Photo by luis.martinez

A majority of businesses today still market themselves by placing ads in the paper, in magazines, or television commercials and other TV spots. If you can get yourself on Oprah, then by all means go for it, but we all know that these days newspaper readership is down tremendously, and even though a publication might have a huge circulation, a half- or quarter-page ad in print can easily get lost without readers ever noticing it.

You need to direct your marketing dollars into things that get directly to your target market. For some markets, that might mean you actually don’t want to get too involved online, so I’m not going to try to sell you something you don’t need. You need to really narrow down your niche and compare it to the demographics of the media channel you’re considering advertising in. But the web has become home to millions and millions of consumers, of nearly every demographic, and when used properly, social media can be a fantastic way to connect with consumers who feel suffocated by advertising in this bad economy.

If you think social media might be right for you, and you haven’t put the time and energy into learning to properly build relationships there yet, here are four good reasons why you should:

1. Track your ROI

With a proper web storefront, an inexpensive company blog , or even participating on social media sites like Twitter and Facebook, you can easily track and analyze your efforts. You can see precisely where your traffic comes from, who is talking about you and your organization, you can review how well your individual marketing campaigns perform, and how much revenue your company can produce from which tactics. Compared to traditional press like TV and magazines, you have much more powerful tools at your fingertips to measure the return on your time and money investment. Surprisingly enough, perhaps the most effective way to analyze how well your traditional media marketing works is actually to run a print-to-web campaign !

2. Get Personal

Even more practically, the game-changer about the social web is that it makes your marketing revolve more around relationship-building, which can help your business succeed in an economy where consumers are increasingly ad-blind. When you put the right people at the helm as representatives of your organization—the ones who are passionate about it—they can get comfortable showing people their personal side, instead of just a cold, sanitized company brochure. Social media, even when used to promote your business, is a personal world—others want to learn more about you—so tell them about your interests outside of work, share the articles and trends that interest you, talk about the events you go to, and let people see you as a real person. When visitors feel they’ve established a more personal connection, you’ll build trust and enjoy more loyalty from your customers.

3. Save Tons of Time

The cool thing about all this social media relationship-building is that the tools will allow you to form 1-on-1 relationships with thousands of people at the same time, in much the same way that email marketing has been used by a successful few in the last decade. Networks like Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook allow you to send a message to 2000 people at once, and build individual relationships with members of a large community. A blog will help you broadcast important news and updates that thousands of people around the world will see too, saving you a tremendous amount of time. Just imagine how long it would take networking at conferences to pass out business cards and tell 2000 people about what you do! And because of the nature of search and the way the social web works , a majority of the people who your message reaches will be the people who are actually interested in what you have to say, rather than other businesspeople who are only listening to be polite at your networking events.

4. Build your Tribe

The most important benefit of going social is that you’ll build a community of followers and help foster connections between members of your community. This is the new power of social media that wasn’t available through traditional media. Whereas you used to have to have a real-life event like a conference or a workshop to get your tribe together in one place, on the social web, others will help share your message and talk to each other through blog comments, forums, webinars, Twitter, Facebook groups, and more. In addition to the products and services you provide, this is a tremendous value you can offer to the people who look to you as an authority.

Are you ready to get started?

Learn about the three different kinds of social media , and some initial steps to take for successful social media networking .

Cody is a nomadic entrepreneur & lifestyle designer who helps social changemakers & other remarkable people spread their message on the web.

Tags: Advertising, budget, community, followers, Marketing, marketing campaigns, personal connection, print, relationship building, ROI, social networking, target market, traditional media