareness-based campaign. Both awareness and conversion are essential for growing small businesses, but it is important to keep your business’s long-term conversion goals in mind when creating any marketing campaign. Here are two of many marketing tactics to consider when reviewing your business’s long-term conversion goals.

Website Maintenance

A well-designed website with a seamless user experience is one of the best places to start when elevating conversion. If a customer clicks on an ad to purchase a product or service, but the website is cumbersome or not easy to navigate, that person has a higher chance of not purchasing a product then if they had a smooth website experience.

Website maintenance includes intuitive navigation, accessible information and engaging design that provides a positive experience for visitors. One example of how to optimize conversion from your website is to create an easy checkout process that reduces friction and makes the process as easy as possible. Additional examples of optimizing your website for conversion include a clear call-to-action, a secure payment process and clear information about shipping and returns.

Personalization and Creative Branding

Branding is most effective and able to foster conversion when it is engaging, comprehensive and unique to the brand. Similarly, conversion-based marketing tactics are most successful when personalized toward previously identified target audiences. Creating personalized messaging for specific target audiences can maximize your marketing efforts since it increases the relevance and impact of marketing materials.

What are your Retention Goals?

Retention is what happens after a customer becomes aware of your product or service, converts and remains loyal to your brand. Once you convert a customer, it is essential to retain them in order to continue to grow. Posting on social media is a great way to engage with customers, but it is usually not enough to encourage customers to continue converting. There are several marketing tactics that can help build lasting relationships with your customers and establish long-term success for your business, which you can read about below.

Customer Engagement

One of the best ways to boost retention is fostering active and organic customer engagement. Creating an email segment for VIP or early adopter customers is a fantastic way to retain an important section of your customer base. Giveaways, exciting partnerships, and activations and events are also great ways to engage and retain your audience while also attracting potential new customers without relying on social media. However, you can also engage with your audience through community management on social media to continue building strong relationships and keeping your customers loyal to your brand. Social media engagement can also include responding to comments and questions, creating polls, posting surveys and hosting events or webinars to further connect with your audience.

Personal Connections

Finally, providing excellent customer service that focuses on personal connection is key to retaining customers. By responding promptly to consumer needs and addressing any issues quickly and effectively, you can build trust and loyalty with your customers and keep them coming back for more.

While social media can be a fun, useful marketing tool, growing small businesses have the opportunity to look beyond social media in order to achieve long-term goals related to increasing ROI, conversion and retention.

Let your business start embracing a comprehensive, omni-channel marketing strategy to build relationships with target audiences and increase sales as a result!