When it comes to marketing it can be difficult to decide where to focus your time and money. Most people sway toward social media assuming it is the best option.
This is not necessarily true.
Below is a breakdown of the pros and cons of social media marketing and SMS marketing to give marketers information about which marketing strategy is best for your business.
Investment and ROI
The truth is, social media is quite difficult especially when you want to build traffic and you’re new to a platform.
Social media is not an instant marketing tool. Your company will have to invest a lot of time and resources for it to show any results. And once you’re up and running you have to constantly monitor your accounts to make sure you’re engaging your followers and keeping the the ball going.
If you compare this to SMS marketing, where the investment of your time is incredibly low. i.e. it doesn’t take long to type a text and click ‘send’, you can identify why you’re going to get a better return on investment.
With Gikko, setting up a bulk SMS business account is FREE. Get Started. The cost associated with messages soon goes out of the window when you work out your hourly rate and put a monetary value on the time spent on social media.
Engagement
Around 96% of Zimbabwean adults own a mobile phone, and with 99.99% of text messages being read within 2 minutes of receiving them you can see why SMS marketing is such an effective tool. You have your customers undivided attention while they read your text, which isn’t something you get with social media.
A Facebook post has an average reach of roughly 2-3% and a very low number of readers actually engage with the post (unlike when they’re reading a text). Twitter has 313 million active users but is so fast moving that many tweets aren’t actually read.
Access to the market
If we analyse why people use social media you start to see it’s downfall as an effective marketing strategy for businesses. The clue is in the name – social – media. People access their accounts to connect with friends, catch up on the latest news and share the latest funny video that’s doing the rounds.
They’re not there to buy something from you which is why it takes a huge amount of effort to get someone to make a purchase on social media. Some businesses manage to conquer this, but it’s only after the long struggle of getting customers to notice their page, providing content that’s engaging enough to get people to like or follow them and hoping their latest post is noticed amongst everything else in someone’s feed.
This struggle does NOT exist with SMS marketing. As most customers own a mobile phone you can be confident that your text will be delivered and read by your intended audience.
In addition, you already know that people want to be contacted by you because they’ve previously opted into receiving your business SMS and are therefore willing and ready to buy.
