The rise of social media has marketers scrambling over which platform to prioritize. Should they focus on traditional marketing or should they spend more resources on digital marketing? And would it still be a good idea to support both?
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On the one hand, traditional marketing is your basic advertising platform. These are the print ads in newspapers and magazines, posters and billboards, TV and radio commercials, as well as direct mail. Digital marketing, on the other hand, is every advertising space on the internet, as well as social media.
There are key factors on why traditional marketing is losing favor over digital marketing. The most important aspects of this trend include price and the ability to quantify data.
Major platforms of traditional marketing are known to be costly. For example, a brand can spend thousands of dollars producing a 30-second commercial and spend even more on prime commercial spots. Other mediums such as newspapers are also on the decline as more readers shift their source of news from paper to digital versions of the same periodicals.
Traditional marketing also has a hard time quantifying data. It’s not always as simple as a guaranteed 20 million households watching Super Bowl commercials. It is quite hard to measure the success of commercials and how they influence would-be buyers or possible customers.
Given these two major constraints, a brand can utilize digital marketing and use a fraction of the cost buying commercial slots and simply target audiences that have a higher rate of engagement. Digital marketing can also track engagements far better than traditional marketing and can be done in real-time as well.
Traditional marketing will always have a solid base. Marketers should revisit whether traditional marketing will be the right call for their brands. If so, they may choose to complement traditional marketing strategies with digital marketing to get the most for their product.
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Known to be a health and fitness advocate, Brian Carr is also a founding member of The Grid, a group of websites that design themselves with artificial intelligence. For more on Brian and his interests, visit this blog.
