Can Digital Marketing Replace Traditional Marketing?

If you consider, the word “replacing” as the complete elimination of traditional marketing. I would say no. While I have seen and heard of organizations slowly moving more money towards digital platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, there will always be a need for traditional marketing. The reason for that is because traditional marketing mediums (i.e. television commercials, radio ads, billboards, flyers, postcards, newspaper ads, etc.) are just one more tool to get in front of your customers. While your customers may not enjoy the disruption if it captures their attention quickly the odds are they will be more likely to recognize your product, service, or brand more easily the next time they see your ad or logo.

However, where traditional marking falls short is its ability to determine who is seeing it. If your ad is being seen by people who do not have a need/want for it, have an inability to buy it, or are not the type of person you want to be selling it to, then it can be seen as you wasting money. The other side of the argument can be that while the ad may be seen by someone that would not buy, that very same person may share what they saw to someone who may buy. Which is true enough and could potentially happen if there was a good offer. On the other hand, using digital marketing can allow you to display your ads to only those people who either meet your targeting criteria or are actively looking for the type of products and services you offer.

One other way that traditional marketing does not do as well is determining the true performance of the ad campaign. While you are able to run a post-performance research study after the ad campaign has run its course, it is time-consuming and costs extra money. This is where digital marketing outperforms. Through the analytical tools that different platforms have in place, as well as the ones you can install on your website, you are able to determine how well things are working. Best of all, if it is under-performing you can quickly pause the campaign, make changes, and relaunch it.

At the end of the day, if you are willing and able to flood the market with your brand on multiple platforms and mediums you have a better opportunity to generate the highest volume of leads, brand recognition, and become the top of mind brand for your category.

For small businesses, even though traditional marketing may be out of reach, you can use digital marketing to grow your brand considerably on a small budget. In addition, you have the benefit of knowing that every decision is data driven.

As your business grows, so should the amount you spend on advertising so you can continue to grow. Many small business owners continue to forget that the biggest players in your industries are the ones spending the most money on advertising. Why? Because it works!

However, to get the best performance out of your paid advertising campaigns you should be actively growing your natural organic performance. What this means for social media platforms is to increase the number of followers, likes, comments, and shares you get. For search engines, this means that you should be actively optimizing your pages to increase in the rankings.

You can do it, all it takes is effort and a willingness to try. If you ever need help, reach out and I would be more than willing to help.