Mouprise.com

The Great Debate: Digital Vs Traditional Marketing

The Great Debate: Digital Marketing vs. The Fall of the Mailbox

I attended a Marketing function in Sydney in June this year hosted by the popular Real Estate platform, RateMyAgent, and led by CEO, Mark Armstrong. His presentation aimed to address the evolution of communicating with an audience based on how quickly the business environment is changing today. This is a relevant and difficult debate indeed!

While this event was specific to Real Estate, it is a topical discussion taking place across every industry and every market in the world in every boardroom and strategy meeting: digital versus traditional marketing.

Where do we spend our valuable budget to get the most out of engaging our audiences and achieving our organizational goals?

So, it’s finally time to look at both sides and get to the bottom of this debate.

Where are our customers?

Effective marketing is all about your audience. This is never up for discussion as we all know it to be true. Knowing that, it may be time to step back and consider that age old question: have we thought about our customer?

Recent research shows that 87% of consumers now look to online reviews to determine the quality of a local business, and I’m sure the statistic is pretty similar in how people look for product information as well. This is a huge change in behavior from just a couple of years ago. Organizations didn’t start this, consumers did. We did it. We as people are game changers, and today’s organizations are very naive if they don’t believe that people are already doing most of their research before they even contact your business.

As an example

Mark Armstrong said the other day that his son needed an Internet router for his house, and at first he had no idea what a router was. In about ten minutes online, he became a pro with all the brands, prices, and specs, then went straight to a local store, went to the shelf, and bought it without talking to anyone in the store.

This is very indicative of the modern client.

The digital interview

Today, it is ‘the digital interview’; in other words, searching online to find more information about a person or company without actually contacting them. Online dating, LinkedIn, Facebook, websites – it’s all about research before you meet in person. About 70% of clients make up their minds before that stage, which is something companies need to accept and adapt to.

While statistics are always fickle, all you need to do is think about your own customer behavior and you’ll instantly know this to be true. Rarely does a customer walk in unprepared or without information.

they’re all online

How often do we go to a bar or restaurant and find everyone staring at a screen? It is a sad reality, but a reality after all. That’s where your customer is! On your digital device.

People are not looking for reviews and information in your physical office or in your marketing material, but online. Therefore, being there for your audience is absolutely crucial to the success of your business.
It’s about your audience, after all.

The three arguments: digital marketing vs. traditional

There are three main considerations when deciding the pros and cons of new digital marketing versus more traditional methods like letterbox or print.

(1) Cost
(2) Efficiency
(3) Responsibility

COST

As a general rule, the more traditional methods tend to be much more expensive in many ways. Materials like these are expensive to design, print, and deliver. Now look at the digital methods: it’s almost instant, requires little design due to templates, and the reach isn’t physically limited, meaning you can get ten times the exposure for around a tenth of the cost.

They seem light years apart on the cost front.

For example, a client recently came to see me and told me that the only advertising he was doing was on the back of local buyers’ listings, which was not giving him any tangible results, but was still costing him a few hundred dollars. dollars a month. For a fraction of this cost, I put your ads on Facebook and Google, and you immediately noticed the difference in leads generated!

EFFECTIVENESS

How long do banner ads, print media and even conventional advertising last?
Think of a mailbox specifically. Printed material sits in an office, then in a mailbox all day. Then, when your audience gets home, are they really engaged as they check their mailbox, stumbling through work? They come home with the purchases or fight with the children. This stuff literally takes a second to capture them amongst the rest of the clutter, and it’s very easy to ignore. That’s not to say it doesn’t work occasionally, but the chance of compromise is very low.

Now consider digital ads. It stays online much longer, and due to the customizable nature of online targeting, it can show up when the customer is most engaged and in the right headspace. You find them on their terms, like when they’re on their phone killing time, or browsing a website, etc. They can also interact with it by clicking on it, looking at it, zooming in on it, saving it, and much more.

