Mailouts and catalogues are nearing extinction. Netflix poses a threat to TV commercials, and Spotify now takes precedence over traditional radio. And The Yellow Pages? What’s that? Attracting targeted customers online today is the difference between a successful business and a failed one. In our evolving digital world, best practices shift rapidly and existing technologies become smarter and increasingly sophisticated. New features and functions become available every day, making it seemingly impossible for manufacturers and businesses to keep up with this frenzied pace. In order to cater to shrinking screens — and shrinking attention spans — you should make sure you are capitalizing on all that digital marketing has to offer.

In this article, we will evaluate both traditional and digital marketing and why this dynamic switch is happening.

Disclaimer: Traditional Marketing is Not Obsolete

You have to admit — there’s nothing quite like flipping through a crisp, colorful magazine. The tangibility aspect of traditional marketing is one characteristic digital marketing just simply can’t replicate. For this reason, traditional marketing can still be used to supplement and support your digital marketing strategies. As companies shift from traditional to digital marketing, the good news is that skills are highly transferable. Copywriters are still writing, designers are still designing, and project managers are still managing — but with the added help of convenient digital marketing tools and software. 

These are the types of traditional marketing that you can take advantage of:

• Print (magazines, newspapers, etc.)

• Broadcast (TV, radio, etc.)

• Direct Mail (catalogues, postcards, etc.)

• Telephone (telemarketing, SMS marketing, etc.)

• Outdoor (billboards, fliers, etc.)

Benefits of Digital Marketing

While digital marketing may sound intimidating, there are actually many advantages of adapting to these strategies.

• Low Barrier to Entry

  For all the mom and pop businesses, you still have hope to compete with the larger retailers of the world. Virtually anyone — from entrepreneurs to small businesses to large corporations — can build a digital presence. In other words, you don’t need to spend thousands of dollars on traditional advertisements to see results. Smaller businesses, including e-commerce, brick-and-mortar, and personal brands, can compete with a much smaller advertising budget when it comes to digital marketing. Many of the beginning steps of digital marketing — like creating a website and social media profiles — come with a very low cost. 

• Higher Return on Investment

  Digital marketing not only reaches people faster, but it offers a higher return on investment. While it costs about $20 to reach 1,000 people with a print ad, it only costs about $3 to reach that same amount with Google AdWords — and significantly less with social media marketing. Because of the longevity of traditional marketing, companies are used to doling out money for print advertisements, radio advertisements, and direct mail campaigns. However, there’s really no surefire way to guarantee you are making meaningful impressions on your target audience. With digital marketing, there is less risk involved. You can spend less money on ads that target your desired audience in a specific timeframe — and get actual metrics that let you tweak your campaigns to perform better.

• Larger Reach

  Digital marketing has a lack of physical boundaries, so it allows businesses to reach a huge range of prospects at the local, national, and global level. You can increase your web footprint easily and effectively — not to mention, you can target people at times when they’re more active online.

• Data-Driven Targeting and Audience Engagement

  Remember when you overpaid to advertise in a small column in the newspaper without really ever knowing if you reached your intended audience? In our adaptive digital world, your marketing efforts become more laser-focused and less like taking shots in the dark. With so many ways to narrow in on your target market — through demographics, psychographics, and purchasing behavior — digital marketing takes the guesswork out of reaching your target audience. Social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram allow companies to launch ads that micro-target a group of people that meet their desired criteria. Because you can target a much more specific group of people, you also have more opportunities for increased interactivity and engagement. Digital marketing allows you to take advantage of two-way dialogue to communicate with your audience. These messages can be highly personalized as well. By evaluating a consumer’s purchase history, you can target them directly and even recommend certain products to them.

• More Metrics and Ways to Measure

  It’s much more difficult to estimate your ROI, conversions, and results when you’re strictly using traditional marketing. With the increased amount of data available, digital marketing offers more room for trial and error. You can reap the benefits of tracking tools like Google Analytics and social media metrics to evaluate your campaigns. Marketing analytic software is becoming more and more sophisticated, giving businesses demographic breakdowns and other helpful insights. If certain content achieves a higher cost-per-click, more engagements, or more impressions, you can continue to produce that kind of content in the future.

