Social Promotions vs. Magazine Ads

Posted by Lisa Manfield

This is the second post in a series that uses social promotions as a benchmark against which we compare more traditional methods of achieving traffic, conversion and sales goals. Read the first post: Putting the Muscle in Your Marketing Strategies - Display Ads vs. Social Promotions.

Before allocating your marketing budget you’ll want to evaluate the full spectrum of options at your disposal to maximize your return on investment. As we wrote in the first post in this series, marketers have a lot of options to choose from, including SEO, paid advertising, content marketing and social promotions.

But what if you’re looking at the more traditional option of magazine advertising? In this post, we’ll take a look at the pros and cons of paid print ads as compared to social promotions.

Pros of Magazine Advertising

Magazine advertising

Despite the decline in the magazine publishing sector due to decreases in advertising revenue, magazines remain a trusted way to reach niche audiences. The magazines that have been the most successful in face of the competition from digital properties have been those with targeted audiences, high production values and quality content. And all of these factors are valuable to marketers when looking to promote their brand.

According to Pew Media’s The State of the News Media 2013 report, consumer magazine subscription sales were up very slightly in 2012, while single copy sales were down, indicating growth among loyal readers of magazines. And this is good news for marketers looking to get their ads into the hands of engaged audiences. Placing an ad in a respected and credible publication allows advertisers to benefit from the magazine’s trustworthiness. And quality content and high production values can help to elevate the ads to valuable content in their own right.

Cons of Magazine Advertising

The difficulty with magazine ads, however, is two-fold. First, they’re cost-prohibitive for almost every company except large, national brands. Digital options cost a fraction of what you’ll pay for print, and their ROI can be measured directly. And there’s the kicker: the effectiveness of magazine ads simply cannot be easily measured.

Magazines use circulation and pass-along metrics to demonstrate value to advertisers. For example, a magazine with a distribution of 50,000 copies may have a pass-along rate of 2.4 people per copy, which more than doubles its reach.

But pass-along numbers can only be measured by asking readers about their habits. Similarly, you can ask consumers whether they recall seeing your ads, and whether seeing your ads influenced their purchase behaviour, but relying on consumer recall is tenuous at best.

Enter the digital sphere, where click-throughs, conversion rates, time to purchase and pretty much any other metric you’d like can be tracked. In an age when conversion is king, the inability to provide proof of ROI is a huge detriment.

Benefits of Social Promotions

Social promotions

Social marketing has picked up a lot of the marketing dollars that once would have been allocated to print because it’s more affordable, and it offers a host of actionable metrics.

According to eMarketer, in August 2013, social marketing spending accounted for an average of 6.6% of marketer budgets. Within the next year, that share was expected to rise to 9.1%, and in the next five years, marketers expected social to account for 15.8% of spending.

Much like magazine ads, social promotions can be targeted to loyal customers and specific audiences, but unlike magazine ads, their calls to action can be tracked directly to conversion rates. Based on the hundreds of social promotions we have run for our customers, we have reported an average conversion rate of 73% for social promotions involving contests or sweepstakes. Many of our clients have harnessed the power of social promotions to build their lists and boost lead generation, engage their audiences with creative user-generated content, reward loyal customers with prizes and special promotions, and drive traffic directly to their e-commerce sites.

Best of Both Worlds

Of course, the options aren’t mutually exclusive, and both magazine ads and social promotions can work together to build brand exposure and drive engagement.

If you’ve got the budget for magazine ads, why not use them to drive traffic to your social promotion? Engage your customers with an ad campaign that sends them to a branded promotion page, or slap a hashtag on your ad with a request for hashtagged user generated responses and your multichannel campaign will be much more measurable than a print campaign alone. It truly is the best of both worlds.

Ready to launch your social promotion? We can help. Our social promotions platform makes it easy to engage your customers across social channels. Sign up now and try it out!

Main image: Flickr / John Martinez Pavliga Second image: Flickr / Jessica Spengler