Online Marketing Dilemma, Use Your own Website or Social Media
Where to invest your online marketing dollars? With the rapid rise in Social Media, most business owners are faced with this marketing dilemma. The truth as usual is somewhere in between.
Both the website and the social media properties are different marketing channels that businesses can take advantage of and benefit from.
Benefits of using your own Website for online marketing
There are some clear advantages when your website is your marketing channel
1. Ownership
Your website is owned by you. You pay for the domain name, the design and development and the hosting. All the data concerning your site is owned by you and not by some 3rd party entity.
2. Relevant visitors
Most visitors to your website know your business, typed the name and arrived directly or have come through search engines. The remaining visitors are arrive through referral sites or campaigns. Most visitors had a strong intent to visit your site or a similar one.
Social media visitors to social properties are mainly there to socialize and less intent on a business related purpose.
3. Converting visitors to generate business
You website offers you more control on conversions that directly generate revenue. You can tweak your website to the finest detail to improve conversions and ROI. You can play with landing pages, add new pages and modify existing ones.
4. Risk level
Anytime you put your data or campaign on a 3rd party, you are totally dependant on that provider. There are numerous risks when you do this. The platform could close down, you could be banned for some trivial reason, the terms and conditions may mean losing ownership on data or content built through your efforts. Having your own platform, your own website as a marketing channel is a great way to mitigate this risk.
5. Flexibility and Freedom
As you are the owner, you have the freedom to radically change any aspect of your website including the domain name, the hosting, the look and feel as well as its functioning. You can adapt it to any change and keep the site running.
Benefits of using Social Media for online marketing
Social Media has some key advantages due to the network effects on their platform.
1. Extending marketing reach
Social media is low on relevancy compared to search, but it has the potential for more reach. This is great to make more people aware of your brand and business.
2. Potential to go viral
Due to network effects, there is a chance for some of your offers and content going viral and spreading out to a large audience. This can lead to increased exposure for your brand.
3. Timing and Connections Matter
Social media is about being present at the right time, with the right message to a core audience. Success depends on who you have in your network and what influence your network connections have.
4. Ease of use
You don’t have to worry about the details like hosting, coding, etc. In most situations, applications built on social platforms do the job for you. Also the level of detailed knowledge required to run one’s own website is not usually applicable here unless you are in the business of social media application development.
5. Networking and Competitor Analysis
Social Media helps you directly interact and respond to questions from new and existing customers. You can connect, share, learn and improve your business instead of just your website. You can have a more realistic view of how people view your business and competition in general.
Dharne & Company offers online marketing services to businesses across California. This includes our SEO Service, Social Media Marketing and others. Contact Us to know more about these services.
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