How many people can you advert reach? An experiment on social media.

by chee leng-Oncoffeemakers
(Singapore)

I am based in Singapore, so if I would to do some marketing for F&B or coffee shops, it will usually involves flyers or posters.

Although TV and Radio advert is getting cheaper, including production, you are still looking at a 5 figure sum. Not likely for most F&B outlets in Singapore.

With flyers and posters, you can probably do the entire marketing for less than two thousand dollars, the question is how many people will actually walk into your outlets to consume your products?

I doubt anyone track it, and I doubt anyone even bothers about how low that figure is. They said it is about 0.001%. That means for every 10 000 flyers, you get 10 customers.

Let's just say you spend about 2000 on it, your 10 customers must spend more than 400 (assuming that the COGS is 50%) for you to break even.

For folks in the industry, we know that figure is difficult to achieve.

Now, what about social media? They said it is cheap, and it is good, so can it really work? Unfortunately, no for most companies.

The smaller companies do not know what to do with it other than acquiring more fans. Even the bigger companies, have no clue about how to get more out of their fan base.

The key to social media is simple -be social. If you are not chatting with your fans, why are you getting them to like you in the first place?

And if you are selling them stuff, why should they like you or even bother about engaging you?

You have spend some effort to get them to know about you, and somehow they like what they saw, the critical part is to get them to trust you as a brand.

If they trust that you are the authority in the area which you represent, there won't be a need to sell to them, they will come to you asking what they can buy!

Below is an experiment which I have done about social media engagement. It is not about how many fans, it is about the quality of the post that you have.

For this experiment, I can reach close to 1000 people with a push of my mobile, without even spending anything on promotion and marketing.

So, why would you want to spend so much on advertising if you can do it simply by engaging your fans?