Written by Josh Kohn
Is Digital Marketing Better than traditional marketing? In order to really understand the question, let’s define digital marketing.
Digital Marketing includes tools such as website development, google ad words, google display ads, search engine optimization, social media, video and just about anything you can promote on a computer, digital or mobile device.
Traditional Marketing includes brochures, printing, billboards, advertising in local papers and magazines and of course Television and word of mouth.
Marketing has become a very complex animal in recent years. Ten years ago the trend was to convert all of your marketing from traditional to digital. The average business owner is inundated with mass emailing, phone calls from foreign companies promoting SEO and web development services, as well as guaranteeing placement on the first page of Google’s search engine. The siren’s song of saving thousands by switching to digital marketing is a scam. The fact of the matter is that digital marketing is as expensive as traditional marketing and in some cases less effective.
As a business owner, there is only one way to look at marketing. One must decide on a goal. For example, do you want to just brand the company for awareness or do you want to increase sales for the quarter? Or do you need to unload product as fast as possible? There are a million reasons to market. You must understand the tools. Not necessarily how set them up, but how to utilize them.
Lets pretend that you own a tax accounting firm and want to increase business. A mixture of traditional and digital marketing will serve best. First, you’ll need to make sure you have a website and a social media presence. You’ll want to make sure your website is properly written to optimize organic searches on the web. Organic searches don’t require any money whereas Google Adwords does. Then it would be prudent of you to place an ad in a local publication that reaches your audience.
In this case, your tax company wants to engage businesses and not consumers. You could obtain a list of all businesses in the county and send them a postcard to let them know you are open and ready for business. When they do receive the postcard you can push them to your website to get a discount offer for their first engagement with you.
Not only will it give this new user a view of your website but as the website owner you will be able to capture their information because they cashed in on the discount coupon. So, you’ll have their interaction in analytics as well as their name in your database. That’s a hot lead.
Electronic mass emailing has an average click rate nationally of approximately 1.3%. Whereas direct mail has a return on investment of closer to 2%. But, postcards cost more than mass emailing. It’s a trade off.
If your average customer in the tax company has a value of $4,000 then it would be prudent to use the traditional marketing methods. On the other hand, if your average customer only spends $400 dollars a year, then mass emailing is the way to go.
Any way you look at it you will need to do both traditional and digital marketing. Talk to your marketing professional about how to find the right mix for your business.
