How Digital Marketing is making Traditional Marketing Obsolete

Go digital or get left behind

When you think of traditional marketing, you might think of newspapers, television and radio commercials. Digital marketing, on the other hand, is in our line of sight virtually all day long, as we scroll through Facebook and Instagram or even read the online news.

Marketing is just like oxygen. It’s happening all the time, it’s all around us, we see it, we hear it, and it comes in all forms.

Over the years, marketing has evolved considerably from traditional methods to cutting-edge digital techniques. Let’s see if we can clear some of the basics and whether or not a certain style of marketing may triumph over another.

Marketing in a nutshell

Marketing aims to satisfy the needs of consumers while being able to promote a service or product of a business. It also aims to drive sales in this manner while getting prospective customers to convert to sales. Marketing forms part of the marketing funnel, which will be elaborated a bit later in this post.

When engaging in any form of marketing albeit digital marketing or traditional marketing, entrepreneurs have to consider the management process. Managing your strategy is one of the most crucial parts of marketing as a whole.

Basic focus of marketing

Connection

Being able to connect with your team players (staff) as well as reaching your valuable customers is imperative. A sense of good understanding has to be established within the business so that the rest of the connected communications will follow.

Your product concept

The product is one of the key ingredients to any business. Your product is the thing that will either result in better sales (because of the marketing), or not do well again because of marketing. The product’s ability to generate good sales also depends on the overall quality as well as price affordability.

Sales driven responsibilities

In order to sell your product, you need to market it to get it out to the public. However, some people need to advertise constantly and work on keeping their marketing strategies fresh and exciting to bring in customers.

If you already have a popular product, you probably don’t need to aggressively advertise it to make it work for you. However, the same cannot be said for some SMEs as new products may require a considerable amount of “coaxing potential customers and clients”.

Let’s not kid ourselves, competition is always a b*#$! and being able to stand out from your competition is going to be one of the hardest challenges you may face.

Your marketing strategy

Every business has a different strategy for their marketing needs and while one thing may work for an SME, the same may not work for a larger corporation. Hence, every “shoe” will fit accordingly. Some aspects to consider in the strategy include:

• The target audience
• The product
• Your ability to engage in digital or traditional marketing (can you do one or both)?
• Your budget

What is a marketing funnel and how does marketing function in this “system”

The marketing funnel is a system that incorporates a very vital strategy covering the following key factors:

• A – advertising/awareness
• I – interest
• D – desire
• A – action

Once this is in place, it sets the wheels in motion because, in the beginning, the (wider) part of the funnel is the advertising process.

The first step is to attract those prospects via advertising, traditional or digital. As a business, you need to pique the prospective customer’s interest. Once the interest is secured, the marketing needs to build a sense of desire within the potential customers.

Creating a desire for the product is often done through emotional means such as how the viewers need your product to better their lifestyle. Next is action, and this is the part those prospective customers convert to sales and make their purchase or book their service.

Some of the effort put into marketing your product through digital means include online social media, emails and online adverts. Businesses also use traditional advertising in this part of the marketing funnel such as printing flyers and banners, newspaper print, cold calling, and business cards to name a few

What is traditional marketing? 

Traditional marketing relies on the physical “face to face” way of marketing. Setting up physical meetings with prospective clients and hosting seminars and events amongst other to help promote the service or product, is all part of traditional marketing.

Businesses that use traditional means will heavily rely on print to advertise, as mentioned before newspapers, brochures, and flyers amongst other. In the traditional strategy, the use of media is also very essential where TV commercials will pop up between primetime shows and reach a larger audience in this manner.

Benefits of traditional marketing

Although often considered an “old school” way to market, traditional means has plenty of benefits that truly help boost business sales.

• Word of mouth advertising is big in the traditional sense
• People still resort to adverts post in magazines and newspapers
• Many people watch their favourite shows and this is when TV adverts are phenomenal and pays off
• Can rake in more with new audience exposure
• Its more personal than digital means because it often requires that one-on-one aspect
• People prefer dealing with humans as opposed to bots

Disadvantages of traditional marketing

Although this is a lucrative way to market, it should not be the only means of marketing your business, service, and products. Here are some of the disadvantages of traditional marketing:

• TV commercials are extremely expensive
• Printing in newspapers is expensive and only lasts a few days
• Business can only reach a limited area (geographical limits are crippling)
• Radio commercials just like TV commercials occupy a certain time slot (increases the price)
• You’d also be advertising to people who may not be interested at all (audience cannot be narrowed down by digital analytics)
• It’s hard to expand the business beyond the local market

What is digital marketing?

Digital marketing comprises all digital means such as the internet and all that computers and mobile devices can afford. The various digital and social media platforms allow business owners to place paid adverts on their sites/apps.

Businesses find digital marketing favourable because they can use videos via YouTube and Vimeo to showcase their services. People prefer watching to reading so digital advertising makes plenty use of this advantage. Social media, who doesn’t have at least one social media account these days?

Benefits of digital marketing

Digital marketing has many pros and is always changing to help improve business strategy and make things a bit easier.

• It’s much more affordable to advertise online than in print
• It’s easy to use and reach large audiences
• You have an array of tools to assist your online marketing efforts and improve
• There is no geographical disadvantages (online shopping delivers to the customer’s door)
• You can also establish online meetings and have access to freelancers who can assist
• People spend hours online reading and viewing videos
• Your website and social media channels are mobile friendly for more reach
• People can view how well the business is doing for fellow customers via real-time reviews
• Better engagement with fellow businesses and customers

Disadvantages of digital marketing

Even though always highly spoken of, digital marketing also has its downfalls. These are some of the cons:

• Online security is always a factor especially for your online store and the safekeeping of sensitive documentation
• Everyone has access to viewing real-time customer complaints and reviews (Google and Facebook for instance)
• You need a specialized team or assistant to help you get the most out of your digital marketing (raises the costs)
• Sometimes the business digital influence can be a good or a bad thing (sometimes overwhelming)
• People don’t always find your adverts or website for that matter (needs proper optimization)

The takeaway

Marketing is great, and it plays a major role in any business operation. When the marketing strategy is set in place, the next step would be time to execute. Even if you found a tactic that works better with your business and you know as well as follow the basics, it’s not a guarantee that you can make it work. For this reason, marketing agencies always have a team of qualified specialists. Qualified specialists mean you’re going to work with a team who are trained, skilled and most importantly experienced.

Reputable marketing agencies live to help their client’s business grow and do well in the midst of a highly competitive industry. Hiring a marketing team also ensures that you get what you pay for, so while it isn’t always the most affordable option, it is a long-term healthy investment.

Either way you choose to advertise, your business has to guarantee accessibility, engagement and other key factors that will help it succeed in converting sales.