Ditch The Billboard: Why Social Media Advertising Is More Effective

Unlock the power of social media advertising to reach your target audience and boost brand visibility with our expert tips and strategies.

If you’re still relying exclusively on traditional advertising to market your company’s products and services, you’re missing out on something big. Social media marketing presents a huge opportunity to reach more consumers at a lower cost. Not only will you reach more consumers, but you can also target the right ones.

We’re passionate about helping local businesses thrive by ensuring their message reaches the right audience. Moving your advertising away from traditional methods to social media can generate a better return on investment. That’s not to say traditional advertising isn’t effective but social media advertising can lead to more customers, more sales, and more profit.

Better Opportunities To Nurture Leads

Social media advertising is a much more effective way to nurture leads and transform prospective customers into loyal ones. This is because social media allows you to engage and interact with consumers, unlike any other advertising platform. By establishing a two-way relationship between your company and a consumer, you’re establishing trust, which can present lucrative opportunities.

Social media marketing also allows you to establish your company as an industry thought leader. Rather than just publishing ads for your products and services. Advertising-free material like blogs, whitepapers, and E-Books provides people with valuable information and establishes a relationship with your brand. Using an inbound marketing approach like this is beneficial to your business because you can generate interest among consumers and then sell them why they should do business with your company.

This is something you can’t do with traditional media. If I see a billboard or commercial for a product I like, I must go to that store to purchase it. With social media advertising, I can click on it as soon as I see an ad to learn more.

This ability is a great way to help nurture leads and move them through your sales funnel.

Save Money Online

Not only does social media present better opportunities to nurture leads, but it’s also way cheaper. Assuming that with traditional and social media, there are additional costs and time spent to create, develop, and relatively similar print materials. Let’s look at what the cost to reach people is.

According to LinkedIn, you will spend about $57 on direct mail advertising to reach 1000 people. On social media, you can spend under $3 to reach that same audience.

You might be wondering how the prices can vary so much. What it comes down to is it’s just faster and more convenient to advertise online. You can have your ad broadcasted to people in just a few clicks. With more traditional print methods like newspapers, they have to be physically delivered to the consumer, which takes time and costs for people to do. With television and radio, there are also spikes when more consumers are engaged, so these companies inflate their prices.

Even if your social media advertising only brings in the same sales as your traditional methods, you’ll still be saving money compared to what that billboard ad would have cost you.

Media Consumption

It should come as no surprise, but more and more people are using technology than ever before. Mobile usage has skyrocketed and changed the digital landscape completely. PAYFORT, a company that looks at online usage, has said that the average consumer spends around 6 hours online daily. Of those 6 hours, mobile usage represents 43% of that. Those numbers also represent a wide age range of consumers. Not surprisingly, their data saw an increase in consumption time as age decreased. If the key demographic of your business is 16-24, for example, you need to be online.

When you compare those numbers to television consumption, you should be convinced for sure. According to the same study by PAYFORT, average television consumption is around 2 hours a day. That makes sense, though, as streaming services like Netflix have increased in popularity, and more people choose to watch their favourite television shows online.

Even though the data has shown that people are engaged more with the internet than television, you might be wondering where they spend their time. Spoiler Alert! It’s on social media. Research has shown that as social media networks continue to grow, social media usage accounts for 1 out of every 3 minutes spent online. Think about that. If the average consumer spends 6 hours online daily, 2 of those are on social media. That’s a huge marketing and advertising opportunity for brands.

Reach The Right Consumers

One of the biggest differences between social media and traditional advertising is the audience. With traditional media like a bus ad or a television commercial, you don’t know who exactly is seeing your ad. A media sales rep will tell you that your ad will be viewed by 20,000+ people daily, but that doesn’t mean anything. If you sell snowboards and 80% of the people that see your ad don’t snowboard, you’re wasting your money.

With social media advertising, you can target the ideal consumer for your business. Advertising on Facebook is one of the most effective ways to ensure your target audience sees your ad. Facebook ads allow you to filter your audience around location, age, gender, and language. You can filter it down to relationship status and interests to get even more specific. If your ideal customer is a female in Kingston, aged 16-30, interested in snowboarding, Facebook ads can target them.

It’s not just Facebook; social media sites like Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and more offer advertising opportunities to target a specific type of consumer. Within each channel are different kinds of ads for you to publish.

Receive Measurable Results

One of the best parts of social media advertising is receiving measurable results. This means you can see data in real time and take immediate action, discover trends, and realign campaigns if you have to.

If you use traditional advertising that doesn’t produce many leads, you’re left wondering why it didn’t work. The analytics and data you get from social media ads can show why your ad wasn’t effective. Maybe the ad generated a lot of clicks, but people left soon after they got to a landing page. This tells you there was something on the page that didn’t work well.

This kind of insight and data just can’t be determined through traditional ads (unless you want to stop everyone that drives by your billboard and ask them to complete a survey).

Data is one of the most important resources a marketer can have. It’s essentially a report card for your ad. If something isn’t working, the analytics and insights you can get from your social media ads allow you to readjust campaigns and turn a failed ad into a success.

Want To Learn More about Social Media Advertising?

If you’re interested in learning more about social media advertising, we’re happy to help you get started. Together our team can help you develop an effective social media strategy and advertising material to help your business thrive. Our lines of communication are always open. Feel free to contact us at any time, we are more than happy to help you grow.