Summarizing, as the price of a product or service goes up, social media effectiveness significantly decreases. To me, social media has always been like cotton candy: it does not stick around too long.
As a former VP sales manager of a Fortune 500 company, my opinion is social media is more effective if you're selling a vanity product or service for $14.99. But when a product or service price is $500 and higher, nothing beats good old face-to-face communications. Or, if selling business-to-business, the telephone is a powerful tool!
Social media is also effective for non-sales dialogue like politics or reconnecting with high school friends from 20 years ago. If you are both a business owner and politically-minded, keeping business separated from politics is difficult.
I officially got off social media for business reasons about five years ago. I use the word "officially" to mean my expectations from getting business from social media dropped to less than 5%. And based on my conversations with my market niche, which includes attorneys, CPAs, dentists, plastic surgeons, insurance brokers and real estate brokers, these highly certified business professionals never had much social media success either.
It's January 2021. By now, and hopefully, people understand that social media was primarily a political tool to be used by both political parties.
For my business, seeing the negative disruption for small business owners is to my company's business benefit. The failure of social media to serve as an effective marketing tool will push white-collar business owners to more proven, traditional marketing methods like print, radio, television, face-to-face and B2B phone calls.
I admit I was hooked on social media for a number of years. Back in 2015, I started regaining my sobriety from social media when I asked many white-collar small business owners if social media was successful for their companies. The answer was 99.99% NO!
The reason why social media was doomed from the start for white-collar small business owners is there was no barrier for small business owners to advertise. Business owner simply had to create a Facebook, Instagram, Twitter page, for free.
Since social media marketing was free, millions of business claimed their digital territories to present their products and services to potential buyers. This led to complete saturation! Plus, white-collar small business owners thought people who buy legal, accounting, dental, plastic surgery, insurance and real estate services...services starting at $1,000 and higher...were spending their "free" time on social media. No! These qualified buyers were working trying to earn a living. They were not on social media like college students or laid off workers.
In essence, using a statistics type example, there were 10,000 real estate agent trying to sell their services to 1 qualified buyer. Interestingly, the 10,000 real estate agents probably missed selling homes to qualified buyers standing in line at banks, at bakeries, or on the soccer field sidelines.
Interested parties can contact me, Rick Nappier, CEO, at (833) 321-3212 or Yeilyn Rodriguez, VP, Business Development Specialist (bilingual) for English or Spanish contacts, at (786) 697-3400.
321 Biz Dev LLC offers 6- to 9-hour sales system training to help white-collar salespeople improve skills and increase business development results.
Business owners can also complete a 5-minute Questionnaire by clicking the Services tab on our website. Also, click the About tab to learn about 321 Biz Dev LLC.
I hope readers enjoyed this article.
Rick, CEO
Yeilyn, VP