Ever since the boom of internet technology, digital marketing has grown at a rapid pace, a trend that will undoubtedly continue in the future. Businesses must adapt to changing consumer behaviors and utilize the latest technologies in order to improve ROI from a marketing budget. If you’ve focused most of your marketing campaigns with traditional marketing methods in the past, you might be surprised by the many reasons why digital marketing can potentially be more successful and cost effective than traditional marketing.

Adobe’s take on Digital Marketing vs. Traditional Marketing

1. Digital Marketing is More Cost Effective with a Higher ROI

In many ways, digital marketing is more cost effective than traditional marketing and yields a higher ROI or return on investment, due largely to digital marketing strategies that allow the marketer to target a demographic or user that may already be interested in their product. With many different digital marketing strategies available to make use, you can tailor them to your target audience and others as a means of reaching a wider audience.

When taking a look at the costs associated with digital marketing in comparison to more traditional marketing like a TV ad, digital marketing techniques like search engine optimization, pay-per-click, content marketing, and social media can cost as little as a couple hundred/thousand a month in comparison to a single TV ad that can cost at least tens of thousands of dollars for a basic 30-second spot (in the middle of a work day). Prime time slots that will show your ad during a popular TV show or sporting events can cost you millions of dollars, which isn’t a feasible solution for most businesses.

Even in the event that you avoid TV ads and are considering utilizing other types of traditional marketing, the price of newspaper and magazine advertisements can also fill out your entire marketing budget and often don’t compare to the reach of most digital marketing techniques. For example, a full-page black-and-white advertisement in the Wall Street Journal or New York Times can cost over $100,000 — while placing ads in smaller newspapers and magazines will cost less, it also means that the circulation will be drastically reduced from that of a larger publications.

On the other hand, even the smallest and most affordable of digital marketing techniques can attract a larger audience if conducted with an intelligent data driven marketing campaign. Creating a page or account on a social media website such as Facebook or Twitter requires very little initial investment and can help sell your brand to a larger audience than traditional marketing at a very low cost as long as you are sure to actively participate and engage with your audience on these platforms. If you’d prefer to leave this digital marketing to a professional digital marketing company (cough.. cough.. Bryt Designs), marketing plans can cost as little as a few hundred to a couple thousand dollars a month (and of course, can go much higher than that depending on your budget/goals) but have the potential of reaching a limitless amount of customers.

2. Accessible Across All Media Devices & Types

In the world of ever evolving technology and mobile devices, digital marketing can be displayed across all devices and media types, allowing you to reach a much larger consumer base than you otherwise would with traditional marketing. If you decide to run a TV ad and have the money to do so during a regular season NFL game, the leads/sales you could generate is limited by the portion of your target audience might be watching at any given time during the game and because these ads are extremely expensive, as is making a commercial in the first place.

With the clear reduction in TV viewership and newspaper readership over the last decade, the costly traditional advertisements that you pay for may not even reach as wide of an audience as they once did. More and more people are accessing internet media via mobile devices and less so through traditional methods like newspapers and magazines. While a newspaper or magazine advertisement can only be read by someone who purchases that specific magazine or newspaper, all devices with access to the internet can also access your digital content.

3. A Local Presence & Global Reach

A distinct benefit of digital marketing in comparison to traditional marketing is that digital marketing content can be targeted on a local demographic while still having the ability to acquire exposure globally, as content can be accessible from all around the world via the internet.

Let’s say you have a digital marketing campaign that’s designed to highlight an event that your business is hosting in downtown Los Angeles a couple of months from now.

While your targeted marketing efforts would be seen by local residents of Los Angeles, the city plays host to millions of tourists each month, some of which might notice your advertisement online and decide to attend the event if they are traveling to the city at the same time.

Even though the core of your targeted audience may be local, your company benefits from the global reach of a digital marketing presence. Traditional advertising campaigns are limited to a local audience, which will invariably limit your growth potential.

