When you’re a small business trying to break into social media marketing, it’s extremely easy to end up with tunnel vision. You focus specifically on just one network (maybe two) and throw all your efforts into the channel. Some businesses even do this without performing the appropriate research so they may not even be engaging the right network – their customers might be somewhere else.
That tunnel vision can happen in other places as well. Small business owners have a tendency to settle into a comfort zone when they’re trying to market their business. They may find something that seems to work reasonably well and stick to it without venturing into other areas. Sometimes the comfort zone they’re in doesn’t even perform that well but it “fits” their business and their preferences.
When you focus too much in your marketing efforts, whether its online or offline, you miss a lot of opportunity to improve the position of your business. Many individual owners push off online marketing because they already have their attention split between various forms of offline marketing like direct mail, community outreach, etc. Whether it’s the cost or the time required, they haven’t done much of anything to promote their business online.
Those that do sometimes fall back into that tunnel vision issue, where they lock onto a specific form of online marketing and won’t branch out.
As a business owner, it’s important to realize that not all of your customers can be reached in the same way. It’s like the methods of learning; some people learn by doing, others by seeing, and some by hearing. There are also plenty that can be reached through a combination of all of those. Your customers are the same way.
You may need to reach some through direct mail, others through various content marketing channels. A selection of your customers will respond the most to social media outreach and yet some may only jump at email offers. It’s important to do the appropriate research as part of your content marketing strategy to establish the buyer persona. You need to understand which methods work best, and which are ineffective. It will always be more than 1 method, and it’s never all methods. You need to develop a strategy that appropriately ranks your methods for marketing, prioritizing which will receive the most attention and which the least based on how your customers respond.
When you base your content marketing and consumer outreach on hard data, you’ll see that the narrow focus and tunnel vision is only hurting you. Broadening your perspective will bring you far more success and a notable increase in conversion.
