Are Traditional Marketing Methods Wasteful in a Digital Age?

We occupy a really strange time in the history of the internet. Children, worldwide, are learning to programme and code in primary school and more and more traditional industries are becoming increasingly digitalised yet we are in a weird sort of no man’s land where consumers are increasingly moving online whilst traditional industries haven’t quite caught up.

There is a real, tangible sense that the digitalisation of most industries, whether through offering a digital service or selling their products online, is just around the corner and yet it seems like a lot of industries are stuck playing catch up.

For instance, the retail market has been revolutionised by online grocery shopping, with 6% of the UK population doing their weekly grocery shop online in 2011 which rose to 11% in 2015. If you haven’t guessed already, this equates to a lot of people and a lot of money in a market that will only continue to grow increasingly lucrative.

This means a lot traditional industries and sectors have had to adapt fast, the effect of which is that, in some cases, they aren’t yet quite savvy enough to understand what has value online and what doesn’t. This has led to a lot of companies getting suckered in to parting with extensive amounts of cash for very little return.

Mention huge figures like 100,000 impressions or 5000 click-throughs for £50k and it seems like good value for money but how much of this will actually lead to tangible sales? These figures are called “vanity metrics” because they are all vanity: they are large figures that sound impressive and are easy to sell to people based on that fact but they aren’t “actionable” as they are hard to correlate to actual sales, which makes their Return-On-Investment very questionable.

A lot of the success of digital marketing agencies or social media freelancers is due to these companies who utilise a lot of traditional marketing methods not completely understanding how to engage with their consumers through a digital platform or even what they hope to achieve through doing so.

In many ways this is the golden period to be a digital news site like BuzzFeed or Vice or The Tab, as they have extensive reach on their site and the higher-ups in the conventional marketing roles are chasing digital engagement rather than sales, viewing it as a completely separate construct to their physical offering.

I say to those capitalising on the lack of digital understanding in traditional industries like FMCG, enjoy it while you can because it won’t last. In a few generations time, the extortionate rates websites are charging to have a brand advertise with them will be called out for being as ludicrous as they actually are.

However, there are ways of combatting these snake oil salesmen of the digital space.

Analytics is vital to all things online. Not only is it easy to implement but it also lets you collect masses of data relatively quickly. Digital marketing is special as you can track each step of your customer’s journey online so there is no reason to invest in any advertising that isn’t backed by cold, hard sales figures.

Once you understand analytics you can understand how your consumers interact with your digital offering then set about trying to reduce your bounce rate or editing your site design accordingly for a better digital experience. The tech boom has also meant that there are lots of tools to engage with consumers first-hand in much the same way you would through market research.

Ultimately, in physical marketing you would be searching for the best Return-On-Investment that you possibly could so why isn’t the same attitude apparent in digital marketing?

It all starts from an understanding of what you want to achieve and this understanding will become increasingly prevalent as the old guard of the marketing world make way for the younger generation to whom this comes as second nature.