Business Strategy: Traditional vs. Digital Marketing

Are you ready to join us on a knowledge-adventure as we depict the true essence of marketing in today’s time?

In this business strategy comparison blog we’ll be tackling the likes of traditional marketing techniques, and digital marketing methods. As well as which approach would best fit specific businesses and industries.

First let’s clarify ‘how‘ and ‘why‘ marketing came to be, and how influential AND essential marketing truly is for businesses and their journey towards the top: SUCCESS.

Business and Marketing: Understanding the Correlation

Before we get into the nitty gritty of the marketing world, let’s get some facts cleared up by some reliable, informative, straight-to-the-point, and more importantly, trusted sources.

History of Marketing – When was the term Marketing first used? No one really knows the exact date or timestamp for the business-world altering discovery. However, Entrepreneur did some research a while back and found a nicely presented infographic created by Hubspot that presents data from the 1400s all the way up the 2010s. As stated by Entrepreneur:

“From the first magazine published in 1741, to the first billboards in the late 1800s, the art of getting the public’s attention and turning it into sales has gone through a dramatic evolution over the past few hundred years.”

Moving forward with the data gathered from Hubspot’s historical infographic we can see that a big impact in the world of business with regards to marketing was the printing revolution brought by the German inventor, Johannes Gutenberg.

In 1450 Gutenberg innovated the movable type, to the point of being easily reproduced by the masses. This in return produced a domino-effect which led to the birth of printed advertising due to the accessibility of mass printing.

Content Marketing – The consistent style that continues to connect businesses with consumers. When regarding the essence of content marketing, Forbes presents a clear view:

“The key word here is “valuable.” It’s what changes this definition from one that could describe almost any form of advertising or marketing. You can tell if a piece of content is the sort that could be part of a content marketing campaign if people seek it out, if people want to consume it, rather than avoiding it.”

Moving forward: content marketing is your efforts as a business person to connect with your potential consumers ON THEIR LEVEL. It’s not about you – it’s about them. What content do they enjoy? It doesn’t matter if you don’t like cute cuddly animal videos. If your customers are #1 fans of fuzzy baby creatures, you should try to compromise and use their desires to connect to you and your product.

Purpose of Marketing in Business – Customer Reach, Sales, Brand Awareness & Recognition, are but a few of the more apparent reasons for promoting. You want to reach customers (Customer Reach) so that they can purchase your product (Sales), and not that of your competitor as they can recognize that your business is more trustable (Brand Recognition), and produces consistently high quality products (Brand Awareness) no matter what.

The Marketing Budget – Every business needs one. Whether you know it or not, it’s a necessity – but why exactly? There are many answers to help clarify the importance of investing in your business with regards to marketing. Some reasons include, but are not limited to the following: Brand Awareness, Brand Recognition, Matching up Brand Identity with Brand Image, Building Relationships with Customers, and last but not least: SALES. There is no perfect equation that tells you what you should put aside for promoting your business. However, Entrepreneur suggests that:

“For companies that have been in business for one to five years, we suggest using 12 to 20 percent of your gross revenue or projected revenue on marketing.“

Back to the Basics: Traditional Marketing

Direct Mail – You’ve Got Mail – old school style. Morning and evening routines of reading the newspaper of the day can easily be accompanied with direct mail promotional products. You might not be aware of it, but that local car wash flyer coupon you received in your mailbox – that’s a perfect example of direct mail marketing.

Print – Reach potential customers where THEY frequent. Supermarkets, Salons, Restaurants, Coffee Shops, Libraries, Schools – so many places, so little time. This is exactly why people began printing posters of events and started putting them up at more publicly-seen spaces. More visibility, and less work. An example hereof could be that of an up-and-coming vegan clothing brand promoting their store opening at places such as vegetarian restaurants and animal rescue centers.

Broadcast – Introducing the RADIO and TELEVISION-influenced consumer behavior and business connection. Loyal TV Show fans are the ones who might notice this the most. At-home-relaxing  radio listeners too. The biggest target market though is the MOVIE GOERS – think of all the commercials you’ve seen mixed with ‘coming soon’ movie previews that reflect the same sort of interests as the movie type you are about to watch. EX: alcohol products and Rated R movies, couples spa or dining specials matched with romantic movies, and new kids toys showed before a family-friendly movie.

The New Kid on the Block: Digital Marketing

Digital Marketing, Online Marketing, Internet Marketing, and E-Marketing, are a few ways people describe, as stated by Business Gateway:

“using digital technologies such as websites, mobile devices and social networking to help reach your customers, create awareness of your brand and sell your goods or services.“

PPC –  Pay Per Click ads, as defined by Network Solutions:

“involves creating and placing ads in the margins of the search engine result pages. Many businesses use these ads to persuade people to visit their website. In order for a PPC campaign to be effective, you, as an advertiser, must bid on keywords that best define your business. Your ads will appear when someone searches for products or services using the keywords that you placed a bid on. You only pay when a visitor clicks on your ad – hence, Pay Per Click.” 

