Social Media Advertising More Effective Than Traditional Advertising?
Nowadays, the word ‘social media’ is on everyone’s lips. However, what exactly is social media? How do we define it? Social media refers to platforms that allow people to communicate, interact and share information online through the use of internet or mobile phones.
Social media exist in various forms:
· Social networks (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter)
· Media sharing networks (Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest)
· Social blogging networks (Tumblr, WordPress, WiX)
· Discussion networks (Reddit, Quora, Digg)
· Review networks (TripAdvisor, Yelp, Glassdoor)
Leverages on social media platforms to advertise and gain exposure for businesses.
A conventional mode of marketing that helps to reach out to a semi-targeted audience with various offline advertising and promotional methods.
5 major categories of traditional advertising:
· Print (magazines, newspapers)
· Broadcast (TV, Radio)
· Direct Mail (Catalogs, Postcards)
· Telephone (Telemarketing, SMS marketing)
· Outdoor (Billboards, Fliers)
Social Media Marketing vs Traditional Marketing
Cost:
Advertising via traditional media is relatively costly as compared to social media. Businesses have to pay a sum of money to television channels, radio stations or even newspaper publishers to advertise their business. The average cost for a 30 second time-slot during a United States news broadcast is approximately $1200. Whereas for social media, businesses can post electronic direct mails (eDM), write ups or videos for free. Social media platforms also offer businesses the opportunity to distribute advertisements to a desired segment through paid advertisements. With that said, there is a hidden cost for social media advertising – Time. Time spent on doing up a post should be monitored to ensure efficiency.
Evaluation Metrics:
There is no clear method of evaluating the performance and success of traditional advertising. In contrast, social media advertising provides businesses with actual data-driven insights on how well their marketing efforts have panned out.
Cost per thousand impressions (CPM) is an advertising metric that measures how many advertising dollars one must spend to reach 1000 people. The goal of any advertising is to reach as many potential consumers as possible at the lowest cost.
Social media is the cheapest form of advertising available today. For less than $3, it can expose a business to over 1000 people.
Convenience:
Traditional advertising is more time consuming as businesses have to approach a publishing house, while social media advertising is much faster and efficient. Businesses can post on their feed on-the-go, any time they want. Alternatively, businesses can choose to pay the social media platform online to feature their advertisement.
Reach:
Traditional advertising is generally exposed to a very broad audience, which results in irrelevant advertisements being served and lower return on investment (ROI). Businesses whose target audience are elderly would stick to traditional advertising as the bulk of the older generation are not familiar with internet; social media. On the other hand, social media marketing allows advertisers to accurately target relevant audiences, resulting in the right message being delivered to the right person at the right stage in the sales funnel. Also, one point to note is that traditional advertisement is a one-off thing. Unlike traditional advertising, social media advertising is an on-going thing that continually yields results. For instance, if a company pays for 10 days’ worth of newspaper advertisement, after the 10 days, the advertisement no longer exists. However, a company just have to post an advertisement on their social media feed and users of that social media can still view the post long after the company posted it.
Engagement:
Businesses and consumers are unable to directly interact via traditional advertising. As for social media advertising, it enables both businesses and consumers to directly interact with each other through comments, conversations on threads and shares. This type of engagement not only helps businesses to create buzz, but also gain insights into what they are doing right and what they can improve on.
To summarize, the effectiveness of social media advertising far exceeds that of traditional advertising in terms of cost, method of evaluation, convenience, reach and engagement. That being said, I personally feel that businesses should not be closed off to the idea of traditional advertising. Businesses could explore having both traditional and social media advertising to target the different consumers.
Cheers,
Dayna.T
