Deciding on the best marketing strategy for your business takes a lot of work. You have to consider the message, the creative, and the medium all the while ensuring that it will be well received by customers, is within budget, and will generate a strong ROI. To help relieve some of the pressure of making all these decisions, we’ve broken down some of the pros and cons of social vs. traditional advertising to assist you in deciding which medium to use.
Interactive
One of the great things with social media advertising is the quick jump between a potential customer viewing your ad and visiting your website. With a few clicks of a mouse, a potential customer can see your ad, google your company, explore your website and make a purchase/inquiry. This journey, however, is not so seamless with traditional marketing. If a customer sees something in a magazine while they’re at the doctor’s office, there’s going to be a lag between seeing your ad and having a chance to google your company. With the craziness of daily life, it becomes more likely that they may forget the company name or forget the ad altogether and a potential lead is lost.
Cost-Effectiveness
If you have a tight budget, social advertising is the best way to get the biggest bang for your buck. In a recent study, social media emerged as the cheapest advertising method for CPM. CPM stands for cost per thousand impressions, which simply put is a metric that measures the dollar amount needed to reach 1000 people with an advertisement. Traditional advertising like magazines and newspapers have an average CPM of $16, whereas social media was less than $3. If your goal is reaching the most amount of people as cheaply as possible, social media is the way to go.
Customizable
As platforms like Google, Facebook, and Instagram become more and more geared towards advertisers, their capabilities for customization have developed. You can now place an ad on one of these platforms and dictate the location, age, gender, interests, professions, etc. of the audience whom you want your ad to reach. If you have a very specific customer in mind, this is a great way to ensure all your budget is being used to target them. This is great for maximizing your advertising ROI and generating leads. If you’re hoping to reach a broader audience, social media platforms can accommodate but, traditional advertising can be equally effective.
Best Fit
At the end of the day, the most important consideration for your advertising strategy is understanding who your customers are. If your customers are 55-year-old commuters who drive down the DVP every day to get into Toronto and don’t use social media, advertising on Facebook may not be your best bet. Instead, traditional advertising like billboards would allow these commuters to interact with your brand daily. On the other hand, if your targeting 18-22 years old, Instagram is likely the way to go. Advertising is only effective if your target audience is viewing and interacting with your ad. Therefore, before deciding how to allocate your marketing budget, take some time to break down your ideal customer persona. Understand their behaviours and preferred way to interact with advertisements to create the best strategy for your company.
Interested in how you can improve your social advertising strategies? We’d love to help! Feel free to reach out to info@sidepart.com!
