Social Media marketing has taken over a huge chunk of how businesses promote and advertise their products or services. So, what does traditional marketing even mean? Traditional marketing can consist of print advertisements including newsletters and billboards, also television promotion and even radio. It is much broader and can incorporate many different forms of marketing and advertising. Social media marketing is much more specific. Marketing is effective no matter what way you use it if you are using it wisely and staying in trend with the industry.
Social media has increasingly become a huge part of our everyday lives personally and professionally. Social media has various benefits to each business. The good thing about social media is that it allows you to truly build and develop your brand image. You can change your tone, your theme, any time you want.
Advantages of Social Media marketing
It is inexpensive. If you are aware of Facebook or Instagram, these social media platforms usually charge such a small amount to reach just a minimum of 1000 people. That is way more affordable than paying for an ad to play on television, the radio and even billboards. Not saying that these are not effective at all, just that they cost more to have on there rather than social media where you can pay a lot less and still reach a significant amount of your audience. The best part is it is free to create your accounts.
You can interact with your audience. Unlike billboards and television, you can comment, reply, have conversations with your audience and engage. Some brands depend on that type of interaction to build their business.
It is an easy market to analyze. Although social media is always changing, it is easy to keep track of trends within it and there are programs that allow you to better measure the success rates of your campaigns.
Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other large social platforms have very large audiences. Like mentioned above, it is so widely used. You can reach many people all over the world.
The Disadvantages
The biggest disadvantage to social media is the amount of time it takes to effectively impact your business using it. It is a very effective way of reaching your audience, but it is very time consuming and requires a lot of planning and strategizing. Traditional marketing isn’t as time consuming; the results are typically short but provide an appealing visual aspect.
Social Media is an ever-changing industry. It can be difficult to keep up. When you think you’ve gotten something all figured out, something new pops up. There are always new features coming out and sometimes social platforms will decline at some points and you must move on to another. The good thing about traditional marketing is that hardly anything changes in the industry. A few updates here and there but the marketing somewhat stays the same in newspapers, magazines, radio and TV. Magazines and newspapers are slowly transitioning to also having an online presence rather than a physical publication copy but there aren’t any huge changing trends in traditional marketing.
Social Media is dominated by millennials and younger generations. It is always changing because the younger consumer is likely to change their interests every day. How much time are you truly spending doing the research to stay updated with trends? Social Media LV dedicates the time to not only researching the market but understanding all the platforms and how they can benefit your business.
