There is no denying the Digital Marketing movement. With more and more traditional media being fazed out, keeping up to date with digital marketing trends is essential in today's market. Believe it or not, there are still new people getting access to the internet everyday.
Why is Traditional Marketing not as effective as Digital Marketing
The main reason for this is targeting a specific audience. Not only does digital media have a much larger audience, you can target specific people who are interested in your products or service. Targeting the correct people who are likely to purchase your products are services has a much better ROI than traditional media. With the Television and Newspapers, it is distributed to everyone watching and doesn't have specific targeting. With Digital Marketing you have many more options to conduct research on your ads.
Traditional marketing also typically has a large up front cost, and if it doesn't perform well your out of pocket. With the advancement of technology, many people either record or fast forward TV programs. I mean, who actually watches TV ad's anymore anyways? Everyone grabs there phone as soon as an ad comes on. With Digital Marketing there is much more flexibility to tweak the campaign as it is running, or you can choose to create highly converting content for social platforms and more. Using Digital Media give you a ton more flexibility in the long term.
Now we aren't saying traditional marketing doesn't have a place in today's world because it definitely does. We believe traditional marketing is overpriced compared to the digital version.
What are the advantages and disadvantages of Digital Marketing?
Of course there are advantages and disadvantages of digital marketing. While the list is strongly sided towards digital marketing, here is a brief list of some of the differences.
Advantages
Branding
The main difference we believe is branding. Building your brand through great campaigns build your brand. Creating personalized content and telling your business story on social media keeps your customers engaged with your brand. Here you can create a customer service hub at the same time you are telling your story, all for a very reasonable investment.
Engagement
Utilizing many forms of digital marketing gives you incredible engagement compared to traditional marketing. Keeping your customers up to date on current and upcoming products/deals is a great way to keep them engaged. Traditional marketing, this was very difficult to accomplish.
Results
Another very important improvement over traditional marketing is actually tracking and measuring results accurately. Tracking and tweaking campaigns while they are in progress in game changing. Not only does this save on massive costs, but requires a lot less up front planning than traditional marketing. If a campaign isn't working it can be stopped almost immediately, which saves money.
Disadvantages
Time Consuming
Getting your business up to date in the Digital Marketing world is very time consuming. There are a lot of tasks that need to be completed in order to create a digital experience for your customers successfully. Knowing when to create PPC, SEO, Social Media Marketing, Influencers, Content Marketing, Email Marketing and Marketing Analytics can be very daunting for many businesses. Which is why we suggest hiring a Calgary Digital Marketing Agency for your business.
Can digital marketing help my local business?
Without a doubt. Digital marketing helps every size of business. Without having a strong online presence, you will be missing out on a significant amount of customers and stunting business growth. Each month local searches are increasing, adding "near me" to the end of google searches has increased over 3000% in the last 4 years.
Small business owners don't believe they have the time or money to be competitive online, but in fact there are many ways to bring overall costs down. There are a lot of aspects to marketing and may feel overwhelming when marketing is brought up. Having your business just "exist" and hope for customers will not attract as many customers to make your business succeed.
Another risk to not having a significant presence online is your customers may fear you are not a legitimate business. Maintaining and updating your business presence, strongly increases your company's reputation and builds relationships with new and existing customers. A great way to do this is to engage with customers on all social media platforms. This can also be a great way to utilize customer service directly on the platforms. Providing value to your customers for free online is a fantastic way to boost brand, this can be done in many ways.
Social Media Marketing is one of the most affordable ways to brand your business. Creating a strong media strategy on various social platforms strongly increases your ROI(Return on Investment) compared to traditional marketing. This can be done with paid and unpaid advertising.
What type of content should my business create?
They type of content depends on the industry and the specific needs of your audience. For example, if you are an online retail store selling beauty products, you don't really want to create content that isn't anything related to this. Sticking in your lane will help you expand to other users who are interested in this content. There needs to be some thought on who your customers are and driving content that is relative to them. It's always best to create a buyers journey when starting a marketing campaign to make sure nothing is missed.
Can digital marketing work for any business?
Yes in fact it can. Whether you're a B2B or B2C business, digital marketing works well. If you are marketing in B2B or B2C, these strategies are often slightly different.
What is B2B Marketing?
B2B Marketing refers to Business to Business. There are many different forms of B2B Marketing including Email Marketing, Digital Marketing, Content Marketing and Social Media Marketing. There is a comprehensive breakdown on how to do B2B marketing here.
What is B2C Marketing?
B2C refers to Business to Consumer. With this type of marketing, we believe it is best to really get to know your audience more in depth. Starting with buyer personas that can be used to determine which content and marketing strategies their leads are likely to respond to. If your brand is targeting younger audience , it would be best to use digital forms of marketing than traditional marketing like Television and print.
Whether you are a new or well established business, always remember that digital marketing is already here and keeps on growing.