Why Companies are Putting Their Marketing Budgets into Social Media

Remember when traditional marketing was the only way to promote your business? Business owners would buy newspaper ads, billboards, bus stop ads, and drop flyers at every doorstep. Snail-mail promotional flyers were considered high-tech. While some might sigh, longing for the good ole’ days, others are flourishing in the new age of marketing. Today, we have amazing online tools, like social media, to promote our businesses to the exact people we want to. Here are some of the other reasons why brands keep moving their marketing budgets out of traditional marketing and into social media. 

Targeting to the Extreme

How do you target with a bus stop ad? If your target customer is middle-aged men, how can you ensure that demographic sees it the most? You can’t. Targeting in traditional marketing only works if you’re targeting a specific neighbourhood or city. Any further specifications aren’t possible.

Social media and digital marketing have changed the targeting game. You can set the parameters of your Facebook ad to only show up on the feeds of men of a certain age with a certain profession and certain income level. You can even set your ad to target people with specific interests or buying histories. That’s incredible for your return on investment. The money you spend on social ads gets utilized as efficiently as possible.

Analytics are Everything

When you buy a paper ad in a magazine, how can you tell how many people read it? Can you calculate how long most people stayed looking at the ad before flipping the page? No! With social media ads, you can determine both of those metrics. You can count how many people saw your ad, clicked it, shared it, or engaged with it. Then, you can see how many of the people that clicked your ad purchased your goods or services. This is crucial for knowing which ads work for your audience and which get less engagement.  

Reporting for Future Planning

Since your analytics are constantly and automatically being tracked, you can create reports weekly, monthly, and yearly. These reports are amazing for showing which marketing campaigns have been successful and why. You can see the promising trends in your content. For example, you might notice in your monthly report that your Instagram posts that included a person’s face in the image got higher engagement. Or, that Facebook posts that were written in the first person received more comments. By reviewing this month’s social media report, you can plan an even more successful content calendar for next month.

Sure, you can create reports for your traditional marketing campaigns. Before the internet, brands would pump out paper ads for a month and then hopefully see an increase in sales. But, there was no feedback on which specific ads caused the influx or why. Traditional marketing reports are far broader than social reports based on analytics.

It’s no surprise that more businesses are transferring their marketing budgets from traditional marketing to social media marketing. If you’re curious about making the change, contact us.