I just got destroyed.
Like a horse competing against a race car, old methods are no match against the new.
Remember, back in the old days of traditional marketing, we had stuff you might not have heard of: the good old newspaper and fax machine. That’s what we used to do advertising and marketing before the internet came along and revolutionized how we do things.
Now we have what I call the three T’s, the reasons digital marketing is far superior than traditional marketing.
Reason #1: Targeting
With traditional marketing we had massive billboards like what you see in Vegas. They still have billboards, but it’s more like for brand awareness. The problem with the billboard is you can’t choose who you target with it. If someone sees it, great, if no one sees it, you don’t know.
But digital marketing, you can precisely target who you want to see your offer. You can choose.
For example, with Google AdWords, you can target the keywords that people are searching. You know the buyer’s intent, so when they search the keyword, they will find you and your message. Or with Facebook, you can also target exactly who you want, their interests, and the profile.
You can be very precise about who you want for your customers or for your offer. That you cannot do with traditional marketing. In the good old days with direct mail, we have a term called A Pile and B Pile, meaning that people sort their mail so that ads and flyers go in the trash can, or the B Pile.
The A Pile are all the personal letters, credit card statements, and bills. As a marketer, our first goal was not to get people to buy, but to make sure they didn’t throw away our stuff. We wanted our mail in their A Pile.
Now with digital marketing, you don’t need to do that anymore. You can put your offer, your products, your service, in front of exactly who you want, when you want, and where you want. You can choose the country, demographics, and psychographics.
It’s extremely powerful to know exactly who you’re marketing. And with advances in technology, we could almost look over a person’s shoulder to see what they’re reading.
Reason #2: Tracking
With direct mail in the old days, we would send out thousands of letters and we’d get so many order forms back. People sent back an order form or money order, or called a phone number to buy something we marketed in the mail. This method is so archaic now.
With digital marketing you can track exactly what happens. You can see the customer’s journey when they first saw this particular video, and then they opted-in to this particular offer, and then they didn’t buy, but they read email number four in your email sequence and finally bought your product.
You cannot do that with traditional marketing. You can do so much more with digital marketing, even update your marketing with the flip of a switch.
Reason #3: Tweaking
Back then, if I made a massive billboard and changed my mind about my message or offer, what did I have to do? I had to replace everything! I had to reprint everything! But with digital, if there’s an ad that I’m running that I don’t like, I can change it just like that.
I can also split test different ads at the same time. In marketing, we call it A/B testing. We can tweak different things. On my webpage, I can test different guarantees, different price points by running traffic to it. The results are immediate.
With traditional advertising, there’s a huge delay in terms of time, and that gap makes advertising very expensive and costly.
Digital marketing has so many advantages over traditional marketing. You can target, track, and tweak very quickly to get better results.
But there’s also a downside. The marketplace is getting more sophisticated so your competitors are doing the same thing as you. You could be running a large company and competing with a 17 year old kid living in a basement.
Digital marketing has many advantages, but it changes all the time. You have to do more to keep up the pace and have that leading edge. And they always say, if you’re not the lead dog, the view is always the same.