By Jarrod Smith – Director Smith&Partners / Random Story Teller
Important. Beyond important, it is imperative for your business. I don’t even need to know what your business is or what you do to answer that question. In the year of 2017 each and every business can benefit from and obtain a great ROI with social media, it doesn’t matter if you’re a real estate agent, or running a business that holds chess tournaments in a retirement home. Social media can help you reach your target audience.
I’ve asked this question and been asked it what seems like a million times to a million different people. The most common rebuttal I get from that analogy is “what’s the point in using social media to advertise to retirement home chess players, no way they use social media”. Well first mistake in that comment is stereotyping and assuming you know your entire audience, you don’t. No one does. The second is that is such a narrow minded thought process, just because the end user may not (in their opinion) use social media, it doesn’t mind that their influencer’s don’t as well.
Let me explain… using a completely stereotypical, hypothetical scenario. Let’s say an 80 year old grandpa lives in a retirement home. A local former chess champion is looking for a way to live off his passion and recognition as a chess leader and also wants to give help out the local community with a program that assists those that helped pave the way for the lifestyle he’s trying to enjoy. Now the problem is the local chess champ doesn’t know how to get in front of his target market, so he asks his sister to help with ideas around the marketing. She offers the very sound advice of going and knocking on doors at local retirement homes, meet the people that you want to help play chess. And this of course is very sound advice, meet people who you want to work with. Tick. Thanks Jarrod you’ve changed my life, blown my mind… no I haven’t. But the next advice she offers is avoid social media, no one who’s old is on social media you’re wasting your time and money.
The chess champion follows his sister’s advice, he knocks on doors and gets good interest. Books his first clients and starts to get busy. But not busy enough to change his life, he needs to start delivering pizza’s on off nights to make up the rent he owes each month. He’s run out of doors in the local area to knock on. He’s capped his captive audience and therefore his market share. So he thinks about other ways he can reach more people without a huge investment of his cash, as money is tight. It’s always tight. He decides to ask his best mate growing up to help, he started a business in his garage and now sells tea towels across the country. Perfect, someone who knows what to do. His mate ask a simple question, “how would your own grandpa find out about the chess tournaments?” his response was, I’d tell him. The next question was just as important, “then how would you find out about it?”. The answer: online.
So our local chess champion put $5 a day into targeted social media advertising, he focused on demographics likely to still have a living grandparent in the radius of the local bus route (again stereotyping but in a more segmented, informed way this time as he had market research to back up his assumption) . He also advertised to people with an interest in chess, who enjoyed driving and had an interest in philanthropy. What he found was that the numbers for his tournaments increased dramatically, at some locations he had to spread the competition over more days as too many people wanted to participate. He also found that a number of interested chess enthusiasts in the local area wanted to donate their time to help and to drive people home from late night finishes, those retirement home chess tournaments can get a little out of hand sometimes!
I guess the moral of this long winded, random story is that digital marketing can be applied to anything. Not most situations, any situation involving a business looking for a way to generate more income, awareness, sales, customers. The bottom line is, in 2017 digital is the most effective way to reach a real audience. It’s not the only way and all aspects are important, but don’t discount a proper digital strategy when you’re creating your next marketing plan. If you’d like some help being pointed in the right direction. Drop us a line, we’d love to hear from you. And if you laughed at least once while reading this far fetched analogy, you me a like and share. Help me spread the word and lets together get Smith&Partners into the sphere as a recognized entity.
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