Marketing has evolved over the past twenty years. Traditional marketing was defined by television ads, newspaper ads, magazine ads, and billboards. Digital marketing, on the other hand, involves website design, search engine optimization, paid advertising, social media, online video content, email marketing and more. We reveal five reasons why digital marketing may be a better decision for brands trying to compete online.
Target Audiences With Precision
Did you know that the first and possibly most important step to any marketing campaign involves defining a target audience? This is critical to ensuring your campaign’s success. With traditional advertising, a business or agency must decide which television stations, newspapers, or magazines to target.
To target the affluent, they could advertise in a golf magazine, or a Yacht magazine, or the Wall Street Journal. Perhaps you could target the elderly by advertising in a senior citizen-focused magazine.
You could target men on a sports channel on television. Targeting audiences in this manner was imprecise and difficult.
Digital marketing makes it far easier to target an audience with precision. Companies such as Google and Facebook have a tremendous amount of personal data for each of their users. They often know the following for each of their user’s:
- Age
- Gender
- Occupation
- Income
- Birthday
- Marital Status
- Anniversary Date
- Taste in music
- Taste in movies
- Interests
- Online behaviors
Digital advertising also allows your business to target consumers during life events, including marriage, birthdays, and anniversaries. It allows you to target users by marital status and by occupation. By targeting an audience with precision, a business can maximize its return on advertising spending.
Upscale Your Marketing Quickly
With traditional marketing, businesses must make marketing decisions months or even a year in advance. With the Yellow Pages, for example, a business would have to decide each year whether to have a large, small, or text ad. The business would have to decide whether to pay more to be on the cover or whether to have additional color to the ad. The business would not be able to change its ad until the following year, when the next edition came out. The same holds true, albeit to a lesser extent for magazines, newspapers, and television advertisements.
With digital advertising, a business can choose to increase or decrease its advertising budget every day. If the business is doing well, it can increase its marketing budget with just a few keystrokes. If a business is so busy that it can no longer handle new business, it can decrease or pause its online advertising.
Change Your Marketing On The Fly
As often noted, targeting the right audience is critical. But as campaigns run, audiences can change. With traditional marketing, messages can’t be altered to follow potential changes.
With digital advertising, on the other hand, you can change ads on the fly. You can change your slogan, offer, and display times almost anywhere.
You Can Remarket
Digital advertising makes it easy to remarket (often referred to as retargeting) to customers. Many people who search for a product online will notice that ads for that product are displayed on their Facebook feed before they watch a video on YouTube or while visiting a wide range of websites. This is remarketing in action. With traditional marketing, remarketing is done through repeated television ads, and by placing ads in newspapers, magazines, billboards, and on bus stop benches, during a given period. Remarketing in this manner has limited effectiveness.
In contrast, remarketing is easier to implement and to target with greater precision with digital marketing. Through the use of website cookies and/or the collection of email addresses (which are collected in exchange for special offers or to download a piece of content), a business can use digital channels for remarketing. Instead of hoping that someone is watching television when an advertisement is displayed or that he or she reads a given newspaper on a certain day, with digital advertising, the targeting can be customized, and the business has far greater assurances that the target has been exposed to the remarketing. Moreover, the remarketing interval can be set with high precision, and a buyer can be targeted throughout the buying cycle.
Results Are Easier to Measure
Measuring results with traditional media is a challenge. While it is possible to determine how many people purchased a newspaper or magazine, it is impossible to know exactly how many actually read it or a given ad within. Similarly, with television, it is possible to estimate how many people watch a television show, but it is impossible to know whether someone went to the bathroom or to get a snack during the commercial. Or whether the television was left on with no one watching.
With digital marketing, we can accurately determine the following:
- How many people clicked on an ad or visited a website
- The number of people who opened an email newsletter
- How many people opened an email drip campaign
- Which country, state, city, town, or zip code those who viewed an advertisement reside in
- How many people saw or clicked on an advertisement on a given day of the week, or time of day
Digital marketing results are easier to measure, meaning they are also easier to change and adapt to optimize return on investment.
Digital marketing trumps traditional marketing. Whether your business is looking to transition from traditional marketing or is already using digital marketing and needs some help, contact Summit Crew today, and we will help you grow your business.
If you need help growing your business and averaging 400% or more ROI from your digital efforts, give us a call today or schedule a free strategy session with one of our experts in digital marketing. You will have an opportunity to discuss your business and your marketing goals, and we will provide recommendations on what you should be doing based on our BOOST Method. This is a sales-pitch-free no-obligation meeting, just real advice.
