Comparison Report: Social Media Marketing vs. Traditional Advertising

This report provides a comparative analysis of social media marketing versus traditional advertising, focusing on the advantages and disadvantages of each approach. The introduction sets the stage by discussing the characteristics of Generation Y and their impact on advertising strategies. The report then defines social media marketing and explains its importance in the digital age, including the use of data analytics for campaign optimization. The report also includes an infographic that illustrates the vast landscape of social media users. Traditional advertising is defined and its impact on Tier 2 & 3 markets is discussed. The pros of social media marketing, such as cost-effectiveness, data analysis capabilities, and the ability to gather user feedback, are explored in detail. The cons, including the potential for negative user engagement and the time-consuming nature of social media marketing, are also addressed. The conclusion emphasizes the importance of a social media monitoring team and the need for agencies to develop effective strategies, customer profiling, and data analysis to succeed in the digital marketing landscape. The report highlights the shift towards digital marketing and the importance of adapting strategies to the evolving trends in advertising.

Running head: Positives & Negatives of New technology
Table of Content:
Introduction................................................................................................................................2
Social Media Marketing.............................................................................................................3
Social Media Infographic...........................................................................................................3
Conventional Advertising..........................................................................................................4
Positives of Social media marketing..........................................................................................4
Cost effectiveness...................................................................................................................4
Data Analysis in tracking campaign & its success.................................................................5
Feedback & Trust...................................................................................................................5
Negatives of Social Media advertising......................................................................................5
It can create negative users/ Negative image.........................................................................5
Time consuming.....................................................................................................................5
Conclusion..................................................................................................................................6
Social media marketing V/S Traditional Advertising
Positives & Negatives of New Technology

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References:.................................................................................................................................7

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Introduction: Generation Y is the cluster of people who are born in the mid 80’s to the 90’s,
specifically 1982-2000 is the birth range for this group. Gen Y is also popularly called as
millenials or echo boomers succeeding Gen X. This generation is also called as the I’Gen or
Net generation. They are passionate about life, risk takers, try to get work-life balance, they
are world travellors, have a different and fresh perspective to life, believe in spontaneity,
keeping all these characterstics in mind, it becomes a great task for advertisers to market the
GEN Y(Nadeem, Andreini & Laukkanen, 2015)
After a boom in social media platforms, the size of advertisers doing marketing on the social
media platform grew from a handful to thousands, such is the impact of social media
advertising. However, it has been observed that not all brands are able to create a success
story on social media, it’s just a few which have been able to create success for their brands.
For others, it has not been so successful. In this report , we will learn some of the reasons
why brands are not able to create a success story on social media in comparison to traditional
advertising, and what could be the strategy to exploit the medium in the best possible manner,
also will discuss some of the pros and cons of this revolutionary technology.

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Social Media Marketing
It can be defined as use of social media platofrms to promote ones product or services. After
a revolution in digital literacy, social media tools have become very important to the
marketers. Any brand, today has its presence on social media, the reason of it can be straight
away attributed to the growing popularity of social media and also because of direct
conversation between the marketer and the consumer (Solomon &Tuten, 2014). Almost all
the social media platforms have their own data analytic tools which helps with the ad
campaign’s targeting, positioning, customer profiling, impression, etc and help the advertiser
in getting a good data analytics on his/ her campaign.The content which is produced on these
platforms is entirely user based in terms of comment, post shared, product/service review
&customer complaints, this in turn helps them to reach out to a larger audience (Ashley &
Tuten, 2015)
Social Media Infographic:
In a wolrd where the total population is 7.4 Billion with an urbanisation of 54 % which is
roughly more than 3.5 billion, out of the entire population, number of internet users being
3.73 billion (50% penetration) and 2.789 billion social media users, the landscape is huge for
marketers to promote and advertise on social media. Study shows that a person on an average
in a day interacts with his cell phone almost 20 times, with so much of mobility, marketers
are not shying away to catch the customers on the go. The conventional medium on the other
had has become obsolete in terms of the ways of advertising, and also as it requires a huge
cost. Marketers are slowly and steadily moving to more advanced way of advertising which is
on social media. It is very pertinent for the brands to have a presence of social media, citing
the figures to prove the claim, what is more important is not to throw away excess of
marketing at the consumer, because then they might shy away from interacting with the
brand. The content which is shared to engage with the consumers is most important along
with the timing, the right platform and right media buying, the content has to be targeted
according to the customer profiling, else a huge amount of money is wasted in the process
(Chaffey, 2016)

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Conventional Advertising:
This is a form of advertising that is prevelant since the advent of the word advertsing. It
involves all the trivial ways of marketing and promotion like TV ad, radio ads, billboard,
newspaper, magazine publication and so on. This form of advertising has the major impact on
the users owing to its phenomeneal audience and also keeping in view the penetration of this
form of advertising in Tier 2 & 3 markets. Although, this market is a bit expensive, but it sure
has the maximum penetration when it comes to targeting a wide range of audience (Percy &
Elliott, 2016).
Positives of Social media marketing:
Cost effectiveness: One thing which hurts the marketers the most is cost involvement in any
ad campaign. Traditional mode of advertising may be it print, TV, radio or billboard are very
costly, and on the other hand advertising on social media is much cheaper compared to
traditional advertsing. In traditional advertising, a lot of hidden costs are involved, which the
marketer is not able to asses in the beginning but have to take care of the same at a later
stage, with social media marketing there are no such hidden costs involved, a marketer can
simply use CPM metric (Cost per thousand impression) to promote his product or service on

