Do You Think Social Media Giants Have High Marketing Costs? Niche Platforms Such As Reddit Are Also Very Popular!

During the epidemic, the development of offline stores was restricted and e-commerce boomed. Many sellers and brands rushed to social media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram to promote their products in order to attract traffic to their stores.

According to eMarketer, spending on digital advertising is expected to grow 13% in 2021 and 33% in 2023. The largest digital advertising expenditure comes from the retail industry, accounting for 21.9%, followed by automobiles (12.3%), financial services (12.1%), telecommunications (10.4%) and consumer goods industries (8.6%).

However, as the marketing track becomes more and more crowded, it is unknowingly more difficult for sellers to stand out among the huge number of "advertisers", so the cost of acquiring an audience of the same size has also increased.

And according to Shopify's "The Future of E-Commerce 2021" report, although the user base of social media platforms such as Facebook is still large, the decline in general social trust has still had a huge negative impact on brands.

So is there any way to save costs and achieve twice the result with half the effort?

Relatively niche social media platforms may be a good choice. Moreover, successful brands themselves require comprehensive and multi-channel marketing methods, including emerging channels such as Snapchat, Pinterest, TikTok, and mature channels such as Google, YouTube, and Facebook, as well as emails, SMS, and Messenger that can help activate old customers.

In addition to the above-mentioned marketing channels that everyone is familiar with, the Forbes website also lists some marketing channels that are easily overlooked:

Twitch, a live streaming platform for gamers;

Hulu, a video streaming website that can be used as an alternative to YouTube, and the platform’s advertising fees are still decreasing;

The news aggregation website Reddit gained many new users after the GameStop stock mania, and most of its 48 million users are young people;

The music service platform Spotify has extremely high social media exposure, but the number of Pandora users has also reached 257 million;

The question-and-answer website Quora has 300 million users. When consumers go online to seek answers, the platform’s discussion results are often ranked first among all search results;

Chat app Discord has more than 250 million users.

The above-mentioned smaller but more effective advertising channels can help small businesses in the growth stage, especially DTC brands, to liberate themselves from high marketing expenses, thereby planning fund allocation more rationally and achieving faster performance growth.

Therefore, before placing advertisements, sellers may wish to learn more about various social media channels, enter the market cautiously, and at the same time formulate targeted marketing strategies and strive to spend their money wisely, so that they can ultimately obtain twice the result with half the effort!