5 Advantages of Digital Marketing Over Traditional Marketing

The marketing world has come a long way since the days of Mad Men indulging in pre-noon libations, smoking like chimneys while drafting up Coca-Cola billboard ideas and children’s candy radio jingles. While traditional marketing strategies such as print, radio, and television ads still hold some relevance in today’s retail era, digital marketing has completely changed the way companies of all sizes can reach, interact, and target their ideal customers.

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Despite growing trends and research indicating how successful digital marketing tactics are, there remains a subtle yet significant hesitancy for many business owners to commit and invest in online advertising. You don’t have to be Don Draper to be skeptical of whether or not search engine optimization (SEO) or pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns will pay off in the long run for your company! Recent surveys have indicated that 83% of small business owners are satisfied with their digital marketing investment, leaving nearly 20% of small business owners either dissatisfied with or not utilizing digital marketing strategies.

Perhaps the cynicism toward digital marketing is based on their own disgruntled online consumer experiences, like constantly clicking out of pop-ups, ignoring coupon emails, and feeling bombarded by targeted social media ads. Hey, nothing can grind your gears like waiting through a 30-second ad on YouTube before watching your favorite Peggy Olson-compilation clip! However, in today’s technology-driven world, the less invested your business is in digital marketing, the more customers you’re failing to reach.

To help illustrate how digital marketing differs and triumphs over traditional marketing methods, let’s take a look at five distinct advantages of digital marketing that will highlight how much more bang for your buck you can receive from these advertising services.

1. More Engaging

Arguably the biggest difference between traditional and digital marketing is how much easier it is to track, measure, and assess consumer engagement with the latter strategy.

Not only does digital marketing serve as a direct pipeline of communication with your loyal customers and target audiences, but you can also evaluate their engagement in real time. For example, utilizing social media marketing offers businesses the opportunity to produce engaging content that can be liked, shared, and commented on by their customers, allowing businesses to visually assess what types of content and marketing are more effective than the other.

2. Cost Effective

Here’s a quick breakdown of the average price for various forms of traditional and digital marketing:

• Billboards: $1,500 - $14,000 on average, depending on location
• Full-page newspaper ad: $2,772 (small-town paper) - $163,422 (Washington Post)
• 30-second radio ad (including production costs): $1,200 - $7,500
• Digital marketing packages: $90 to $250 hourly services - $3,500 to $10,000 monthly services

Now the main difference between all of these costs is evaluating the overall bang for your buck. Only with digital marketing strategies will you be able to officially determine how many people you’re reaching, how many people you’re engaging with, and how many people became customers as a direct result of the marketing.

In addition, digital marketing tactics provide businesses with more control over costs, as they can pick and choose which digital marketing strategies they want to implement into their marketing plans, such as SEO or social media advertising.

3. Wider Reach

This is another dynamic where traditional marketing can’t compare to digital marketing. Unless you’re spending hundreds of thousands of dollars advertising with The New York Times, it’s practically impossible to assess how many people you’re actually reaching when utilizing print or radio advertisements.

With digital marketing, you can pinpoint the exact amount of people you’re targeting. But even without online ads, an SEO-optimized website can help you tap into new markets and reach a global audience for only a small investment.

4. Easy Targeting

As previously mentioned, the ability to reach your target audience in a cost-effective and measurable way is arguably the biggest advantage digital marketing has over other traditional forms of marketing. Whether you’re reaching people who match your ideal customer with targeted advertising, keeping in touch with current customers, or showing up on search engine results for people who are actively looking for your products or services online, there are seemingly infinite ways to target your preferred customer base and ultimately converting consumers into customers.

5. Flexibility & Measurement

Perhaps the biggest risk associated with traditional marketing methods is how murky and unclear it is to truly assess, measure, and alter, if necessary, your marketing strategies. How can you truly know how many people saw your billboard while passing an interstate exit or came into your store because they heard your advertisement on the radio?

The fact is that digital marketing makes evaluating and amending your marketing strategies so much easier. With so many analytics tools to choose from, digital marketing will help you monitor the performance of your online ads, allowing you to see impressions, engagement rate, cost per click, and many more insightful metrics.

See For Yourself How Effective Digital Marketing Can Be

For small business owners, digital marketing presents a more cost-effective and flexible solution to increasing brand awareness, engaging with customers, and evaluating what specific strategies are best for your business. Trust us – if Don and the rest of the Mad Men boys had the ability to target their audiences and engage with them directly, they’d be all over it like a bottle of Aspirin in the morning!

If you’d like to learn more about how digital marketing can boost your business, contact Triton Commerce today! Our digital marketing experts will be able to thoroughly analyze your current digital presence and recommend you the necessary marketing solutions to help your company thrive.

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