Marketing is a crucial part of setting up and running every business. For established organizations and large corporations, millions of dollars is spent on various marketing campaigns on traditional media and digital media. Its never a big problem to invest in marketing since they have built up capital over the years. However for small businesses, it remains a huge problem.

Startups and small businesses often struggle with capital and are always left with fewer resources to run the business effectively. As such, it is always a big challenge to invest or take advantage of all available channels to create awareness for the business and reach large audiences. Here is where social media marketing could come in. There are many proven benefits of social media marketing for a small business. Consider the following 3:

1. Cost Effective: When compared with Television or radio adverts, social media marketing seems to be the cheapest. There are very flexible plans to accomodate even the smallest budget. Time is usually not a big factor when running a social media campaign compared to traditional media. For example, the cost to run a 20 minute TV commercial will definitely dwarf what it will take to do the same ad on social media. With a very small budget, any entrepreneur or small business can easily reach out to potential customers through social media marketing

2. Large audience: You get to reach a larger Audience through social media marketing. Most people with internet facility spend most of their online time on social media platforms. Some people cannot skip checking their status updates and other messages on their favorite platforms. Just about everyone that access the internet has a social media platform. Nigeria for example has demographic of more than 22 millions Facebook accounts. Lets say out of that number, you could get 5 million that are active and can buy a product. Through sponsored campaigns, such a large audience could easily be reached on social media. The budget to reach 5 million persons through television or Radio will be astronomical. So when small businesses advertise on social media, they not only save cost but also reach a very large audience

3. Measurable: It is very easy to analyze how each marketing campaign performed through analytics tools for social media marketing. Such cannot easily be said of Radio or TV adverts. You can really say how many people were reached and what area of the population was covered. Once the TV commercial is run, the rest is left to fate. Ofcourse, anyone that was not tuned in will miss the campaign. Worse yet, there is no way to know who missed or got it. But with social media campaigns, you could see who was reached, when, and the areas of the population covered. Those that responded can be determined too. So with these, it is easy to measure success or failure of any social media marketing campaign.

There are several other benefits of social media marketing not covered here. For example, it is easier to target a demographic of interest when running social media campaigns than on traditional media. These and many other benefits are too good to miss. hence, every small business or start should seriously consider social media marketing for business publicity and to create awareness.