Digital Marketing versus Print Marketing: WHO WINS?

Which platform truly rules the world of lead generation, sales and business growth?

Online versus print; Facebook Ads versus Newspaper Ads; Modern versus ‘old school’, traditional media’; Social media versus a print ad.

Today, we’re here to (once and for all) settle the argument; which marketing approach deserves the most praise? What marketing tool will work best?

Round One: Endurance and Need

(READ: The ABC’s of Email Marketing: A Beginners Guide)

The newspaper’s early years left nothing to the imagination; there was nothing quite like it. Its archetypal shift into the very zeitgeist of bygone centuries has, ultimately, endured.

People still love traditional media. They’ll read the Sunday morning paper (receiving their weekly TV Guide is a must). Many ambitiously enter competitions and mail off their entries. Some enjoy the feel and somewhat classic experience of physically turning pages.

Despite its endurance, newspaper circulation rates have spiralled downward for a number of years.

Magazines and newspapers, while traditionally serving an increasingly-appealing purpose, are today deemed by many to be ‘too rigid.’

Put simply, they’ve been brutally hit as more people move online to access free, non-gated, widely-accessible content.

(READ: What’s a Good Email Open Rate & One Simple Trick that could improve yours)

Constraints to audience-reach as well as steeper costs, thinner editions, less content and less competition (many mastheads no longer exist); traditional media has witnessed a dim in the spark that once made it so appealing.

Print media’s unique offerings, although once exclusively aligned to print, are available online. Print marketplaces rarely exist; replaced by the likes of Gumtree, Facebook Marketplace, and so forth. TV Guides are easily Googled. Recipes and advice are easily found online, at little to no cost. Everything is instantly accessible.

Digital Marketing is consistently refreshing its game with new advancements and capabilities. All of its avenues use electronic devices and the internet to reach potential leads, taking advantage of channels such as social media, email marketing, search engines (and effective search engine optimisation AKA SEO), and more.

With the number of people using social media and the internet increasing by the year, the ways to reach almost anyone with digital marketing seems endless (and that’s a very good thing).

Digital advertising’s players include Facebook, Instagram, Google, TikTok and more. That’s billions of users across the world. That’s billions of opportunities to market to the right people.

(READ: Why Social Media Management is Important)

When it comes to digital advertising for Perth businesses, leveraging platforms like these is a no brainer.

With digital media on the rise and traditional media on the decrease, it’s no secret who takes this round.

WINNER of Round One: Digital Marketing.

Round Two: Reach

Digital marketing is awesome. It allows marketers to specifically create targeted marketing campaigns where there is a likelihood of sales; tailored towards the right demographic of people, Content (and strong content marketing) is more likely to be seen, by people more likely to engage with it. In this manner, you can minimise and cut down on marketing costs. That’s a huge win for small businesses – especially if you don’t have big budgets to play with.

You can target certain stages of your Customer Value Journey too. Once someone reads a newspaper, they’ll put it down, dispose of it, and probably forget about it.

Not in digital marketing, though. You can advertise and market to potential leads who might not have converted the first time they had seen your advert – this is called retargeting.

(READ: Why Facebook Retargeting WORKS)

Traditional advertising, while it can still work, is more of a ‘put it out there and see what happens’ approach. You can’t specifically tailor your approach (Facebook, for example, enables you to specify your ad targeting options so that businesses can reach audiences by geographical location, interests and more).

WINNER of Round Two: Digital Marketing.

Round Three: Flexibility. 

If you advertise in print, there’s no chance to go back and revitalise your advert. Once it’s in print, it’s in print. If it doesn’t work, you can’t amend or make any changes – that’s thousands of dollars worth of advertising, for one static advert, that might not deliver.

Having a strong digital marketing campaign enables you to see what’s working, what isn’t working, how you can optimise your marketing campaigns, how you can change things up, what is and isn’t converting, and more. Once your ad is out there in the universe, you can chop and change it – using unique insights to determine how you’ll action this.

(READ: How Fixing Orphaned Content Can Help you Rank Higher on Google)

According to Entrepreneur.com, prices can range from approximately $250 for a tiny advert in a local magazine up to around half a million dollars for placement in a national magazine.

Digital marketing enables you to select your own budget and work to that budget – the potential that lies with this is enormous. If you enlist the expertise of digital marketing services for some online marketing, you’ll do yourself plenty of favours to reach your target audience.

Winner of Round Three: Digital Marketing.

Overall Winner: DIGITAL MARKETING (No surprises there).

If you’re wanting to look forward to the future, the direction everyone is heading in, the digital world is a no brainer.

(READ: The Customer Value Journey: How to Create a Digital Marketing Strategy)

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