What is the difference between social media ads and old ways of advertising?

Gone are the days when you would only know products because you saw them on a billboard while driving, or because you had an ad on TV. Traditional advertising means the advertisements that one could see in print, radio, TV, etc. These advertisements usually catered to the masses and had their own pros and cons. Then came the internet boom and later digital marketing.

One core area of digital marketing was advertisements through social media. These apps allowed people to reach masses but with precision so that there was no spillover. Social media ads are adjusted by either the business owners or social media marketing professionals who have high skills in social media advertising. While your goals might be the same with both kinds of advertising, they are both different in many ways. Gradually a part of the marketing budget of many brands is shifting towards social media advertising as they are realising its benefit.

Effective Targeting

Is every person who watches the ad on TV your target audience? With all the efforts that you make on segmenting your customer base who can really buy from you, traditional advertising does not offer precise targeting. You might have an option to choose from little options like city, channel, location but your ad still will be shown to many people who have no link with your product/service.

Social media ads on the contrary focus on building ads that specifically cater to the audience you create. Instagram, for example, has multiple options of age, location, city, interests etc. and the ad will be shown to only those people. These platforms are special because they show ads to only those people who you choose to show.

No Spillover

Creating a target audience based on the goals of your business doing the ad on social media means that your ad will always be shown to your target group. This means that, unlike traditional advertising, your ad spend will not get wasted. While a billboard shows an ad to everyone which means the actual audience may or may not see, social media ads are fully controlled and thereby save the spillover in the advertising budget.

Make Changes As Per Need

In the old ways of advertising, once you finalize the ad, no changes can be made. Imagine having an ad in a magazine and then thinking of making changes because it gets no lead. Impossible, right? But when you put an ad on social media platforms and you find that they are not working you can change literally everything- from image to copy to the target audience. The amount of flexibility that social media advertising provides cannot be found in traditional advertising.

Goal Setting

With old ways of advertising, brands usually had one major goal. But as the costs involved were high, they used to merge two goals together in one ad. In social media advertising, you can form different ad sets according to different goals that range from just awareness to getting leads or website traffic. This way, you can find suitable goals and create advertisements that fit those goals.

Cost-Effective

One TV ad used to cost lakhs, one billboard ad ranged from thousand to lakhs. These were the costs that traditional advertising had. Social media advertisement when compared to old advertising is an economical option. You can set the amount that you wish to spend and can still reach a targeted audience. Due to its nature of target segmentation and no spillover, the amount spent does not get wasted and hence is in a way invested upon future customers.

Anyone Can Place Ads

Are you a small lip gloss business that wants to show ads to people who have a deep interest in their arena? With social media marketing, you can do it without spending thousands of rupees. It is different from old ways of advertising as it used to involve a lot more costs which abstained small owners from promoting their business. Social media advertising, like social media marketing, opened doors to all small and medium enterprises that wished to grow big but could not afford to spend lakhs on marketing. Now, you can market with a budget as low as INR100.

Traceability With Analytics

Could you ever find which person of what age, what gender, and from which location visited your billboard and checked it out? Old ways of advertising did have metrics but they never gave accurate results. With social media advertising, you get analytics that shows you everything from age to how many seconds the visitors stayed. This provides an accurate result as to how much money was spent on what and what was a cost per acquisition if any. With the use of these analytics, a business can grow rapidly as they know exactly what people are doing.

World Is Your Customer

Imagine sitting in Chennai and a customer ordering your products from Dehradun or maybe Sydney. More than a million people are connected via social media and when you target your ad to multiple audiences, chances are that you might reach an entirely different audience set. So why not begin with finding a new audience?

Social media advertising like old advertising focuses on the achievement of the goals of the business. But when you have a social media agency working for you, you can truly leverage all the above-mentioned points and gain multiple new followers and acquire them as customers. Why not use the new age, more reliable, accurate and precise model of advertising when it is ready to serve your business!