• Provides Value-Added Content Over Advertising

  When you think about traditional TV commercials or newspaper ads, what is their sole purpose? Usually, it’s to sell you something. Print advertisements and ad spots are very common in traditional marketing. But in digital marketing, there is much more of a focus on content marketing than advertising. This entails just about any piece of informational content, including videos, blog posts, case studies, infographics, e-newsletters, and white papers. Its intent goes beyond advertising a product or service or closing a sale. This type of content provides value to the consumer and builds trust. How? It’s unforced, value-added content with no strings attached — meaning your audience won’t immediately feel obliged to buy something. Keeping in mind the value of content marketing, it is vital in today’s world to invest in content creation and management. Companies are increasingly seeking talent from bloggers, social media managers, and graphic designers to help them scale their content marketing efforts.

• Ability to Leverage Multiple Channels

  Digital marketing is about knowing where your audience is and what their behaviors are. And just like your consumers don’t live on one channel, neither should your content. This being said, your content should be branded uniformly throughout all channels you choose to utilize.

Digital Marketing Channels

• Social Media Marketing

  Social media marketing is a great way to generate digital buzz and interact directly with your consumers. With the rise of trends like live-streaming stories, influencer marketing, and hashtag marketing, there are many ways to leverage your content on social media platforms. If you have a successful social media strategy, you can drive traffic to your website and increase your conversion rate. Because it integrates text, photo and video content, social media marketing allows your company to establish a unique brand identity with many types of content.

• Video Marketing

  Video marketing is a great way to share knowledge, connect with consumers, and raise awareness of an issue. There are tons of engaging ways to use videos in your marketing plan, including live-streaming events, promoting customer testimonials, tutorials or showing entertaining content. The cool thing about videos? They have the potential to go viral. In fact, 70% of people said they have shared a brand’s video, which increases the likeliness that the video will garner the attention of other potential prospects. Not to mention, video marketing in the retail space has extremely high conversion rates. Product videos have the potential to increase purchases by 144%.

• Email Marketing

  And no, we’re not talking about unsolicited spam. Email marketing is an effective way to nurture leads and convert prospects into customers. An overwhelming 99% of customers check their email on a daily basis, which makes it a quick, cost-efficient way to get your message in front of tons of people. The best way to do this is by building an email list, which allows you to collect leads and send automated messages to your subscribers.

• Pay-Per-Click (PPC)

  Ever wonder how those ads that appear alongside search results on Google got there? That’s through PPC, or pay-per-click advertising. PPC is an online advertising model in which advertisers pay each time one of their ads is clicked. It is essentially a way of buying visits to your website rather than gaining those visits organically. How does it work exactly? Advertisers go through a process of bidding on ad placements in search queries. Essentially, advertisers can place their product or brand front and center in search results in the form of an ad that targets a specific keyword or behavior. It may sound a little complex, but tools like Google Ads, Microsoft Advertising, and Amazon Advertising can help you find the right keywords to bid on — and in turn, get your ads seen by potential prospects.

• Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

  With over 3.5 billion Google searches per day, a high search engine ranking is one of the most effective ways to build traffic on your website. SEO is focused on increasing the visibility of your website in organic (non-paid) search engine results. It involves structuring your website in a way search engines can understand and using relevant keywords that position your website at the top of search queries related to your business.

Emerging Digital Trends

The great thing about the digital world? It’s always changing, which means new features and technologies become readily available every day. Some emerging trends in digital marketing include the use of artificial intelligence (AI), messaging chatbots, programmatic and influencer marketing.

Few people actually understand the complexity of artificial intelligence. In short, it can help businesses analyze existing customer search behavior and patterns to target similar prospects. It is a trend that is increasingly gaining more traction. Most people are already using products that incorporate AI capabilities (Waze). AI also plays a big role in fostering a personalized customer service experience. Ever used a customer service live chat software and suspect you’re talking to a robot? This technology is called a chatbot, which combines the use of text, voice, and messaging to interact directly with consumers. It mimics human conversation and satisfies consumers’ growing need for information quickly and accurately.

Influencer and micro-influencer marketing are also growing trends. In a world saturated by social media content and advertisements, consumers are seeking more authentic experiences. Influencer marketing delivers just that by using actual people to serve as brand ambassadors.

Is it Time to Switch?

With the mass adoption of the smartphone and increase in daily screen time, making use of digital marketing to reach your target audience is vital. But should you completely abandon traditional marketing? Not exactly — but you should rather choose smartly where to invest your marketing dollars.