Social Media Marketing VS Traditional Marketing

I came across this article on why businesses especially SMEs should invest time doing online marketing. A very good insights of social media marketing. As all of us are aware, the way of doing marketing is definately changing towards the betterment of business owners. 

Over the past years, marketing has changed from outbound to inbound, from push to pull, from monologue to dialogue. A Report: Trust in Advertising”(Oct 2007) by Nielsen reveals a dramatic shift in consumer behavior. Some interesting findings from this report are:

No To Traditional Media	Yes To Social Media
18% of TV adv generates positive ROI	34% post opinions on social media
90% of people skip TV ads	36% think more positively about companies that have a social media presence
14% of people trusts advertisements
78% trust other consumers’ recommendations	32% trust other social media users’ opinions

Social Media is fast gaining popularity and is many ways are more influential than traditional media. The role of offline traditional media such as newspaper, TV, radio, SMS broadcast and business networking is rapidly replaced by online social media equivalents such as Blogs, YouTube, Podcasts, Twitter and Facebook.

With internet, everyone can now start their own online newspaper (Blog), TV channels, (YouTube),radio stations (Podcast), SMS broadcasting (Twitter) and business networking group (Facebook), sharing  whatever content they like, to their own target market!

The low cost, wide reach, ease –of-use- and speed of implementation of these social media platforms level is the playing field for SMEs to reach huge numbers of prospects effectively, something that usually would be prohibitively costly for many SMEs to do using traditional media.

It is not uncommon to spend RM4,000 for a 3- column newspaper advertisement, only to get less than 20 inquiries, That’s a cost per inquiry of RM200. Neither is the RM20,000 per month billboard along North-South highway nor the RM250,000 TV advertisement is going to yield a lower cost per inquiry.

The truth of the matter is, with social media, consumers are empowered with the ability to choose what to read, what to watch, what to listen to and who to communicate with. We can see that consumers are saying No to interruptive, one directional push marketing and saying YES to permission-based, bi-directional pull marketing. 

Modern consumers like to research information themselves using search engines and then make buying decision based on either opinion they hear from social media sites or friends’ referral. Whichever case, social media is not a fad, rather it’s a fundamental shift in the way we communicate.

Social media is about Content, Conversation and Community. You can get the word out at faster speeds, at a lower cost than offline traditional media. 

It’s really about leveraging on all those online social media platforms to help spread about your business by Sharing Content, engaging in Conversation and building Communities!