Running a successful business is no longer just about picking a suitable marketplace or having a high-quality product or service.
In order to succeed in the current market, small Irish businesses and SMEs are increasingly looking towards marketing to drive sales, create brand awareness, and to engage effectively with their clients.
When it comes to choosing a marketing strategy though, selecting the right one is the age-old question on most business owners’ minds.
For many businesses, making the right decision is never easy; most often struggle to choose between ‘traditional’ marketing and ‘digital’ marketing channels.
But what are the main differences between these types of marketing?
Traditional marketing is the ‘conventional’ approach to marketing - this approach helps to reach out to the audience using various offline methods such as:
Digital marketing on the other hand, is all about reaching potential customers online – this approach aims to reach a targeted audience through digital media such as:
Despite traditional marketing being a historically ‘tried and tested’ technique for many established businesses, marketing leader HubSpot maintain that more and more businesses are now embracing ‘fully digital’ marketing in order to keep up with the competition.
Though both approaches have pros and cons for small Irish businesses and SMEs, the only real difference between them is the way in which the ‘targeted’ audience encounters the marketing message; where traditional marketing uses long-established media channels such print and OOH, digital marketing uses ‘newer’ digital media, like social media platforms or websites.
Traditional marketing is by no means out-dated though – a massive 82% of consumers trust print advertising the most when making a purchase decision.
Owing to this statistic, by choosing to focus only on digital marketing, you could actually be damaging your business performance in the long run.
While it’s important for businesses to incorporate a digital marketing strategy, it’s also important to remember that traditional and digital marketing aren’t polar opposites – instead, they can actually be used to complement each other.
By combining digital and traditional marketing, businesses can maximise their reach and ROI by using both channels simultaneously – the key is to find a way to use both strategies to improve your business.
In the simplest example, by attracting customers using offline marketing methods, you’re then able to leverage their testimonials to further empower your online marketing campaigns – and vice versa.
Through this combined marketing strategy – similar to Mojo’s integrated marketing approach – you can begin attracting more customers, increasing your revenue, and growing your business.