5 Reasons Why Online Entrepreneurs Must Look Beyond Numbers?
Everyone starts a new business with a specific goal to achieve. This goal is definitely not to get a million likes on social media, because thinking rationally, not all those million people are going to buy your product in the end. Liking a Facebook post about someone’s broken car will not help them fixing it as well. Similarly, getting more likes on a post does not mean that you have turned those people into the customers as well.
Moreover, many experts believe that social platforms are creating much complexity and competition in the online market. Due to this rise in complexity, companies are increasing their marketing budget to cover all the platforms that they don’t even need them in the first hand. Conforming to the norm of expanding on all mediums business are losing sight of what is important and what is not. Hence, many businesses fail within the first year due to intense financial pressure.
That is why we are going to discuss 5 reasons why online entrepreneurs must look beyond numbers?
Likes Only to Boost Your Ego Not Your Sales
A business’s success, in reality, is by the number of sales rather than the number of Facebook likes. This may look like a very simple thing to say, but sadly entrepreneurs do not understand it as such. A million likes will not guarantee a business success unless the company knows how to convert those likes into confirmed leads. Having social media following can be a part of that strategy but the whole plan cannot entirely depend on it. Every company should spend considerable time and effort on making an excellent marketing plan so that it can help them in engaging long-term customers rather than creating posts for a few likes.
There are a lot of ways to use social media more productively. Ideally, it should be used as a medium of continuous communication with customers. Their queries should be timely answered, and their issues should be heard and resolved efficiently. This can help foster a healthy relationship between the brand and the customer. But many businesses create a social media campaign without an “End Game” and end up compromising their customer relationship. So, you need to start a campaign for the sake of generating sales and engaging customers, not to get likes only.
Blockade in Reaching The Target
Getting too many likes on Facebook in a short time by spending money does not mean a brand has won a large fan base. Those paid likes will not result in increased sales; instead, this will get difficult for a company to identify the actual number of customers who are really interested in buying the product. Designing a marketing strategy becomes a difficult task in such scenarios. All the information collected from social media will not be accurate and the company will have to spend a lot of time and investment in conducting proper market research. Furthermore, it will result in a loose focus on potential customers.
Moreover, it will become difficult to improve the product itself, because product development depends entirely on the information collected from customer feedback, and this will surely not going to work out if all the feedback is coming from the fake accounts.
Trust Drops as Like The Rise
Buying likes will not help businesses survive in the long run. They may result in creating temporary popularity among the target audience, but customers cannot be deceived for long. Certainly, they will find out the truth and will become repulsive towards the brand. The fake likes will become useless as well as the money and resources spent on it. Furthermore, it will not increase the sale but could damage the brand image and will ultimately result in lost trust and diminished brand loyalty.
In our own experience, finding the quality and the work of Likes is easy. All you need to do is look at their interaction level with the page. A page with 20,000 followers getting less than 100 responses is clearly buying followers. Furthermore, buying followers means that you are spending money on fake numbers which you can spend elsewhere. The 100 true followers you get can give you a few customers, whereas buying 20,000 followers will give you zero. So, spend time in making a real campaign and improve your page accordingly, rather than taking shortcuts.
If Fails to Create a Difference
A brand can outshine others by having unique features rather than having more social media following. Having more likes is neither helpful in increasing sales nor does it create a difference in the eyes of a customer. Today, customers are more vigilant while shopping and they are not so gullible. Continuous hard work for improvement is required to out-shine in the market. If a brand fails to stand out even once, it can result in losing a large number. Customers only buy from those brands who continue to stand up to their expectations.
Therefore, you need to work on your image and customer interaction in order to make a lasting impression. Work on making a few loyal customers and you will increase the longevity of your business.
Your Money is Wasted
The money and resources spent on creating and managing fake accounts will ultimately go to waste as it deviates a company from its actual goals and just makes a balloon of fake expectations. It will result in spending additional resources on conducting full-fledged researches. The companies which depend entirely on social media popularity do not realize that those numbers are not the actual figures, and by the time they realize it, they are already at the brink of extinction. The focus should be on a good marketing plan rather than a social media campaign.
Only a good marketing plan can result in achieving the target of the number of sales. Social media can be a minor part of that strategy but depending entirely on just the fan following and like will not take you anywhere near to business success. The best way to learn about running a business is to follow the footprints of the famous business tycoons and read the success stories.