Websites and Web Design – Blogging, branding your business & building trust (building a relationship with clients) via the passive-aggressive methods of design, converting web visitors into real-life buyers, and selling products & services directly online are some creative ways people make use of websites and web design to market their business, reach customers, and SEAL THE DEAL when it comes to sales.

SEO – Be the first to be seen by searchers, a.k.a potential customers! Nowadays its  a very common occurrence for the following sentence to come up within conversations: “Wait, let me Google it.” Thanks to the great growth of the internet, we, as online users, have real-time access to almost, if not all, kinds of information and answers to questions.

New knowledge is readily available from the ease of a few keywords typed into a search engine such as: *Google, Bing, and Yahoo. The results you get when you search for something online – the first items that you get to see – are thanks to SEO (Search Engine Optimization) efforts. *To name a few of the popular search engines online that are used on a daily basis all around the globe.

Social Media – Establishing an ONLINE PRESENCE  in order to: gain traffic for your website, build up on your brand awareness, recognition & trust via social networking, as well as promote specific products or services, and to do this  in a more casual way – not to mention from the comforts of your own casa – are reasons why PEOPLE LOVE SOCIAL MEDIA marketing. Notable though is that many people forget that different social media platforms call for different actions and different ways of engaging with potential customers.

However, with the varying ROI (Return on Investment) results, and the real-time feedback  you can receive from consumers, your social media action plan can easily be adjusted and improved – you just have to be on the look out of what is working, and what isn’t.

*Want to know what skills are considered as being prime for being the BEST SOCIAL MEDIA MANAGER? – Click here to explore.

Email Marketing – E-Newsletters, email blasts, collecting data to get to know your consumers better and to improve your business via reviews and surveys, building email lists for future business ventures (EX: hotel owner/entrepreneur – wants to  promote new business venture into the restaurant or retail industry) – these are a few examples of email marketing methods and goals. An article produced by Oberlo titled, Email Marketing 101: A Cheat Sheet for Email Marketing That Works, elaborates on the definition of email marketing:

“Email marketing can take many forms, but at its most basic, it consists of sending content directly to your customers’ and potential customers’ inboxes with the aim of increasing sales. Typically, your email list is going to be made up of people who visited your site and provided you with their email addresses. This can happen because they opted to sign up for your newsletter or entered it when making a purchase at your store.”

Mobile Marketing – People are using their mobile devices more than ever in present times to find quick and factual answers to their everyday questions. The amount of online users that are choosing to make use of mobile devices compared to desktops and laptops for surfing the web is increasing every year. This shouldn’t come as a shock though. Today’s people in our current society, and their personal mobile devices are so together-all-the-time, that you’d almost guess they were identical twins.

Think I’m exaggerating? People – and I’m no innocent bystander here either – take their phones EVERYWHERE: to bed, to the dining table, in your back pocket while on the go, and let’s not forget one of the most private of rooms, yet frequently accompanied by you and your iPhone, the bathroom. Thus it’s almost a given that mobile marketing is rising – it’s how you can REACH CONSUMERS ANYTIME OF THE DAY, besides bedtime.

The Deciding Variable: the Target Market

Without-a-doubt, the marketing methods that you decide to choose to invest in for your business depend on ‘one’ crucial aspect: YOUR TARGET MARKET.

Your target market is the starting point to your marketing methods. Who are you trying to reach and connect with for your business? If you need help defining your target market – take a peek at this article for some guidance.

When comparing the two marketing approaches, we can see that there are both WINS and LOSSES. For example some pluses for the classic ways would be that the tangible and nostalgia-inducing materials tend to win over more people with regards to the time they’re willing to spend on an ad, and creating a greater connection with regards to memory and emotional response to the promo product.

While the new tech-driven methods win when it comes to time efficiency and money, as many digital marketing means can be done with the help of a laptop and WiFi access a.k.a your own personal portable office.

As for the downsides – some downers for traditional marketing could include  a negative impact on your carbon footprint with regards to print media and direct-mail. As well as ads that are too generalized and thus lose their spark of special interest.

On the other hand, the means of digital marketing lacks in the in-person connection, ’cause as much as people are innovating digital techniques to simulate real life experiences (think about VR tech) – you can’t recreate the actual REAL EXPERIENCE.

However, to restate the essential part of deciding which marketing methods would be best for your business, TAKE A GOOD (& IN-DEPTH) LOOK AT YOUR TARGET MARKET to help clear up what the most optimal techniques would be.

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*Tip from the CaribMedia Crew: Don’t be afraid to try out different strategies in order to find out what works best too. You can make use of the advice and recommendations of others, but remember that generalized rules don’t always match up with the reality of niche markets!

We hope you enjoyed our analysis on the varying business marketing strategies, and that the blog read was insightful for YOU.

On behalf of our team at CaribMedia we wish you the best of luck with your marketing methods and business strategies – Until next time!

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Published on April 19th 2018. Written by Megan Rojer.