The best part about social media websites? They’re free. It costs nothing to post about your product on your brand’s Facebook and Twitter pages or announce a new service on your LinkedIn. If you do decide to dive into the world of paid social, the cost is marginal compared to the amount of money companies pay to produce TV ads or print campaigns. For local television stations, advertisers can expect to pay $1500 for a 30-second commercial. If they want the 30-second spot to broadcasted nationally, that figure jumps to $123,000, and that is just on an average day!
During a high-traffic TV time such as Super Bowl 2018, the price to run a 30-second ad was a staggering $5 million dollars.
Those prices have nearly doubled over the past decade! Do you want to know how much it would be to run a Facebook ad during the Super Bowl? The same price as any other Sunday – $1-$5 per click.
Via Seriously Simple Marketing
It’s Not Just About LinkedIn: Understanding B2B Social Media Marketing
It’s Quick!
It only takes a few minutes to craft a tweet, a few hours to design the perfect graphic to go along with it and a mere second to launch it.
A social media expert can easily create an ad on social media for a business in an hour or less. Facebook also allows users to change the ad once it’s published. If it’s not working, the strategy can be altered at the drop of a hat. On the other hand, a TV advertisement takes weeks for multiple people to produce and can’t be changed once aired. In one of my latest posts titled How to Create a Social Media Marketing Strategy, I went into depth on the basics of starting a social media strategy for your brand or business if you would like to understand the nuts and bolts of a social media campaign.
It’s Easy to Target Your Audience
The average billboard in Detroit will set a business back $1,500-$5000 per month. Not only is this an astronomical amount compared to a small social media budget, but your audience will be everyone that drives by – and they simply may not be interested. Facebook advertisers can essentially target whoever they want.
Here are a few demographics you can target through a Facebook ad that you probably didn’t know about:
– By generation: Yep, you can target Baby Boomers, Generation X or Millennials
– People with an upcoming anniversary: This is helpful for event planners and restaurants. In addition, you can also target friends of people with an upcoming anniversary.
– Small business owners: Banks, freelancing platforms and marketing agencies benefit from this!
– Household members: Home appliance suppliers can target family-based households
Social Media Marketing…It Sticks Around
How many flyers or pamphlets have you thrown out in your lifetime? Probably too many to count. Once it’s in the trash there is no getting it back. However, what happens on the Internet stays on the Internet forever. Customers can access the information whenever they want. It also tells the full story of a brand, not just a quick snapshot. It lets customers browse full products with just a click.
It Builds Relationships
Social media allows for two-way communication, whereas traditional media is a one-way communication.
Social media allows you to collect instant customer feedback and interact with them. You can directly and immediately answer a prospective customer’s question about a product. Advertisers still rely on limited focus groups to assess customers’ opinions of an ad campaign.
Social media also allows you to contact targets, grow relationships with them, send them relevant information through tweets, blog posts and foster online discussions in LinkedIn groups. These are simply not possible through traditional advertising.
It’s Easy to Measure
It’s difficult to measure the success of a traditional advertising campaign. Many factors go into a company’s success, and you can’t necessarily attribute increased sales to an advertising campaign. Unless you stand in front of it every day, you can’t count the number of people who walk past your billboard. You can, however, measure the exact impact a social campaign has on a company’s success. Every Internet user that interacts with your brand online leaves a trail.
We have a feeling that one day marketers will stop asking if they need to throw resources into a social media campaign. Instead, they’ll be asking if they need to run a TV ad.
