Marketing Has Gone Digital. Have You?

Using the digital tools & channels to develop a mutually beneficial relationship with prospects, leads and customers that’s a Digital Marketing as defined by Ryan Diess and Hennebery R, 2017.

Through the development of this relationship, the customer will response to digital communication through a journey from Attention, Interest, Desire to Action – AIDA Model, which explained carefully by Chaffey and Smith, 2017.

On other hand Traditional marketing is a type of marketing that is hard to ignore and we encounter it on daily basis, although all it’s drawbacks, but there are many segments/personas love to engage through. It’s come under the following five major categories:

• Print (magazines, newspapers, etc.)
• Broadcast (TV, radio, etc.)
• Direct Mail (catalogues, postcards, etc.)
• Telephone (telemarketing, sms marketing, etc.)
• Outdoor (billboards, fliers, etc.)

For Many years ago, the traditional marketing was the main & only media that available for an organization to get closer to their customers. Nowadays, with the booming of digital media and high dependence on our smartphones/digital tools, it’s a fundamental to integrate both concepts or maybe totally depend on Digital Marketing in specific business or market, who knows?!

I will present 4 main differences between digital & traditional marketing and how they can influence the customers when searching/buying products online. 

Interaction/engagement:

Digital marketing offers a great opportunity for interaction with customers, and digital media predominantly follow Pull mechanism, where the customer usually initiate contact with brand either seeking for information or click on ads (Chaffey and Smith, 2017), which put a burden on a digital marketer using proper tactics to have a good visibility for ads across search engines.

Since the conversation/Interaction is a fundamental for any marketer to engage with audience, digital marketing provides a wide range of communication tools to listen/interact/speak with audiences. While Traditional marketing is a one-way street where a business is able to broadcast a message “Push Mechanism” to audiences who are less defined than digital (Chaffey and Smith, 2017). that’s make this approach limited interactive with the customer and one of main drawbacks of traditional marketing.

 Targeting Affinity:

Digital marketing enables marketer to analyze the data of customers based on gender, age, interests, location, and even past purchasing behavior. This allows campaign messages to hit the ideal target audiences efficiently and provide more flexibility to switch between preferred channels.

 e.g. Geo targeting permits to show ads only in the specified location which have chosen (Debbie, 2014), consider google/Bing/Facebook networks that provide location targeting features which saving the cost. Another example is, Search engine which empower marketer to target segment with a defined need based on their location/keywords, that’s make the digital marketing more cost effective and can approach the niche prospects who are highly likely to be interested. Traditional media didn’t offer such affinity easily and even unable to easily track whether it reach the right target audiences or not. As a marketer using traditional ways we will be struggle to have a quick & accurate feedback for you campaign in short time.

Adaptability:

With the increased accessibility to technology, the way that marketers communicate with their audiences has been changing at rapid rate, which couldn’t afford easily with traditional media, as it is very hard & timely consuming. Digital marketing offers marketer advanced tools to easily change the content of ads through bottom click which provides quick engagement and adaptation to the current customer or a new segment recently appeared.

On the other hand, the traditional marketing will be timely consuming to change even a letter from a billboard of your recent campaign, and surly will incur a high cost.

 Imagine a marketer publish PPC campaigns and finds new trendy keywords in specific region, it needs minutes to modify the keyword-list and adapt the campaign.

Personalization:

“In high tech world, people long for high touch. The more social we are, the more we want things that are just made for us” Kotler, 2016.

Backed by big-data analytics, the products become more personalized and the service become more personal. Digital marketing media allows marketer to easily access more information about the customers, their purchasing history, preferences & even responses to promotion which is a vital to build a database to offer personalized content or suggest relevant products –cross selling/up-selling – based on customer’s preferences. Thanks to social media, google analytics and data management platforms to generate such valuable data about audiences. Campaigns can successfully leverage this data to create personalized emails/individualized experiences which will moving the prospects upward on ladder of engagement and impose customer loyalty increasing

A traditional media couldn’t deliver any form of personalization as its not interactive and therefore has no way for registering user preferences/interests (Diaz, 2015).

Welcome for your comments and discussion

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Resources;

1. Chaffey, Dave and Smith, PR. (2017) Digital Marketing Excellence. 5th edition. USA, Routledge. 
2. Diess, R. and Henneberry, R. (2017) Digital Marketing for dummies. 1st edition. New jersey, USA. John wiley & sons, Inc. 
3. Kotler, Philip. (2017) Marketing 4.0 moving from traditional to digital. New jersey, USA, John wiley & sons, Inc.
4. Debbie, derum. (2014) Online advertising success. New York, USA, Bee Fresh Publishing LLC.
5. Nesamoney, Diaz. (2015) Personalized digital advertising. Edinburgh Gate, UK, Pearson education limited.