What Digital Marketers can learn from Traditional Marketing? (It’s not what you think!!)

Do you think traditional marketing is dead? Heck, no.
The strategies applied to traditional marketing still hold good for digital marketing as well. The platforms & channels might change, but the core strategies are essential to obtain a positive ROI.

Most companies believe Digital Marketing is all about advertising.I.e running google ads, facebook ads, etc. They fail to realise that the fact that marketing/promoting is not the first step of the process.

Many are riding the digital wave & have ruled out the importance of traditional marketing. Yes, digital marketing is better, faster, cheaper & more convenient. But digital marketing & traditional marketing are basically marketing.

The core marketing principles still remain the same, irrespective of the channel/medium. This is what most businesses fail to realise.

While everyone discusses the differences between traditional & digital marketing, we’re going to show you how both are similar based on the concepts of marketing. Get ready to learn some mind-blowing insights that’ll change your perspective.

Identify your buyer persona

Identification of your buyer persona is the initial step followed in both traditional and digital marketing before you carry on with the core marketing activities. Buyer persona is otherwise called as the Customer Avatar in which your ideal customers are identified.

Personas is the primary element for the effective marketing and sales of your products and services. Having a deeper understanding of the buyer persona is critical to drive content creation, product development, sales follow up etc for an effective customer acquisition and retention.
Both in traditional and digital marketing, buyer persona is collected and segmented based on the below factors:

• Demographic factors: Age, gender, ethnicity, family size, family life cycle, marital status, education, race, religion, language, income, occupation, etc.
• Behavioural factors: Attitude towards, usage rate, response, loyalty status, and readiness stage to a product.
• Geographical factors: Look for geographic criteria such as nations, states, regions, countries, cities, postal codes.
• Psychographic factors: Segment the customers based on their personality, attitude, values, self-image, interests, opinions, lifestyle, etc.

This step is mainly focused on understanding your prospective customers better. Thereby, you can tailor made the entire marketing strategies based on the aspirations of your target buyers.

It is essential to create a detailed buyer persona to know their specific needs and interests.
Make a product/service
Once the buyer persona is identified and defined, the next step is to design and develop your services or products based on each target market needs and preferences.
Designing and developing your product or service has the same process and strategies followed in both traditional and digital marketing strategies.

The product design process starts from the idea creation stage in which the new concepts are developed to create a product or service. The newly developed product or service has to not only fulfil the customer aspirations, but also meet the company’s purpose and meet the ultimate business objectives.

The idea generation stage is where you need to analyse what exactly your prospective buyers lack and what exactly they are looking for in a product or service to find the solution or fulfil their needs.
The customer avatar you filled in the initial stage will be helpful in this stage for more clarity on their needs and what areas to focus.

Build systems

Once you are done with the product development, the next step is to build systems. In the traditional marketing, the infrastructure and operational plan is mainly focused on procuring machines, raw materials, arranging physical office space, power, table, chairs etc at your office.
However, in the digital marketing process, the system is not built offline, but online like optimisation of your website landing page, making proper check out page and so on. When the system is perfect, it enables in the higher conversion rate optimisation in both types of marketing.

Identify traffic sources

When both the product/services and the system is ready, the next step is to identify traffic sources for your business. This step is relevant for both the traditional and digital marketing, but only the channels differs.

In the traditional marketing, traffic sources can be from Television commercials, referrals from existing customers, from word of mouth marketing, newspaper ads and so on. Traffic source is the origin through which people came to know about your website or office address.
For every session of your website, there will be a relevant or particular source of hit. In the digital marketing, when someone visits your website through desktop, mobile or any other internet enabled device, the exact origin or source of traffic will be tracked by Google Analytics.

The most prominent aspect is that various traffic sources are identified and analysed to know which traffic source is driving the most and least traffic to your website. It is on the basis of this source identification, businesses will be able to design their SEO, SEM and SMO strategies.

Marketing

Marketing is the process of strategically communicating about your products/services to your ideal customers. This step involves a whole lot of persuasion and putting your message across through the right mediums and in front of the right audiences.

In the traditional marketing, the promotion of products and services include print advertisements, billboards, flyers or pamphlets, TV ads, newspaper ads, radio ads etc.

Since, traditional marketing encompasses many different strategies, every company implements one or many traditional marketing techniques also along with their digital marketing strategy. To a greater extent, this form of advertising is based on the available resources and marketing budget of the company.
In digital marketing, the same concept of advertisements which are followed in traditional marketing is applied. However, the digital marketing approaches like tools and techniques used are different. Digital Marketing is a holistic approach which uses the advertisements tools and strategies like SEO, Social Media Marketing, Content Marketing, Email Marketing etc.

Sale/Conversion

Selling is the final stage or the ultimate goal of both traditional and digital marketing strategies.
When your traditional or digital marketing strategies became successful in attracting customers and fulfilling their aspirations or solving customer problems, you will receive a higher sales conversion rate.
When you deliver 90% value and 10% product/services, the conversion rate can range between 10-30% ideally to boost up your business revenue, brand image and profit margins.
Let’s have a look at this table below to get an idea about the marketing channels of both traditional and digital marketing.

Now you know that traditional marketing concepts and strategies cannot be totally excluded from digital marketing.
You might be wondering if you have to include any traditional marketing strategy in your digital marketing plan.
Many marketers feel that traditional marketing techniques are no longer effective in this digital era. The fact is that it really depends on your target audience, niche market, business objectives and purpose of the campaign.
In fact, outbound marketing efforts can help leverage inbound marketing efforts.
So, make the best use of traditional & digital marketing strategies in your business and plan a solid marketing strategy to scale & grow your Business exponentially.