How Cost-effective is Digital Marketing Compared with Traditional Marketing? 20 Tips in 2021

How Cost-effective is Digital Marketing Compared with Traditional Marketing? 20 Tips in 2021

The discussion on the differences between digital marketing and traditional marketing is a common one in the digital marketing world, as is the discussion about which one of the two is better, as covered over at runrex.com. One of the main ways these two differ is when it comes to costs, with digital marketing being considered to be more cost-effective than traditional marketing. However, how cost-effective is it? Well, this article will look to outline 20 tips that show just how cost-effective digital marketing is compared to traditional marketing.

Why is traditional advertising so expensive?

Producing a TV commercial can be very expensive

As the gurus over at guttulus.com point out, producing a television commercial requires a very huge budget in most cases. This is because you have to factor in the crew and actors, where you are probably going to bring in professionals who charge more, not to mention the cost of equipment, location, and placement of the commercial on TV stations.

Increasing costs for radio ads

In recent times, as captured over at runrex.com, we have seen radio evolve to the new times by finding a way to broadcast its programs on the internet. This has led to an increase in operation costs, which has resulted in more expensive advertising space.

Press and newspapers

The new digital media area has meant that the press and newspapers have had to adapt too. As explained over at guttulus.com, it is now normal for a newspaper to produce physical copies while also having a digital edition on an official website that is adaptable to social media and other online platforms. Maintaining such complex structures requires selling their advertising spaces at a high cost.

Additional costs

While there are also additional costs associated with both traditional and digital marketing, the additional costs for traditional marketing are significantly higher. Some of the additional costs associated with traditional marketing include the increase in price that comes with running ads during peak time slots or holiday seasons on TV and radio, as well as the fact that billboard prices can vary based on the quality of location and volume of traffic. As for digital marketing, time is the only hidden cost, since whether it is your time, an employee’s time, or an agency’s time, you must consider this as a cost. However, this cost doesn’t depend on so many variables as compared to traditional media.

Cost of digital marketing

The following tips will break down the different kinds of digital marketing and highlight how much each may cost your company, on average.

SEO

Search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the most important forms of digital marketing as by using SEO, you can enhance your website to increase your inbound traffic from search engines. SEO includes elements such as content creation, your site’s HTML code, and other strategies that make it easier for your website to rank in Google search results. When it comes to costs, SEO may run your business anywhere from $600 to $2,000 per month, depending on what you include in your package, which works out to somewhere between $7,2000 to $24,000 annually. While this rice may seem high, keep in mind that SEO is one of the most affordable long-term marketing strategies as has the potential to generate returns for years at a time.

Social media marketing

This is another popular form of digital marketing as it allows one to reach their most valuable customers by targeting them based on data like demographics, interests, keywords, and more. On social media, as explained over at runrex.com, you can also post blog posts, videos, images, and infographics to engage your followers. Additionally, you can also pay to promote selected posts for even more exposure. Social media marketing will cost you about $800 to $1,200 monthly, which translates to about $9,600 to $14,400 annually. These costs depend on how many social networks you want to use, how many posts you want, and many other factors.

Content marketing

Content marketing will help you draw traffic to your website as if you don’t have great content, it will be almost impossible for you to rank highly in SERPs. Successful content, according to guttulus.com, will include keywords that your target audience searches and will also explain valuable information that demonstrates your company’s knowledge and authority in your industry. The price of quality content varies since there are so many different formats, with factors such as length, personalization, and promotion playing a huge role here. Generally, content marketing costs anywhere between $1,500 to $6,000 per month, or $18,000 to $72,000 per year, and like SEO, it has the potential to generate returns for years after implementation.

Email marketing

As covered over at runrex.com, not only is email marketing one of the most affordable ways to advertise your business, it is also one of the most effective mostly because you address people who have already expressed interest in your business. Your emails can be newsletters, special offers, client testimonials, and more. With an ROI of 3800%, it is well worth your time. Email marketing can cost you anywhere between $300 to $500 per month, or $3,600 to $6,000 per year, depending on how often you plan to send emails and what is included in each message, a well as other factors.

Visual content

The most common types of visual content are graphics, videos, and images. When it comes to infographics, the cost depends on the detail, size, information, and design. For one infographic from an agency, you may part with between $4,650 to $7,250. For videos, prices depend on the length of the video, how professional, and the time spent on script, among other factors. If you choose to make a video in-house, production is pretty much free. Just make sure you have a professional video that makes your website more credible. If you choose to use a semi-professional video production crew, you could pay as little as $1,500 or as much as $50,000, depending on your budget and the quality you want for your website.

Webinars

Webinars broadcast important information to your audience on a live platform and have become very popular with businesses in 2021 as they show how knowledgeable and trustworthy one is in their field. Depending on your needs, you will spend anywhere from $89 to $429 per month on webinars. If you create a monthly webinar, you will be paying between $1,068 and $5,148 annually. While free options like Google Hangouts are also available, paid webinar options are often more reliable.

