Traditional Or Digital Marketing: Which One Wins?
There has been a long and lasting debate in the marketing world when it comes to the concepts of traditional and digital marketing. Some argue that the primary focus of a business in this day and age should be purely digital. Others believe that there is still a place for traditional marketing. And If you purely focus on traditional marketing… well it’s time to get with the times.
What is the difference between traditional marketing and digital marketing?
Traditional marketing is conducted in the offline setting (newspapers, print, radio, billboards, etc.) whereas digital marketing is purely online (social media, online advertising, influencers, etc.). With traditional marketing, you are able to reach certain targeted audiences and spread awareness about your brand. The downside however is the costs of the campaigns.
Limited by budget? Go digital first
If you are limited with your budget focus on adopting a digital marketing strategy. Are you making enough content online to establish a presence? Running ads to either increase leads, awareness or purchases? A big advantage of digital marketing is having the ability to reach more people with a lot less budget. With traditional marketing, you may not see results right away and it can be hard to measure if the campaign was a success or not.
Digital marketing allows you to measure and track your conversions more effectively as you can pinpoint the end user’s touchpoints. You can turn data into information seamlessly, set up goals for certain campaigns and track your end-users behaviour. How did this person come to my eCommerce site? Was it through an ad on Facebook or was it completely organic? Digital marketing helps you answer these questions.
With digital marketing, you can also adjust budgets if certain ads are not working. This is another advantage digital has over traditional because traditional marketing requires one-time payments that cannot be adjustable throughout the campaign.
Where to start?
Create content consistently on at least 2 social media platforms. It’s important to showcase your content on other channels as you reach more people. Instagram, for example, could “go down” so diversifying your content across multiple platforms is a safety net. Unlike traditional marketing, content creation can allow you to build communities and collaborate with other creators/businesses.
Run ads. As mentioned before, you can run online adverts for a variety of reasons: to generate leads, and improve awareness and purchases. Run ads on some of the content you post to give it a boost in order to receive more engagement. Online advertising helps to establish your presence online, remarket previous customers and gain a competitive advantage.
Slowly branch out to traditional!
Once you start seeing results, you can scale out to traditional marketing. Both traditional and digital can be utilized together effectively – especially if you are looking for a big push campaign to raise brand awareness. It would be ideal to have at least 2 big push campaigns throughout the year in order to grab people’s attention.
If you are interested in seeing a successful campaign that utilizes both traditional and digital marketing then have a look at our Oak Fire Pizza campaign.
To conclude, if you are limited by budget – purely focus on digital marketing. Once you have the foundations layed down, then you can branch out to traditional marketing and scale your business! Traditional and Digital Marketing campaigns, that are aligned with one another, have the capability of producing fantastic results.
Book a consultation with us today by visiting us online or call us on 021 204 0942 to find out more information.