A question every social media marketing agency would have heard often would be “Is social media marketing better than traditional marketing?”. Although the winner of this question is becoming clearly evident in recent times, it still surprises us when a business is doubtful if social media marketing lives up to the hype. To be fair, traditional marketing still does have its uses and if you have the budget for traditional marketing as well as social media marketing, then we are with you! By using both you could reach a wider audience and spread your message much faster than using just social media channels. But if you were to pick just 1 out of the 2, then it would have to be social media marketing, and here’s why;
1. Easily Measurable
Every aspect of your social media marketing could be measured, from reach, impressions, shares, clicks, messages, and overall engagement. This lets you know how successful your marketing efforts are and if you need to optimize your presence to make it more effective.
In social media advertising metrics are even more detailed. Depending on the campaign objective you select you could arrange the metrics that best validate the success of your social media campaign. If brand awareness is the goal but you also want to make sure people remember your ad, you could optimize it for ‘Ad Recall Lift’ on Meta Ads Manager and it will measure how memorable your ad is to the audience. Similarly, a lead-generation campaign could be measured by how many people have filled out the form. This is heightened with tools such as the Facebook Pixel Code that you place on your website, which helps enhance the metrics from your Facebook ads by helping to create new targeted audiences and remarket to people who have already visited your website but not taken any action.
2. Cost-Effective
A small business could run an effective social media campaign continuously for months and it would still be more cost-effective than using traditional advertising methods like TV. More often than not, if you run a social media campaign with the same budget as a traditional advertising campaign you are bound to get higher measurable results.
3. A More Targetted Audience
When you place your bets in traditional advertising forms like TV, radio, and billboards your targeting is not going to be precise. In reality, you are casting a wide net and hoping that your target audience is mixed in there and they are listening or watching. This is not the case with social media marketing, when you choose the channels and start running your ads you can choose from a range of demographic to behavioural segments of your targeted audience.
Even without running paid ads, you could still target your audiences organically and more effectively with a proper social media marketing strategy by using the right visuals, captions, partners and engagement management plan.
4. Build Better Relationships
Social media marketing allows you to build better relationships with your audience. Mostly because you get feedback in real-time from the audience, allowing you to respond or tweak your marketing or offering to suit their needs. The conversation you have with your audience whether it be responding to a comment on one of your posts, a direct message, or a review brings you that much closer to building relationships that last. With traditional advertising the communication is strictly one-way, while there are ways to get feedback, they usually tend to take longer and are more impersonal.
For instance, if you are running a paid social media campaign on Facebook and you start seeing negative comments from your audience on the visual or the ad copy, you could pause it, edit it and place it again. Could you imagine doing this for a television ad?
5. Social Media Helps Level The Playing Field
The best thing about social media marketing is that it levels the playing field. Whether it is a small business or a large conglomerate you are all treated equally on social media platforms. While it could be argued that bigger companies could invest more in social media ads than smaller firms, in reality, social media has a lot
to do with creativity. There have been instances where smaller brands have competed with larger brands and succeeded with a creative social media marketing strategy. If we remove the element of social media advertising and focus only on social media marketing, which is mostly organic then creativity, consistency, and discipline are what will reign supreme.
6. Social Media Marketing is 24/7
Once your slot for a radio, TV, or billboard ad runs out it will no longer be visible to your audience. The content you place on your social media platforms on the other hand is forever! A potential client could stumble across your profile and its content at 3 am on a Tuesday, 2 years from now, or even10 years from now and it would still be there. This is a definitive advantage over traditional marketing methods as these have a certain time limit. Even the print ads in newspapers and magazines are no longer visible once the consumer disposes of them.
Although the benefits are listed, dethroning traditional marketing will not be easy unless you have a clear social media marketing strategy. If you want to enlist the assistance of a digital marketing agency that has a proven record in creative social media marketing strategies then get in touch with us and we would love to assist you!
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