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Trying to find the right balance between traditional marketing techniques and digital marketing? REB spoke with Tiffany Wilson, founder of boutique marketing consultancy Chronicle Republic, to learn where digital marketing provides the most benefit.
Tracking and measuring results
Traditional marketing strategies agents use have one main failing – they are difficult to track. As such, it is hard to see where your marketing dollars are working.
“One of the key advantages to using digital marketing over traditional marketing is the ability to track and measure the results of your campaigns. If you can’t track the results you have achieved from a marketing campaign, how do you know that the campaign was successful? And whether your money and time was well spent?” Ms Wilson said.
While letterbox drops and billboards can be effectively used in conjunction with other marketing efforts, it can be hard to track how much they are benefitting your brand.
“It’s impossible to know how many times that vendor might have driven past your billboard before they picked up the phone and called you. Due to this, you lose the ability to allocate budget and resources effectively to these traditional marketing methods. You are effectively throwing money at a campaign and hoping for the best,” Ms Wilson said.
This is not the case in the digital world. Almost every factor online can be tracked, and with some research you can become a digital marketing whiz.
“Due to the digital footprint consumers leave behind during both the decision-making process and the stages of the customer life cycle, the amount of data and analytics available for digital marketing campaigns is extensive and invaluable,” Ms Wilson said.
If you are unsure how to track your online marketing efforts, using a marketing manager can be a big help. Once you grasp the ins and outs of your tracking software, it can be maintained very easily.
Remarketing
Remarketing is the next level of ‘Big Brother’ marketing. If you’ve ever shopped online and noticed ads for the very items you were looking at pop up in other sites you’ve moved on to, you’ve experienced remarketing.
“The ability to ‘remarket’ is another huge advantage of digital marketing over traditional means. Big data is changing the way we market to consumers. Once a tool used mostly by larger enterprises, Facebook and Google have changed the goalposts with data, allowing small businesses and even individual agents to take advantage of data too,” Ms Wilson said.
“Agents should think of a remarketing strategy as a way of capturing cool leads and warming them up. For example, if you ran a Facebook Ad to drive traffic to your website, with the Facebook Pixel you would now be able to digitally ‘capture’ all of these leads. You can then remarket to this database of website visitors and move them along your pipeline by encouraging them to join your mailing list with a free giveaway or eBook or asking them to like your Facebook page.”
In traditional marketing techniques, there is no way to chase these cold leads. Once you’ve been seen by someone in a newspaper, there is no way to specifically track that person down and get in front of them again. But with digital marketing, that is now incredibly easy and can be specifically targeted.
“The remarketing trend is going to be more prolific, with that capability of hyper-targeted online advertising, email marketing and social media advertising affording marketers the ability to target specific products and services to customer segments at specific times in the customer life cycle,” Ms Wilson concluded.
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