Will Traditional marketing hold on its own against digital?
Have brands started going the digital route, completely ignoring marketing basics?
Can’t brands be built in the digital world as it’s very transactional?
If you have these questions in mind, I will address them in my article today and give you impactful ways of making your digital campaigns much more effective.
Let me start with Peter Drucker’s definition of marketing
“The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself. The aim of marketing is to make selling superfluous.”
– Peter Drucker.
Firstly Let’s look at some fundamentals of marketing
Fundamentals of marketing
1)Marketing is a game of perceptions.
2)A great product sells itself and converts customers to brand ambassadors.
3) Advertising, copywriting, and sales are the components of marketing
4) Marketing helps people discover and make perceptions about the product
5) The Best way to become a brand is to become No 1 or 2 in the category or make a new category or subcategory
Eg:-BMW is No 1 in cars which are chauffeur driven, and Volvo is the No 1 car in safety
6) People remember only No1 or No 2 in every category
Now let’s look at the difference between traditional marketing and digital marketing.
Traditional marketing was prevalent before the digital and will continue to be relevant in future as well. The significant difference is in the communication media. While conventional marketing uses older channels like TV, Radio, Press, Outdoor, leaflets etc., digital format communicates through personal mediums like large and small screens. Digital campaigns allow personalization and better tracking of results than traditional campaigns.
Digital versus traditional marketing
Even though Traditional and digital marketing has few similarities, they both are unique in their ways.
While we can see that digital scores over traditional in many points, it is essential to note that in the case of mass categories like FMCG, traditional media scores over digital. Here reaching to non-English speaking population becomes possible only via TV or radio, and hence traditional media becomes essential.
Digital versus Traditional marketing-Which one is better?
There is no definitive answer to which one is better. The best option will be it depends on the campaign and the product category. While digital-only brands have taken shape, these are targeting a small niche using digital ads and growing via repetition in FB, google ads. It will be tough to build a mass brand only with digital as many customers are still not using the internet. Suppose you are looking to target a local or older audience. In that case, traditional advertising may be the best bet, giving better results.
So the short answer is ……it depends
Now, as promised, Let’s look at 2 ways of making your digital campaigns more impactful.
CATT Marketing Funnel
This model developed by Digital Deepak helps you to uncover money from the niche you are targeting.
Wealth = n^CATT
N=niche
C=Content
A=Attention
T=Trust
T=Transaction
The basic principle of the model is that good content is the start you need to build up. Your content should be able to solve the user’s problems. Once it does it, it will start getting customers’ attention, and the bridge of trust is built. This trust will open the route for the transaction to be done, remove the barrier, and result in a sale.
Let’s now understand the model in depth
1)N-Niche:- This literally means the category you will specialize in and define to your audiences. Niche will be a small pie of the prominent market. Your achievements and wealth depend on the niche you choose. We choose a niche for a hungry market. The people in your niche have some problems, and you will solve them with your product and services.
How to find your niche
To know your niche, you need to know 3 things.
Do you have talent or skill?
Are you passionate about that skill?
Is there a market for that skill that you have?
If the answer is yes, then this is the niche you should go for.
Digging out your niche can be a difficult thing for most people. Books can be helpful in this regard. I would suggest reading.
Ikigai: The Japanese Secret to a Long and Happy Life
This book has changed the lives of so many people around the world and helped them discover their Niche
2)C-Content
Content determines whether people are going to stick to your blog.
Is your content good enough to solve their problems?
How can you solve the problem that your users have in the niche you chose?
It can be blog posts, webinars, podcasts, videos or lead magnets.
Tools such as answerthepublic can be start point in understanding the user pain points and the start point of content creation
3)A-Attention:- This means pushing your content to your audience via paid as well as unpaid mediums like SEO, google ads, FB ads, Instagram ads etc
4)T-Trust:- Building trust with your audiences via engagement
through marketing automation and retargeting. One of the new methods of creating trust is deep marketing, wherein communication is personalized as per your target audience so much that every person feels like you are communicating with them directly
5) T-Transaction:- This is the last and the most important one where your lead gets converted into your customer. If you have been successful in step 2,3,4, then you will be successful in converting your customer
This model gives you the steps needed to move along and get the customer to purchase from you
Integrated Digital Marketing
Source: https://digitaldeepak.com/
Very often, digital marketing teams work in silos; the SEO works separately from SEM, SMM and email, resulting in pieces of communication which are disjoint and confusing for the customer. All the parts must build up on one another to amplify and get the customer to take his card and transact.
A suitable method can be to use paid to get started with your content. New content may take a while for search engines to discover. So the best way will be to use paid mediums like Google ads to push the content to users. Once more and more users discover the content. It will become more influential in the eyes of Google, and ranking will start to happen naturally. Then use Social media to engage and email marketing to move the customer into the funnel and push to get a transaction.
And finally, to discuss the point of similarity between offline and digital marketing. I see digital marketers too often get stuck with tools and media. Online marketing is just a medium to reach the customer. The basics of marketing very well hold here as well. There is an underlying need to make your customer persona, understand his issues and solve those issues to be remembered and loved. All marketing campaigns need to get started from this point. Mediums keep changing, Tomorrow meta may not be there, and a new social media channel can crop up. Still, the basics of marketing always will continue to persist.
Hope this article gave you a different perspective of digital marketing and marketing in general.Do let me know your comments on this