The shift from traditional to digital marketing - Part 2

It's imminently clear that digital marketing is replacing traditional marketing as the numero uno method of marketing. But how?

For one thing, digital marketing costs less and is now even considered to be more efficient because its audience can be anyone and everyone, domestic and international. Due to simply the vastness of the world-wide web an ad has the potential to reach both a person scrolling down an article in the United States as well as a person casually checking his Facebook news feed in Pakistan. The possibilities are endless. Another new dimension that digital marketing has brought to the table is that it can target a number of demographics simultaneously. With just a little variation and good analytics, marketers can target children, adults and adolescents with the same ad. And while companies like Facebook have used this dimension negatively in the recent past – which I will elaborate later on – this element has immense potential if used correctly and ethically. Finally -- and this is perhaps the most important factor – digital marketing has the element of quickness. And can reach a large audience in a very small time-frame. The potential of an ad going viral is an even more exciting possibility of marketers because if an ad does go viral it happens quickly and has the possibility of capturing attention all over the internet.

And this change in trend in marketing isn’t something that happened overnight. It is actually something that has been years in the making. According to author David C. Edelman, A study from 2009 that aimed to investigate marketing budgets, particularly, the increase and decrease in specific areas of marketing showed that 60% of marketers had made up their minds about increasing their budgets for digital marketing by taking money away from the budget for traditional marketing. The same study showed that marketers believed that traditional marketing which includes; newspapers, billboards, magazines, TV, radio etc. would either experience a decrease in effectiveness in the upcoming three years, or the effectiveness would stay the same. Whereas, over 70% of the same marketers were of the view that the effectiveness of social media, mobile, and online video would continue to grow. Nine years on, and the changes are quite clearly visible.