Traditional marketing or digital marketing? Which is better?
Many people will tell you that traditional marketing is “old-fashioned” and that digital marketing is the only way to go. This viewpoint may be simplistic. I believe that digital marketing complements a traditional marketing plan. It is not an “either/or” rather, it is “and/both.”
The goal is to reach your customers or prospects whether they are online or offline.
With that said, we will focus on digital marketing techniques in this column and just touch on traditional marketing. We mean traditional marketing no disrespect.
Before you spend any money on digital marketing, it’s important to ask yourself a few key questions. What are your goals? Who is your target audience? What budget do you have to work with? These are just a sampling of questions that you might want to ask yourself.
Answering these questions will help you create a more effective digital marketing framework and avoid wasting your hard-earned money.
Let’s look at a couple of these questions briefly.
What is the win for you?
This sounds like an obvious question, but it gets overlooked or brushed aside. Many times I will hear goals like “we want to grow our web page views” or “we want to get more leads” or “increase the number of likes we have.”
In most cases, your company isn’t in the business of growing page views or leads. You are likely to want to grow revenue or increase your customer base. So create goals for your digital tactics that are SMART – Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-based.
Here’s an example – increase online revenue by 15 percent from $100,000 to $115,000 by the end of Q3 2022. Without specific, measurable goals, it will doom your strategy to fail. Take the time to assess your business goals and create goals for your online presence that align with those objectives.
Who are you trying to reach?
Before you spend a dime on advertising, you need to know your audience. You need to know where they are consuming their content.
Knowing where they are spending their time is critical to a successful advertising campaign.
You want to reach your audience where they’re consuming content online.
What is your budget to achieve those goals?
You should know going into the project how much you will spend and what return you can expect from that spend.
Digital marketing doesn’t have to break the bank, and you need to be prudent when building out your budget. But if somebody tells you they are going to get you 500 new sales for $25 of digital advertising, buyer beware.
Know your goals, know the money you are going to spend, and know the return that you are expecting.
What’s Next?
Next week we look at some newer trends in search engine optimization (SEO) and how it seems to be everchanging, and just what that means for your website.
Until next time, remember that you deserve marketing that actually works.
