Examines the benefits of social media marketing in contrast to traditional advertising

Sammanfattning: In the recent year’s internet have grown rapidly, and the digital world have grown along with it. This have led to new marketing methods such as social media marketing has developed which have shown to be good tool for building relationship with consumers and increase brand awareness. In the same time traditional advertising, which is a good tool for creating brand awareness, is losing its effectiveness for it. The purpose with this study is therefore to examine why companies continue using traditional advertising for brand awareness when the digital world is growing, and more people spend their time on internet and social media. This study was an exploratory with a qualitative and deductive approach. Expert interviews were chosen as research strategy and the candidates that was interviewed had a marketing manager position or similar that was from different branches and hade much knowledge about the topic. The findings in this study gave some interesting insights and new knowledge regarding social media marketing and traditional advertising. Like one of the big advantages with social media marketing have shown not be true anymore. In this study’s findings it is shown that traditional advertising can still be an effective marketing method to use if companies want to reach the older generation. But the findings also show that it is maybe more important to have advertising that is of high quality in order to not annoy consumers instead of finding the best marketing channel. This study’s theoretical contribution is more knowledge on the advantages and disadvantages between social media marketing and traditional advertising. The study also contribute how companies can work with the challenge of decreasing consumers annoyance of advertising. Another theoretical contribution is the knowledge that advertising annoyance is happening both in traditional advertising and social media marketing and that it is not only important to know the best marketing channel. The practical contribution that this study have is the knowledge to companies that are struggling with the decision to start using social media marketing or not. This study also give knowledge on why social media marketing is good and how companies can use social media marketing to establish brand awareness.