Digital marketing. We hear about it all the time but what actually is digital marketing and how does it place with traditional marketing?
We live in an era now where everything is online. We shop online, we talk online, we even watch films online. So, it should come as no surprise that with everything and everyone now ‘online’, that marketing efforts have shifted towards this trend.
Traditional marketing efforts are no longer as effective as they once were. In fact, money now spent on traditional forms of advertising such as papers and magazines, shop windows, flyers and even television is often wasted due to its low return on investment (if any return at all!)
Large businesses are starting to wake up to this digital trend and now put most of their advertising budget in to digital marketing. Platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and google are granting these companies a much higher return on investment as well as a much more targeted and efficient way of advertising.
On the flip side to this, there are still a vast number of businesses that have not woken to this new trend and still continue to pour their marketing budgets into much less effective channels. Smaller, less aware business owners are often under the illusion that their target audience simply isn’t on Facebook or perhaps doesn’t use the internet. This couldn’t be further from the truth! With over 2 billion active users on Facebook alone, every business can reach its customers!
In this day and age there is no excuse for even the smallest business owner to not be taking advantage of digital marketing. There are literally thousands of pieces of software and platforms aimed at small business owners to help them gain a foothold in the online market. NEWAGEWAGE goes in to detail to explain and review these online tools and platforms such as Clickfunnels, Shopify and more.
Cost is often another worry with directors often thinking that their business can not afford to be running campaigns within this digital market. Again, this couldn’t be further from the truth. The beauty of digital marketing is that you can spend as little or as much as you want. If you start with a small budget, and then the campaign gains momentum, you can scale that as far as you like. If the campaign is not successful, you don’t scale, and start a new one. Simple! If you compare this to say, a television advert campaign, Your initial layout would be thousands upon thousands just to get started.
A traditional marketing campaign also provides little to no feedback on its progress. If you run an advert within a newspaper, you have no way to tell if it is performing well or not. You are in the dark and wasting money. With a digital campaign you have tools and platforms to drill down into every last bit of data. You can see exactly how your adverts are performing and if they need to be amended and tweaked. Are your customers of a certain age? Do they have certain interests, do they have a particular occupation? These are just a few examples of the data you can pull from a digital campaign.
In conclusion, if you are a business owner you need to be focusing all of your marketing efforts on digital campaigns. Stop wasting money on marketing that you can’t even measure. As discussed above, there is no reason that you shouldn’t be advertising online. The longer you wait, the more your competitors will make!