Businesses all over the world are learning exactly how lucrative social media has become for marketing purposes. It’s currently one of the most popular methods for bringing attention to brands in order to engage and retain customers. It’s come a long way since 2005 when Facebook offered the very first advertising option. Since then, the annual revenue for social media advertising has reached an astonishing $8.4 billion.
Such an incredible feat for the advertising industry couldn’t have been predicted, especially since when Facebook was founded, television advertisements were considered one of the best ways to share your brand and gain customers. However, things are entirely different now, since TV commercials are quickly turning into money wasters.
According to Neil Patel, widely recognized expert marketer and entrepreneur, TV won’t go away, but it’s not worth the money most entrepreneurs invest. “It’s easily the industry where the most money is burned each year,” he says. He attributes the lack of success to people ignoring commercials altogether because they’re more focused on other forms of online marketing.
Social media sites are somewhere that consumers invest a lot of time and energy, and that’s also the reason they are one of the most profitable forms of advertisements to date. Here are just a few of the reasons that social media holds a leading role in current marketing tactics.
infographic courtesy Salesforce.
1. It’s Cheaper
This is the most obvious reason. Businesses that invest their money in social media marketing rather than television find there’s a much higher ROI. The average time cost of a 30-second television commercial costs $342,000. Most small businesses don’t have that kind of money to spend on a single approach, and unless a commercial airs during primetime or during a popular program, not very many people will see it.Patel points out that the only commercials that truly see a positive ROI with excellent customer retention are the Super Bowl commercials. The only downside is that these cost $4.5 million for a 60-second time slot.
2. It’s Easier to Target Your Audience
The ultimate positive aspect of social media advertising is the ability to easily target your audience. Patel believes that the main reason TV commercials don’t work is because they’re unspecific. “TV commercials just hit everyone across the board,” he says. Because of that, businesses aren’t able to target directly to their customers, and conversions are low.Social media involves a number of tools that make targeting a customer simple. Using analytics and data collections, businesses can display ads to consumers based on their interests, browsing and shopping behaviors, email addresses, and similar audiences. It’s currently the most efficient form of target advertising.
3. Mobile Is Taking Over
Nowadays, the average consumer spends more time on their phone than they do in front of the television. Aside from texts and phone calls, most of the time spent hunched over the tiny screen is used to browse social media.Eighty percent of customers own a smartphone, and in 2014, we reached the point where more people used their phones to browse the internet than any other medium. There’s not much room for television when consumers are spending all their time looking at their phones.
4. Tracking Conversions Is Easy
Finally, data tracking has been made easier thanks to social media, meaning that you can find a measurable number of consumers influenced by your social ads when making a purchase. The ability to easily track performance of these ads means that companies can repeat successful strategies and tweak the ones that don’t work.Conversions that come with commercials aren’t so easy to measure. Your marketing department becomes smarter about their ad spending and overall strategies so that they can put their time, money, and effort into improving other marketing areas.
Like in all things business related, there comes a point when you must recognize which marketing strategies aren’t working and move on. If you’re currently putting excessive money and energy into television marketing, now is the time to make a change, and put your money where the ROI is high.
