Every form of advertisement falls under two main types of advertisement. The two main types are online and offline advertising.
Offline advertising (also known as traditional advertising) is a type of advertising that depends on real-world channels in order to get your marketing messages to your targeted or selected audience. Offline advertising reaches out to your audience through television, radio, direct mail, print (newspapers or magazines), billboards, and marketing collateral (in the form of flyers and brochures).
Online advertising (also known as Internet advertising) is a type of advertising or marketing that makes use of the internet to promote services and products to audiences and platform users. Advertising strategies under online advertisement include Search Engine Marketing (SEM), display advertisement, mobile advertising, email marketing, and social media marketing.
When it comes to advertising your business (brand) you can now see that there are several ways to go about it and each method has its own advantages and disadvantages. Social media advertising is a type of advertisement under online advertisement. Does it really work? Is it something I should implement for my business? To find out, you’ll have to keep reading.
What is social media advertising?
Social media advertising is a term that is used to describe forms of digital marketing or online advertising that focuses on social networking services.
In social media advertising, the advertisements are distributed to the users (your audience) based on the information gotten from target group profiles. Social media advertising has to do with creating content on social media platforms, engaging social media followers on the platform, and running social media advertisements.
Check out the infographic below to compare and contrast different social media sites based on your needs!
Infographic created by Clover, a restaurant POS system company
Does social media advertisement work?
Social media advertisement—does it work? Yes, it does. Is social media advertising effective as well? Yes, it is. But you don’t have to take my words for it, take GWI’s facts. According to them, 49% of Internet users say that they are more likely to purchase products or services from brands they see advertised online. So imagine drawing the attention of 49% of prospective customers, traffic that can be converted into sales. That wouldn’t be so bad right?
That’s not all, recent studies have shown that social media adverts are effective in helping social media users discover new products. As of January 2022, the statistics indicate that about 4.55 billion people make use of social media platforms globally. In the United States alone, 84% of their total population (i.e., over 334 million people) are social media users.
Even with all these facts, some people are still of the opinion that social media advertising isn’t effective or it doesn’t work because they are unable to precisely target their audience via a personalized ad. Are they right? To some extent yes, because in order to make sales, you should be able to convert your prospects to customers and before that can happen, they’ll have to engage with your ad. So what do you do in such a scenario? It’s simple to personalize your ad to suit your ideal audience. Once you can personalize your ads, you’ll be able to reap the best benefits from using social media advertising.
