Before you go all in at social media marketing, here are 3 areas to help you reconsider if it really is the tool to help your business blossom.

Social media marketing is easily one of the best marketing choice a business can ever made. But depending on it alone for a flourishing business is far from feasible.

Ever since the birth of Facebook, we knew it was going to change the world. There’s no guessing as to why businesses start choosing to go on social networks — they know too.

Here, 3 powerful reasons social media marketing is not the sole answer for business growth:

#1 Social media marketing is not a long-term solution for branding purposes

What is branding?

To explain it in the simplest form let’s put it this way — it’s how people talk about your brand when you’re not in the room.

Branding done right is when people talk about how much your brand helped them, and help you spread the word willingly to other people.

Many businesses immediately head straight for social media marketing when they think of branding. Yes, the dynamic between you and your audiences’ interaction can be effortless, and oftentimes fun on your social networks. But it takes so much more to build your brand.

Brand building doesn’t necessarily mean being the best in your industry; it’s about being the best your targeted prospects’ view you as.

To reach that goal, you need trust. When it comes down to choosing the right brand or business for the products or services needed, trust becomes pivotal. There’s so much truth to that — we tend to approach brands that we trust more, even if there’s little difference between one product and the other.

Social media is a great way to impress. You’re cool, smart, funny, interesting — but that’s on the surface.

You want that special someone to know much more about you, to understand what you do, to know how you really feel and how you can make them feel.

Valuable content is what your prospects want to get hold of. Valuable content is also fundamentally a powerhouse to let them know in depth about your business and brand. The more stories you tell, the more you reveal about the inmost truth about your business, and the more your brand can be viewed as trustworthy and sincere. Eventually people start choosing you over other brands, start telling people how great you are, and how happy they are after meeting you; all because they trust you better. And that’s when your business starts to thrive.

Social media is great for short-term tactical marketing campaigns, but doing it without long-term strategy as a support will do more harm to your brand than expected.

#2 Social media marketing doesn’t generate more traffic to the website

There is nothing more grueling — or defeating — than the vain effort of trying to improve a sluggish social media page. You thought your social networks were supposed to help fire up traffic to the website, but they end up falling below expectations.

Social media for business is so much more than funny cat videos or ridiculously hilarious memes.

Think about your prospects who are really interested in your products or services.

They’d do a lot of research on the products or services they need. Interested buyers will be going through more than just the first page of search engine results. Codefuel reveals that more than a third of users prefer to consume content found through Google, as opposed to through social media.

When prospects happen upon your website, you’d want them to stay within your site. You’d want your content to be  able to answer every possible queries they might have. You also want them to keep coming back to your website whenever possible.

Content marketing, like blogs, build personal repertoire with readers, eventually choosing to visit your blog for more advice. Generating massive traffic to your website wouldn’t seem like such an impossible task after all.

Oh, and the (not so surprising) reason content marketing improves the engagement level of your social media page? People were more likely to engage with a post if it links to a longer piece of content outside Facebook.

Fact: Content marketing promotes more organic traffic to your website and in turn, takes your business to the next level.

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#3 Social media marketing gives you less opportunities to propel purchasing decisions.

Of course social media marketing is not entirely useless in helping consumers make decisions in purchasing.

These platforms are breeding ground for conversations, great for collecting reviews, and nurturing a community. But social media is a fast-paced world: you need to be able to capture attention fast.

Visual takes the crown when it comes to social media marketing. That’s why products or services that are visually-oriented can be more advantageous when they’re on social platforms.

For instance a wedding photography studio. Would it be more effective showing your photos on Facebook or describe them in words? Take for another example, recipes for a packaged food company. Would people be more attracted to the video recipes or the written recipe?

A true conundrum: You can’t hard-sell on social media platforms but you want to sell.

Yes, you can easily display these content on your website. But social media is instant, and people are quick to evoke sentiments that they have. Based on this, social media gives potential consumers the right amount of purchasing desire. Which is wholly different from purchasing decisions.

When used correctly, social media marketing can be brilliant. But content strategy on social media should be more fun than persuasive.

Social media is perfect for engagement and humanizing your brand.  But when you want sales conversion to happen, content marketing is still king.

Conclusion

We can’t deny that social media marketing has done great things for brands. Still that doesn’t mean you should depend on it alone to grow your business. You’d need some real sales conversion to happen in order for your business to be prosperous and healthy.

Content marketing and social media marketing are two completely different things, and they go hand in hand. Without content marketing, your social media marketing strategy will be less sustainable. A great social page is what your business needs to thrive. But that’s not going to happen unless you bolster your social media marketing with content marketing.

Featured image by Saulo Mohana on Unsplash