Digital marketing is obviously an umbrella term for a complete range of advertising approaches and mediums. Naturally, as the name suggests, they are all online, but even this definition does little to narrow down the many ways there are to conduct it.

The online space offers some popular advertising retail with each allotment offering something unique or beneficial that helps brands and marketers get a competitive edge. From social media marketing to something as commonplace as company websites, the various forms of digital marketing all offer several key characteristics that make them so popular, and they are characteristics not exactly shared by more traditional approaches.

So, let’s take a moment to explore the things that digital marketing gives you, that no other advertising media can.

THE ABILITY TO REACH THE RIGHT PEOPLE

Traditional forms of advertising, those typically seen on television, heard on the radio, or distracting you on the highways, take what we call a shotgun approach to marketing, meaning it casts as wide a net as possible and recuperates those costs through the small percentage of people who see/hear the ad and are persuaded to buy something.

It’s a tried and tested approach to be sure, if not a little inefficient, particularly for smaller businesses with less of a marketing budget at their disposal.

Almost all forms of digital marketing, on the other hand, take a targeted approach to showing your ads, which means that only people who are likely to show an interest will see them.

By using organic keywords, targeting audience members based on their demographics and interests, browsing and search histories, digital advertising refines who sees your ad so that you get more value for each person who sees it.

FULL CONTROL OF COSTS

By and large, digital marketing platforms give you a remarkable amount of control and flexibility with regards to marketing costs. This generally translates into how you scale your efforts, but the fact remains that you can assess and adjust your marketing budget in ways that traditional media doesn’t give room for.

This means that a more tightly knit and optimised campaign will get you results while significantly reducing the cost of doing so. Of course, where costs are concerned, marketers prefer to see them as investments, because if the campaign is handled correctly, the costs shouldn’t matter because you should see returns that negate them.

But a more streamlined investment can get you greater returns in advertising without upping the cost. This means that a well-optimised campaign (particularly where Google Ads is concerned) gives you greater control over how much you have to spend to reach your marketing goals.

A MORE ACCESSIBLE BUDGET

This moves us to our next point, how digital marketing makes brand building and large-scale advertising affordable and accessible to smaller brands and businesses.

I can still remember a time when vibrant and engaging marketing campaigns were reserved only for those mega-brands that could afford the exorbitant costs of traditional marketing. The internet, and subsequently, online marketing, changed all of that almost overnight.

Because its not reliant on high production costs and is almost not affected by the economies of scale in the way print media is (for instance), you can get exceptional results with much smaller budgets, which have made digital the perfect approach for brands of all sizes but gives an excellent entry point for those smaller ones with limited budgets.

MEASUREMENTS & METRICS

Traditional marketing can be a little difficult to measure in terms of performance. Extracting information about how many of your new customers are there because of a TV or radio ad is not easy, requires no small amount of guesswork, is time consuming, inaccurate, and still costly.

The same can be said for billboards, Yellow Pages entries, posters, flyers, and any form of traditional marketing.

Digital marketing, on the other hand, carries a clear performance paper-trail, logs everything, and provides you with insights about the performance of ads that no other medium can offer.

This means that you can use this information to focus your efforts where you find the most success, or make meaningful adjustments to improve performance, all based on actual, relatable, accurate, real-time data about your campaign’s performance.

CONTACT RIGHT CLICK MEDIA TO LEARN MORE

There are many massive benefits that are completely unique to digital marketing, and your company can have access to all of them. If you would like to know more about our offers from an experienced full-service agency in South Africa, be sure to visit the Right Click Media website today.