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social media. At the same time, the user generated content or the brand generated content has
more possibility of getting viral due to the ease of social media and its features of like,
comment , share, tweet, rewet, etc. (Dinh, Zhang, Nguyen & Thai, 2014)
Data Analysis in tracking campaign & its success: In today’s world, when data is
everything, if the marketer has the tools to track the success of his campaign, nothing likes it.
In traditional advertising, it becomes really difficult to analyse which of the promotion
method is increasing the sales, in order to put more money on that particular medium, also the
audience targeting is an issue with traditional advertising. On the other hand, comes to the
rescue is social media, where the targeting can be extremely specific and one can totally
control the behaviour of the audience he wants to show his ad to, which would give his ad the
most targeted audience and traffic, such provision are not provided in traditional advertising
(Gandomi, Haider, 2015)
Feedback & Trust:
Social media marketing can be understood as a 2 way street, what the advertiser
communicates can lead to engagement and conversation with his audience. Hearing customer
is one of the biggest advantages that are provided by social media. Getting feedback on
product/service is what every brand needs to improve the product or quality of their service, it
is an absolutely a very big advantage at the hand of marekters to get a direct feedback from
his customers, while building a brand loyalty by addressing their concern and query. It gives
social media platform a necessary edge over traditional form, where the chances of 2 way
communication is the least (Habibi, Laroche & Richard, 2014)
Negatives of Social Media advertising:
It can create negative users/ Negative image:
Social media has given a lot of power in the hand of the user/audience, they are absolutely
free to write whatever comes in their hand, this can certainly be a disadvantage for the brands
promoting on social media. A user has his mind of his own, one bad review can take down
atleast 10 possible users and further worsen down with the spread of negative word of mouth,
and this is one of the biggest disadvantages of social media over traditional advertising
(Zimmerman, 2015)

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Time consuming:
Due to the effectiveness of social media marketing, and the highly targeted audience, at
times it becomes realy time consuming for ad promotion to reach the audience. The reason
can be owing to different strategy for each customer, customer profiling, and huge chunk of
data to analyse to yield the result, so basically it’s a blessing in disguise for traditional media,
which follows mass penetration rather than targeted audience. Timing is a definitive factor
when it comes to defining success of an ad campaign, with social media marketing the time
consumption is more in comparison to traditional advertising. (Fuchs, 2017)
Conclusion: There is no denying to the fact that digital marketing is the future of
advertising, coupled with augmented reality, virtual reality and big data analysis. Hence it
becomes a must and should for any brand which is promoting on social media to have a
social media monitoring team, which works just to communicate and listen to its customers.
In absence of social media monitoring , the brands reputation and the ad campaigns
performance can go hit the bottom of the ocean. Media agencies are not able to have a good
success with the brands simply because, they are not coming up with the right strategy, not
able to get the right customer profiling and targeting of the audience, inability to draw
conclusion or inferences from customer’s feedback and concerns are some of the reason of
failure of social media advertising over traditional (Stephan, 2016). The success on social
media platform thus solely lies in the hand of the agencies, until and unless they come up
with relevant strategies and metrics to define the campaign, analyse the big data and put it to
use, in no way they can compete with the traditional forms of advertising (Lamberton &
Stephen, 2016).

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References:
Ashley, C and Tuten, T 2015, Creative strategies in social media marketing: An exploratory
study of branded social content and consumer engagement, Psychology & Marketing,
32(1), pp.15-27.
Nadeem, W, Andreini, D, Salo, J & Laukkanen, T 2015, Engaging consumers online through
websites and social media: A gender study of Italian Generation Y clothing
consumers. International Journal of Information Management, 35(4), pp.432-442.
Tuten, T.L & Solomon, M.R 2014, Social media marketing, Sage.
Chaffey, D 2016, Global social media research summary 2016. Smart Insights, 8.
Percy, L. & Elliott, R.H 2016, Strategic advertising management, Oxford University Press.
Dinh, T.N, Zhang, H, Nguyen, D.T & Thai, M.T 2014, Cost-effective viral marketing for
time-critical campaigns in large-scale social networks. IEEE/ACM Transactions on
Networking, 22(6), pp.2001-2011.
Gandomi, A & Haider, M 2015, Beyond the hype: Big data concepts, methods, and analytics.
International Journal of Information Management, 35(2), pp.137-144.
Habibi, M.R, Laroche, M & Richard, M.O 2014, The roles of brand community and
community engagement in building brand trust on social media, Computers in
Human Behavior, 37, pp.152-161.
Zimmerman, J. & Ng, D 2015, Social media marketing all-in-one for dummies, John Wiley &
Sons.
Fuchs, C 2017, Social media: A critical introduction. Sage publication.
Lamberton, C & Stephen, A.T 2016, A thematic exploration of digital, social media, and
mobile marketing: research evolution from 2000 to 2015 and an agenda for future
inquiry, Journal of Marketing, 80(6), pp.146-172.
Stephen, A.T 2016, The role of digital and social media marketing in consumer behaviour,
Current Opinion in Psychology, 10, pp.17-21.

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