3 Platforms You Can Forget About, and 3 You Absolutely Can’t Ignore
The marketing landscape is changing ever more rapidly as we enter 2016. Flashy new social networks go viral and go bust within a matter of months. With such confusion, it’s tough to know which platforms are worth investing time and money into, and which aren’t worth touching.
In this article, I’ll present three platforms that have totally lost their value, and three that are worth jumping into right now. While each business’s marketing situation is unique, these trends hold true over all of the marketing world to some extent or another.
You Can Forget About…
Radio Advertising
Let’s start out by knocking out the easy ones. It’s 2016. You don’t need to be advertising on the radio anymore. With listenership falling year after year, it seems clear that podcasts, not Internet radio, will replace terrestrial radio. Unless your target market is uniquely captured through conventional radio, it’s time to stop.
Conventional Display Advertising
While online ads certainly have their place, conventional display ads on specific websites don’t cut it. The average click-through rate for display ads is 0.06 percent. If you want to generate leads, buy ads from a network, not an individual site. At least when you buy from ad networks, you can narrow down by market segment, which isn’t possible with conventional display advertising.
Classified Ads
With newspaper subscription rates cratering and online classified ad sites like Craigslist having essentially swallowed the market for classified ads, it hardly makes any sense anymore to pay for classified ads. The readership for newspapers skew older, and the ROI for newspaper ads isn’t near what it was before the Internet. It’s time to jump ship for those who haven’t already.
You Absolutely Can’t Ignore…
Even as there are still concerns about Facebook losing its teen audience, Facebook remains the six hundred-pound gorilla of social media. Facebook offers the widest range of users and reaches the broadest spectrum of people in the United States. If you’re sitting out on Facebook, it’s time to get back in.
SMS
Even as more and more messaging apps bust on the market, SMS remains the dominant form of digital communication, in part, because it offers universal compatibility between phones. Furthermore, as other channels become saturated with marketing messages, SMS inboxes remain relatively clear, which is an opening for you and your business.
According to a recent study, up to 57 percent of people are willing to share their phone number for the right incentives. This gives your business a huge opening to reach and engage your customers.
Snapchat
Even though Snapchat is sometimes derided as being a pointless app for teens, it was the fastest-growing social network of 2015. Recently, Snapchat has partnered with major publishers to provide content for its audience. While there still isn’t an ad portal like there is for other major social networks, it’s still worth immersing yourself in the platform, because when the inevitable ad platform goes live, you'll want to be able to hit the ground running.
Of course, not every platform is worth it to every business. For now it doesn’t make sense for a retirement home to get a Snapchat account, but who knows? Maybe one day that will be how businesses interact with their customers.
Ideally, though, you should be constantly reevaluating what channels make sense and which ones do not. Otherwise, you’ll miss big opportunities that will leave your business at a disadvantage.
