Digital Marketing vs. Traditional Marketing

Are you looking for a better return from your marketing budget? If you’re spending more money than before but disappointed with the leads you get, it’s time to make a change.

It’s likely that the issue isn’t your marketing budget but where it’s being spent. Many businesses still invest most of their budget into traditional marketing methods. If that’s you, we can help you see better results without spending more money. How? By making the switch to digital marketing.

With digital ad spend increasing 13% year on year, it’s an industry you can’t ignore.In this blog we’ll take you through the definitions of traditional and digital marketing, examples of both and why digital marketing deserves more of your attention and budget in 2020.

Traditional marketing has come to be a catch-all term for many of the more established, familiar types of marketing and advertising. These techniques have long been used to target an audience with the aim of converting them into leads, sales or clients.

There’s a whole range of activities that can be classed as traditional marketing. Here are some of the most relevant examples of traditional marketing in today’s world.

One of the most well-known traditional marketing types, and the oldest, is print marketing. This covers advertising placed in newspapers, magazines and brochures. Print advertising is still hugely popular, with both big brands and small businesses regularly appearing in publications. For many businesses, advertising in their local or regional press remains a key part of their marketing plan.

Direct mail is another type of printed advertising, but this time it’s sent directly to consumers. You’ll often find flyers, leaflets or brochures posted through your door—these are all types of direct mail. This type of marketing is popular with takeaways, garden centres, window companies and local service businesses. It’s difficult to target your direct mail campaigns, so works best for products and services that appeal to a wide range of people.

Broadcast marketing refers to audio and visual content shared with a wide audience, commonly through radio or TV advertising. This can range from a large TV ad campaign on major channels down to a 30-second advert with a local radio station. Broadcast marketing is often thought to be expensive, especially when you consider the production and management costs of a big campaign.

Most of us don’t enjoy unwanted phone calls, but telemarketingremains a popular type of marketing for many businesses. It involves calling customers and potential customers to encourage them to take action—for example to upgrade their service or buy an additional warranty product. Telemarketing requires a specific skill set, so it’s usually outsourced to agencies that specialise in this.

Outdoor advertising is often used as part of a wider marketing campaign. It covers promotions on billboards, bus stops and in other outdoor locations. It’s often eye-catching and designed to stay in people’s minds. For a successful outdoor campaign, you’ll need to enlist the help of a copywriter, designer and print company to produce large-scale artwork for display—or work with a specialist agency to make this happen.

Like traditional marketing, digital marketing is an umbrella term that covers a range of activities. What these activities have in common is that they’re digital—so they use websites, social media channels and email to spread your message to your audience.

Digital marketing covers a lot of ground. Some areas are more well-known and more approachable for beginners, like social media and email marketing. Others require more specialist knowledge, like search engine optimisation and pay per click advertising.

Here are five of the most popular methods of digital marketing.

Search engine optimisation is one of the first techniques many people think of when it comes to digital marketing. It involves optimising your websiteso it’s best placed to attract organic traffic and leads through search engines like Google. This involves a mix of making sure your structure, content and backlink profile is optimised and effective.

Most of us use social media on a regular basis, so it’s no surprise that it’s become a playground for brands that want to get our attention. Social media marketing involves increasing brand awareness, reach and traffic generation from popular platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and more. The idea is to build a strong, engaging presence on the right channels to convert customers over time.

Email marketing helps you reach customers directly, with marketing messages that land straight in their inbox. It’s become a popular way to inform customers about special offers, discounts and promotions. Email marketing can also be used strategically to move prospects down your sales pipeline, with a welcome email followed by a series of helpful, content-led messages.

Pay per click (PPC) advertising is a popular type of digital marketing. With PPC you pay the publisher every time your ad receives a click—this is usually on a search engine like Google, but pay per click is also offered as an option on social media platforms like Facebook. As you only pay per conversion, PPC can be an affordable way to bring new visitors to your website who are already looking to buy.

Content marketing involves using pieces of digital content to drive traffic to your website, grow your reputation and convert leads. This content can include blog posts, articles, thought leadership pieces, infographics, e-books and white papers. Often businesses will use a blog post in combination with a content upgrade like an e-book to encourage people to join their email list.

