Small Business Marketing Wants vs Needs

small business marketing wants vs needs

As a small business owner, it’s common to find yourself caught between what you think you want and what you actually need. You may find yourself setting ambitious goals and creating elaborate marketing campaigns, only to realize that it’s not resonating with your target audience. Or, you might find yourself focusing on “vanity metrics” instead of real, tangible results. This is where understanding the distinction between your wants and your needs comes into play. In this blog post, we’ll dive deeper into how to discern between these two categories and how to align your marketing strategy with your true business goals.

The Difference Between Wants and Needs

When it comes to marketing, wants refer to the things that you and your team may desire or think would be beneficial to your business. This could include a sleek new website or a viral social media video. On the other hand, needs are the essentials that actually keep a small business running. Just a couple of examples are generating high-quality leads and increasing and building a loyal customer base. While wants can be tempting and exciting – particularly in the short term – small business owners must remember that they should always be focused on the long-term success of the business.

Examples of Small Business Marketing Wants vs Needs

As a small business that largely works with other small businesses, we come across these unrealistic wants all the time. However, it is our goal to set people in the right direction, so that they focus on the things that will actually lead to the sustainability of their business.

Want: More Leads

Just about every small business or marketer says they want to see more leads come in. But that’s not entirely accurate. What they really want are more qualified leads, who will be more likely to turn into customers. Having a huge number of leads can actually be a waste of your time if most of them are not qualified and therefore very unlikely to actually purchase your product or service. It would be better to have a smaller number of more interested leads than a large number of uninterested leads.

Want: More Social Media Followers

We know, having a lot of followers on social media looks good. But it doesn’t always make sense for small businesses to have a lot of followers. If you are a small shop located in a smaller city, it wouldn’t make sense for you to have thousands upon thousands of followers. If you did, a lot of them probably wouldn’t be located anywhere near you, which means they are extremely unlikely to become customers. Instead of focusing on the number of followers you have, focus on how you can increase engagement with your current followers. These are people who have already expressed that they have some interest in your business, product, or service. How can you help them take the next step to purchase? This is a much less labor-intensive process than convincing new people to follow you and then purchase. 

Want: More Website Traffic

If you have a website, you’re probably always looking for ways to increase how many people visit it. But think about this similarly to how you should think about social media followers. If you’re getting a ton of traffic from people across the globe, that traffic essentially means nothing (unless of course, you ship worldwide). Rather than focusing on the sheer volume of traffic to your website, make the focus how targeted that traffic is. The more targeted, the more likely it is that they turn into conversions.

Want: More Content

How many times have you thought that you’re not posting enough, whether it’s to your website, your social media profiles, or elsewhere? You may believe that getting a post out every day, even if it’s low quality, will be more beneficial than posting just a few high-quality posts. We are here to tell you that is not the case! Again, volume doesn’t equal success. If you can’t manage posts every day of the week, don’t worry. It’s better to post strategic, high-quality content, even if that means only posting a few days a week 

Want: More Advertising Spend

Another common misconception is that if your advertising strategy isn’t working well, you just need to put more money behind it. It would be nice to always have more money to spend, wouldn’t it? But as a small business, funds are probably limited. If your advertising isn’t going a well as you’d like, it would be worth your time to analyze who you are targeting with your ads. Are your ads being seen by the people most likely to purchase your products or services? If not, spending more time creating the right targeting strategy might be the best option.

Communication Is Key 

Marketing goals are most often met when everyone is on the same page. To avoid any misunderstanding or disorganization, make sure your entire company knows what your goals are. And remember that these might change over time. Keep everyone updated when strategies, priorities, or methods change. This will ensure that everyone works together to create even better results.

Meet Your Small Business Marketing Needs With 98 Buck Social

One thing is for sure: marketing is a huge undertaking. And it is especially so for small business owners who already have a seemingly never-ending to-do list. If you are overwhelmed or unable to give your marketing the attention it deserves, 98 Buck Social is here to help. We can take multiple responsibilities off of your plate, allowing you to spend your time doing what you do best. Everything from your daily social media posting and social media advertisements to search engine optimization strategies and blog writing can be done by our expert team. Get in touch with us to learn more about how our services can help your small business thrive.

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Have any questions?

We have answers.

Can you help me grow Instagram followers?

We partner with Socialboost to help build Instagram followers. Click the link below to enroll. Plans start at $59/mo.

Socialboost
What photos or videos do you use?

By default, we can use the photos you have on your website as well as utilizing the plethora of photos available to us within our royalty free library.

If you have photos or videos for us to use, depending on your subscription, we welcome you to upload them into a Google Drive folder and share that link with us!

Looking for custom videos?  Some of our plans include videos or you can add them to any plan starting at $98/mo!

How do you mimic my branding colors and style?

As mentioned above, depending on your plan, we can use whatever you’d like to provide us! If not, we’ll resort to using your website or our royalty free library.

That being said, we can come up with custom graphics that suit your branding style as an add-on to your posting subscription.

$98/month for 3 custom graphics each week
$148/month for 5 custom graphics each week

Note: The cost of custom graphics is on top of your monthly subscription cost

What is content review & approval?

Content review and approval is where your social media content creator sends you a weeks worth of posts, prior to their designated publication time the following week.

This way, you will have the chance to give us feedback on each post in case you’d like us to make a minor edit.

Note: One round of editing per post permitted, depending on your plan.

What are the results I can expect from your posting services?

The idea behind consistent posting onto your social media pages is to keep them active with content that promotes your business solutions, educates your audience to showcase your expertise and to also keep things lighthearted, it’s social media after all!

There’s nothing worse for a business than to earn someone looking into what you do, only for them to see a barren social media page. To them, it may appear that you are out of business or potentially a scam.

We are often asked about growing followers and generating sales or leads. These are great goals to have but please understand that those goals are better obtained through paid advertising campaigns.

For more information on paid advertising, please visit our paid advertising services.

Do you use a posting scheduler and how do you get access to my business pages?

We are fortunate to be partnered with CloudCampaign.com to utilize their excellent scheduling platform.

By signing up for our content services, we will set you up with your own Cloud Campaign workspace depending on your plan.

During onboarding we request admin access to your social accounts using a secure platform. This allows us to manage the occasional disconnect when the platforms push out updates.

Furthermore, with your own workspace you are welcome to view and edit content at your leisure!

Why do my posts say “Posted by Cloud Campaign”

We use Cloud Campaign, which is a 3rd party app, to scale social media management and posting. When a post says “Posted by Cloud Campaign”, it is only the admins of your company page that can see this and not your followers.