4. Complex Customer Data Analytics

Digital marketers have tools that provide greater customer insight and behavior, allowing them to refine data and discover specific opportunities in the consumer segment. These tools provide you with exhaustive data that can assist you in tweaking your next digital marketing campaign in a manner that ensures that you bring in new customers and satisfy your current ones.

There are a whole host of complex metrics that can help you in identifying the best route for your next digital marketing campaign, metrics that aren’t available with traditional marketing methods. These metrics are available through Google Analytics (terms which are more readily understandable with this Google Analytics cheat sheet). If you wish to know how effective each page of your website is, there are many metrics that allow you to measure the performance of your marketing strategy. For example, the page visit duration metric allows you to see exactly how long visitors remained on a page of your website, which gives you insight into what’s working with your marketing campaign and what doesn’t.

Traffic volume metrics can help you better understand whether or not your website is maintaining the interest of your customers, while also allowing you to identify the amount of traffic you obtain from search engines, referrals from other websites, and direct traffic that reaches your website. Likely the most important metrics provided through Google Analytics are the ones that indicate your sales funnel fall off, which is primarily centered around bounce rates that involve the percentage of customers who leave your website on any given page.

Although the creation of a sales funnel is largely left up to you, it’s basically a funnel that starts at the top with your landing page and ends with whichever page you want people to visit the most, such as a checkout page or sign-up page for a newsletter. By implementing the bounce rates into the funnel, you’ll be able to identify when the majority of site visitors leave your website. For instance, if 70 percent of site visitors leave your website when on the home page, this means that only 30 percent of visitors remain, many of which might leave in the pages before the one that sells your service or product. This metric will allow you to identify which pages of your website may need to be improved and optimized for a better user experience.

5. Higher Conversion Rates

Since digital marketers have tools that provide greater insight, we are able to make intelligent marketing decisions that cater to the needs of our customers, which is essential to increase conversion rates (when a “visitor” become a “customer”). By better understanding the most popular elements of your website or brand, you can focus your digital marketing on these elements, creating an increase in positive interest for your brand or business.

Advertising to a specific audience that actually wants your product/service promotes an increase in conversion rates and sales, which is something that traditional marketing is often unable to accomplish on its own. With more focused digital marketing, you can be confident that your marketing campaign will be effective among the customers that are most likely to purchase the product or service that you offer.

6. Content That Produces Results that Last

Digital content that’s released with promotion via digital channels has a substantial amount of potential to achieve initial success on release while also remaining on the website for future potential gains via search engine optimization and other digital marketing techniques. Any content you place online has the option of lasting for a lengthy period of time, especially if you put in the effort required to keep the piece of content visible and popular, which can be done through search engine optimization of the content and overall website.

Unlike a 30-second TV spot that costs tens of thousands of dollars at a minimum, digital content lives on your website and has enormous potential to produce results for years to come, while TV spots and newspaper ads fade into obscurity, likely never to be seen again by your customers. Lasting marketing content can be a huge boon to your business, as it means that your monthly marketing budget extends past the original month in which it’s spent.

7. Digital Marketing Promotes User Engagement & Brand Loyalty

In most cases, digital content is active and promotes a call to action or the user’s intent to take action, which can include everything from commenting, sharing or subscribing. When the user takes action and gets involved with your brand, they are more likely to not only purchase your products, but also promote your brand and continue to stay engaged with your future digital content, allowing you to foster a certain amount of brand loyalty, a tool that can be extremely rewarding for your business in the long run.

When it comes to traditional marketing, loyalty programs can be extremely complex and costly to maintain and execute successfully (creation of physical marketing material, establishing distribution methods, CRM, etc.), making it more difficult for your business to sustain its marketing efforts. Digital brand loyalty programs can be put in place to keep your users engaged with the brand and promote sales opportunities (many of which are already built into the various digital marketing platforms). Digital brand loyalty programs provide users with the sense that they are being rewarded for their loyalty while also allowing you to promote current sales or benefits to the customers. It’s a win-win situation that won’t make much of a dent in your marketing budget but could generate substantial returns in years to come.

Looking to begin your digital marketing journey? Have questions?

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