At QuayClick, we’re big fans of digital marketing. We’ve seen it produce outstanding results for the businesses we work with. It’s not enough to just take our word for it though. Here are five advantages that digital marketing can bring to your business.

With digital marketing, it’s easier to set up and run campaigns that suit your budget. You can run advertising campaigns on Facebook with less than £5 and see results. You’ll see greater results if you scale up your spend, but you can make a start with a small investment.

This initial affordability makes digital marketing a great partner for a small or growing business. You don’t need to come up with multiple thousands for the upfront costs of a broadcast or outdoor campaign. Instead, you can try out different digital marketing methods without worrying about whether you’ll see a return.

It’s much easier to calculate your return on investment (ROI) with digital marketing than with most traditional marketing methods. You can use readily available data and analysis to help you see what’s working and where to invest your marketing budget.

Most advertising platforms and agencies will provide you with reports and analysis on how your campaigns are performing. These reports contain specific and accurate data, thanks to the advanced tracking offered by most digital platforms. You can often see how many clicks you received from a post or advert, so you can place a value on the activity.

This kind of direct connection is harder to make with traditional advertising, where reports will share how many people you reached but not necessarily how many took action. That’s because it’s more difficult to follow the customer journey from influence to sale, unless you include a specific code or follow up with a questionnaire.

Traditional marketing methods tend to be a one-way conversation. You’re reaching people with a message but there’s not much opportunity for them to engage with what you’re saying. Digital marketing opens up the door for discussion, conversation and relationship building.

Most types of digital marketing allow you to have a direct conversation with your audience. This direct engagement not only helps you build relationships with your existing audience, but it makes it easier to reach new audiences too as many platforms prioritise content with high engagement.

With content marketing you can create blog content that encourages discussion in the comments section. Social media marketing allows you to have conversations with multiple followers at once. Email marketing is a powerful way to have a direct, one-on-one conversation with a subscriber. It’s easy to see why so many businesses use digital marketing to get to know their audience.

Digital marketing allows you to target your advertising to the right audience at the right time. You can create campaigns that focus on a niche audience, so all of your budget is going towards people who could be interested in what you offer.

You’re not at the mercy of where and when a publication is distributed or by the demographics of your local radio station. Instead, you can create audience profiles on social media platforms to reach people with specific interests or characteristics. You can create ad campaigns that target a certain search phrase, so you know you’re reaching people with the intent to buy.

With many traditional marketing methods you’re tied into using several different experts or teams for the creation, production or distribution. This could be anything from the in-house team running a regional food magazine to the agency that manages your bus stop advertising campaign. It’s a disjointed approach where you end up spending more time managing suppliers than you need to.

Making a switch to digital marketing puts the control back in your hands. With some study and experience behind you, you could set up and run your own email marketing campaigns or manage your social media channels. There are lots of resources out there to help you understand how digital marketing works.

Once you have an understanding of how digital works for your business, it’s worth outsourcing this to a specialist digital marketing agency. They can manage everything from one place, with a team of experts that care about your success.

A smart marketing strategy often features elements of both traditional and digital marketing. If you currently spend most of your budget on traditional activities, bring in a few digital techniques slowly. It’s a low risk way to potentially reach a whole new audience. You can monitor what works and what doesn’t and try out new things, all with the affordability and adaptability that comes with digital advertising.

Traditional marketing is less flexible. Once you’ve committed to a print campaign it’s almost impossible to make changes. This doesn’t mean you should stop using traditional marketing methods completely. They still have their place, especially for reaching a wide or local audience. TV, radio and print advertising is still a healthy industry—the question is whether traditional marketing is right for your business or not.

The right marketing mix is unique to your business. Some businesses lean heavily on content marketing and SEO, while others blend outdoor campaigns with social media. It’s all about knowing your audience and where they spend their time.

Once you’ve understood your customer, product and offer you can build a plan that focuses on how to reach them best—whether that’s a billboard campaign, a Facebook ad campaign or a billboard campaign tied to a Facebook campaign.

There’s no special formula that works for all businesses. The best way to build a strong marketing strategy is to ask yourself whether digital, traditional or a mix is the way forward.

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