Why You Need Digital And Traditional Marketing
In today’s digital age, marketers have a plethora of marketing tactics to choose from. From billboards that put general brand messages in front of a wide audience to personalized emails that zero in on a customer’s past purchasing habits, each option offers distinct advantages, opportunities and limitations.
Let’s break down how these digital and traditional marketing tactics work, and how they can work together to create a successful marketing strategy.
What Is Digital Marketing?
Digital marketing encompasses any sort of marketing that can be tracked online. This can mean creating organic social media content, Meta ads, ongoing promotional emails or Search Engine Optimization (SEO)-driven content like blogs and case studies. Brands that emphasize digital marketing tactics focus on cultivating a highly specified audience while gaining tangible results in the form of website clicks and views.
Advantages Of Digital Marketing
- It can be a budget-friendly option for smaller businesses.
- You can cater to demographics that directly lead to more traction.
Our work for Critter Control, a pest control service based in Pittsburgh, focused on digital marketing in order to reach a particular audience — people needing pest control services in a specific area. Through SEO-driven content and Google ads, we were able to effectively reach their target audience and increase their digital reach.
Challenges Of Digital Marketing
- Many platforms on social media sites have come and gone, so using them for marketing purposes can be fickle.
- Some digital marketing strategies, such as SEO-based content marketing, require consistency and constant adjustment in order to be effective, which means more time and manpower.
What Is Traditional Marketing?
Traditional marketing is any marketing done in print. Posters, newspaper ads, billboards and radio ads are all parts of traditional marketing and can be used to reach a broad audience in geographically defined areas.
Advantages Of Traditional Marketing
- In a sea of digital ads, traditional marketing tactics can make a bigger splash if your brand caters specifically to a local audience.
- People aren’t plugged in 24/7. Traditional marketing can reach audience members as they’re living life offline.
When working with Lake Eye Associates, an eye care company, our team increased traction by tapping into traditional channels such as newspapers and magazines, which reach an audience that still responds to analog advertising.
Challenges Of Traditional Marketing
- Audience engagement for traditional marketing cannot be tracked in the same way as digital marketing, so it can be more difficult to identify if a tactic is successful.
- Brands with smaller budgets may find it more useful to depend on digital marketing at first in order to directly see what is working and what isn’t.
A Marketing Match Made In Heaven
To market effectively, you need to know where your intended audience would look for your brand. Would they look up a specific service online? Or would advertising in a localized area make sense for your audience? Each marketing tactic offers different benefits for a brand and its audience.
Orlando Ballet is a perfect example of how to use both traditional and digital marketing to your advantage. We used traditional marketing, like beautiful billboards and bold magazine ads, to build general awareness about upcoming shows throughout the local area. In tandem, Meta Ads promoted special ticket offers and discounts to a more specifically targeted audience including website visitors and people seeking entertainment in Orlando.
Traditional marketing makes a meaningful impact on local audiences, while digital marketing makes it easy to see exactly who you are and aren’t reaching. Together, they can be used to cultivate the highest amount of traction for your brand.
At Think Integrated, our expert team of digital marketers and designers has years of experience with both paid and organic strategies, enabling us to speak for your brand across various platforms. We offer a range of digital marketing strategies so you can design a full-service package that fits your business, industry, and target audience. To get started, contact us today.