By comparison, think of when you hear a radio ad or watch a TV ad: you have to remember and remember the ad at a later time for it to have any impact. This means your audience has to make the effort to remember to act on it at a later time when it’s more relevant, like when they get out of the car. What makes it worse nowadays is that we are constantly bombarded by advertisements and messages, which means that it is very difficult to keep a specific advertisement in mind. You can’t trust your customer to remember the message; it should make it easy and within reach.

Digitally, your customer can fully engage at the same point they experience the content, which means much higher engagement.

RESPONSIBILITY

What technique really works? What have you actually been through and metrics to measure it? If you ask most organizations that spend their budget annually on postage, for example, they’ll say things like “$50,000 a year,” and then if you ask them “does this work?” all they do is shrug. .

The problem is that some companies fall into a “this is the way we’ve always done it” routine. This represents a worrying shortfall in our perspective and priorities. Our industries are too tough and our competitors too smart for us to continue to think this way.

On the digital marketing side, with retargeting marketing and tracking cookies, online communication and advertisements can serve their communication to more defined and much better aligned demographics. Your ads are smarter because they learn about your audience’s behavior and adapt to how they consume content, then determine where and when to best display your marketing.

The three battlefields of marketing

Since the 1960s, there has been an evolution of the marketing and communication battlefields based on how we build our customer database.

(1) The physical address

Organizations struggled to obtain the physical addresses of customers in order to communicate with them physically, be it with a salesperson, knocking on the door or by contacting mailboxes.

(2) The email address

Then, emails went through an effective phase and companies scrambled to fill their databases with everyone’s @.com address. However, nowadays, we have found this to be much less effective due to the amount of spam everyone receives on a daily basis.

(3) The address of the computer

People live on their mobiles and tablets now, this is where they are today. The battlefield has become an online IP address-based exposure. Creating a database of tracking cookies has become the battlefield of today’s marketing.

While these IP addresses are kept private due to privacy laws and you never get the real details, it doesn’t matter as you can rest assured that this technology is getting your message across to the right people. Then success tracking comes from the metrics and analytics behind these interactions.
The core essence of marketing hasn’t changed in any of the previous battlegrounds: it’s always been about reaching your audience. The only thing that changes is how, and this is a direct result of how the market and consumer behavior is evolving.

What does Digital Marketing have then?

Digital marketing is effective because it is customizable. You can target specific demographics to ensure the best audience receives your ads and content at the right time.

The following are three combined ways how digital marketing finds its audience.

(1) Rent

Google tags computers with a geographic location. While mailbox drops can do the same thing, placement is where the comparison ends. Digital can combine placement with the following two qualifiers to ensure your message is tailored, rather than mass distributed to just anyone.

For example, in the Real Estate industry, around 70% of the residences are controlled by investors, which means that the mailboxes are ineffective because the people who receive the materials are not the ones who make the decisions and, therefore, Therefore, they are not in the hands of the right people. The digital equivalents would use the location and the next two to make sure it is sent to the correct customers.

(2) Browsing history

It is the above fact that allows digital marketing to take you one step further. Your browser history paints a picture of the type of person your customer is and their interests, which means ads may be served that match this. It’s not a perfectly precise science, however, due to the cost effectiveness of digital marketing, it has a much better cut and hit rate.

(3) Tracking and remarketing cookies

As you move from one website to another, tracking cookies are embedded in your web browser to enable content to be tailored specifically to you, so you don’t receive irrelevant messages. This allows advertising content to be shown to a relevant audience rather than just anyone.

Where is marketing headed next?

Since digital marketing is following your ideal customer and providing them with relevant content, it seems to be working effectively right now. However, if I know marketing the way I think I do, the next stage is going to be empathetic retargeting marketing, which means showing the ad not just anywhere on any website, but whenever the person is browsing. contextually relevant material.

For example, when your customer, who has already been identified as interested in Real Estate, lands on a Real Estate or property website, the ad will be displayed, unlike how it is now, where it appears on any website in the world. that they can be Looking at.

It’s about being in front of the right customer when they’re in the right frame of mind.