We do believe that social media and social marketing has radically altered advertising. We believe that social media can level the playing field between Madison Avenue and local business owners. It’s not a fad, the landscape of social media has changed dramatically over the past three years, and what we see today will dramatically change 3 years from now. We feel we are at the ground level of a new age of marketing and that social media will play a big part in success of local business going forward.

There are numerous reasons as to why to do social media, and some of the same lists will tell you how to get started. This blog by Brian Solis does a great of describing how a business plays in social marketing and addresses why it works. But he fails to address if there enough hours in the day for the average business owner to dedicate the time to social marketing.

I saw a quote today from Mitch Kapor “Getting information off the internet is like taking a drink from a fire hydrant.” The information is there for everybody in abundance, but is the time there for the local business owner? Over the past 18 months, the economy has created many difficult decisions for local business owners, as they have had to drastically cut their overhead, as well as personnel. The mantra “more for less” began with large corporations to raise stock prices has now spilled over to local small business as a way just to survive.

All the information is available, but is the time? After all, you do have a business to run, and for most small business owners being a marketing expert, let alone a social media expert is not what you signed up for. If you’ve been in business for any length of time, you’ve had to make adjustments with product or services. Consumer demand can make you add goods and or services, as well as discontinue others.

We are a small full-service agency that has worked with locally owned businesses. Over the past 12 to 18 months we have seen more and more opportunities for our clients in social media. Due to the efficiency of being able to communicate consistently with their customers as well as add new friends, we decided to create a department dedicated to helping our current clients succeed in social media. Our goal is to assist other small businesses to compete in the social media marketplace.

Why We Chose to Add Social Marketing to Our Suite of Services

social marketing, social mediaWith efficiency and cost cutting being a huge topic concerning advertising budgets, social media just made sense for our clients. Today most businesses are not getting the ROI in traditional media that they got 2 to 3 years ago. Even if they spent the same dollars, the return would not be the same. First and most importantly, this is because the economy just won’t allow it and second, the time the consumers spend on social media today versus two years ago has cut into time that had been spent with traditional media.

So with budgets being cut, we knew that we had to find other ways to talk and communicate with their clients. Social media was the logical conclusion. We began to implement cost effective social media campaign for our customers. While social media today cannot replace or replicate what can be done with traditional media, it does act as a very affordable compliment to anyone’s campaign, and for those clients that couldn’t afford traditional media campaigns, well social media has given them the voice that they’ve needed for these many years.

It takes time and dedication to do it correctly. Social marketing is more than just marketing, and it’s more than just being social, it’s walking the fine line between the two. For us its fun, it’s exciting, it’s a way for us to do what we like to do and what we do best, help the local small business compete and succeed.

About the Author:

Mike Frey

Before co-founding Paradux Media Group, Mike spent more than 15 years in the world of marketing and advertising. While working with hundreds of locally owned businesses, he developed an appreciation for minimizing clients’ dollars while maximizing tangible results for those clients.

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