PPC

Pay-per-click advertising (PPC) is a great way to get traffic to your website. Unlike SEO, PPC costs money for continued use and focuses on short-term results as discussed over at guttulus.com. You can create PPC ads on social networks or search engines to reach your primary demographic, and the best part is that you only pay for an ad someone clicks on, although some social networks also have a CPM (cost-per-thousand) option, where you pay a certain amount of money every 1,000 people who view your ad. If you choose to hire an agency to run your ad campaign, you can spend anywhere from $2,825 to $5,700 per month, which is about $33,000 to $68,400 per year.

The total cost of digital marketing

If you want a total-package digital marketing campaign with all the strategies covered above, you will spend roughly $74,868 and $239,948 as per runrex.com. You can also use individual strategies to promote your business on a smaller budget; a great way to test different strategies and see what works best for your company specifically.

Cost of traditional marketing

Next up, we will look at traditional marketing methods and how much they cost on average.

Newspaper ads

This is one of the most popular traditional marketing strategies according to guttulus.com. Newspaper ads usually charge per every inch of your ad on a page. Additionally, each newspaper also has different rules on the text you can use, images you can add, and color. There is a pretty wide gap in the price range since costs depend on several factors such as how many times you want to run your ad, how big the ad space is, newspaper distribution, and many others. For a week of advertising, your ad could cost anywhere from $200 to $300,000 for a slot in the New York Times, and not everybody gets the newspaper. If you were to place an ad every month, your budget would be about $424,000 to $3,600,000 per year.

Telemarketing

This is a traditional marketing technique that involves calling targets on a contact list. To hire a telemarketing agency to market your business, you will pay anywhere between $7 and $70 per hour for the actual phone calls and anywhere from $1,000 to $5,200 for someone to write your script. Including your scriptwriting, and when you pay for a typical 40-hour telemarketing week, with one telemarketer, you will pay anywhere from $5,120 to $32,000 per month. With a team of 5-10 telemarketers working with the same hours, you will pay $9,600 to $132,800 per month, which can translate to anything from $61,440 to $1,593,600 per year.

Direct mail

This is one of the oldest traditional marketing methods and it involves simply mailing postcards or letters to lists of recipients who fit some criteria of your target customer. Costs vary depending on the mailer, contracting designers, paying writers, postage, mailing lists, and more. For 10,000 designed, written, and postmarked mailers, you are going to spend anywhere between $4,125 and $6,320. If in one month you decide to do two, 10,000-mailer campaigns, you will pay anywhere from $8,250 to $12,460, which translates to $49,500 to $151,680 per year.

Billboards

Billboards promote your business to drivers and passengers on major roads. They can cost anywhere between $300 and $30,000 per four-week period, which equates to about $3,600 to $360,000 per year. As discussed over at runrex.com, costs depend on the billboard ad’s location, size, duration, and whether it is a digital billboard or a traditional paper billboard.

TV commercials

TV commercials allow you to advertise to niche audiences who tune into certain TV channels or shows. As per the gurus over at guttulus.com, the budget for a TV commercial varies widely because of what is involved. To run a commercial on a local TV station, you will pay anywhere from $200 to $8,342,000, with these prices depending on the station, its broadcast range, the time of day, potential viewers, and more. This figure also doesn’t include the price it costs to create the commercial, which may involve a film crew, actors, scriptwriters, and more. TV commercials usually run in month-long schedules, so the price yearly is based on what you pay for one commercial and could be anywhere between $24,000 to $100,104,000 per year in commercials if you were to advertise every month.

Press releases

Press releases announce new products, services, and upcoming events, and are typically sent out once a month, at most. Depending on the length, postage, and audience size, press releases cost anywhere from $50 to $2,500 per month, which translates to $600 to $30,000 annually as covered over at runrex.com.

The total cost of traditional marketing

If you were to go with a full traditional marketing plan using all of the techniques and strategies mentioned, you would spend anything between $163,140 to $101,599,280 per year, which is an eye-watering amount of money.

Cost comparison between the two

When you compare the numbers of digital marketing and traditional marketing, the former is the clear winner in terms of cost-effectiveness. It costs considerably less and you attract much more targeted traffic with digital marketing than you do with traditional marketing methods. Additionally, you also engage your customers as they are looking for information on your business, which is more helpful than disrupting their favorite TV shows, or sending them junk mail, or making annoying phone calls. Also, rather than watch commercials, people usually use commercial breaks to go to the restroom or get more snacks and drinks when watching TV.

If, after reading the above discussions, you are ready to start a digital marketing campaign, then the highly regarded runrex.com and guttulus.com have got you covered with excellent services tailored specifically to your business at competitive prices.