The rise of the internet has completely changed the way most companies do business. In the old days, getting noticed was all about the right billboard or television commercial, which made marketing success inaccessible for many small businesses.
Today, a small company can have the same success as a huge corporation with the right viral video or online marketing campaign.
While there’s a lot of emphases placed on social media marketing nowadays, traditional marketing hasn’t completely fallen by the wayside.
In fact, the overall best technique for any business is to use an online marketing campaign in conjunction with a digital one.
To help you understand how these two strategies (Social Media Marketing vs Traditional Marketing) compare and contrast, here are some of the key differences between social media marketing and its traditional counterpart.
Social Media Marketing Has More Components
When planning a traditional marketing campaign, business owners will typically focus all of their energy on one channel. For example, if they’re planning a booth at an event, they will focus all of their energy into that booth and not much else.
Social media marketing campaigns have a lot of components. That’s because there are so many platforms that entrepreneurs need to take advantage of.
For example, if you’re planning a campaign for the availability of a title loan online, you wouldn’t just focus on announcing this on your Facebook page.
Rather, you need to optimize the campaign for the Facebook audience, but also for the Twitter audience, the Instagram audience, and perhaps even the YouTube audience.
These various approaches to the myriad of social media platforms need to have the same cohesive theme but are tailored to fit the unique audiences of these different social media services.
To put it simply, social media marketing can be more a pain in the you-know-what than a traditional marketing campaign.
However, that shouldn’t discourage you. When executed correctly, a cross-platform social media campaign can truly take even a tiny business to the next level.
It just requires a lot of internet savvy and dedication to perfection your marketing efforts.
Traditional Marketing Campaigns Have A Beginning and End
In the world of traditional marketing, a campaign will typically have a beginning and an end. The beginning is the planning, the middle is the execution and the end is when the marketing effort has run its course and the company moves on to the next campaign.
Social media campaigns don’t have beginnings and ends. Rather, they’re all middle, indefinitely. A social media ad isn’t like traditional Ads.
A billboard eventually comes down when the rental contract is up, while a YouTube video or a Facebook post is forever.
In some ways, this makes social media marketing slightly preferable to traditional marketing. After all, a marketing video can take months to produce, so there’s something satisfying about knowing it will be viewable forever.
However, this also means that there’s more pressure on companies to do good work.
For example, look at the controversial Kendall Jenner commercial produced by Pepsi. In the old days, it would have been pulled from television and soon forgotten.
Thanks to the internet, however, it will be available for viewing for the rest of the time. It’s had a worse impact on the company than it would have had decades ago.
Both Are Competitive
There’s this pervasive notion amongst marketers that the rise of social media has made their job more difficult.
Since the social media marketing landscape is so competitive. This isn’t quite accurate, however.
Marketing has always been a fiercely competitive industry with various brands all gunning to be noticed in the crowd.
Social media marketing, at the end of the day, isn’t all that different from traditional marketing.
Both ultimately boil down to appealing to your target demographic. And being clever and compelling enough to stand out from the crowd.
The same basic concepts ultimately apply to both industries, with slight variances between the two.
Conclusion –
Hope you find this social media marketing vs traditional marketing article useful. If you want to add any point or information do let me know in the comment section.
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