Digital Marketing News: Digital Tactics Bring Higher ROI than Traditional

Every week we’re collecting a host of links, videos, and assorted analysis on the ever-changing world of digital marketing. We invite you to skim, share, analyze, argue, and refute – just so long as you don’t get embarrassed at the water cooler again. Here are the latest digital marketing news and trends for the week of January 4, 2019.

2018 Industry Recap and 2019 Marketing Predictions

Location3 celebrated the end of the year with our 50th episode of Digital Shoptalk! As is tradition, the end-of-the-year show features a recap of the year’s biggest industry shifts as well as predictions for the coming year. This year’s predictions cover a variety of topics, including digital, franchise marketing, data management, and more.

Digital Tactics for Higher ROI

A study released by eMarketer in October 2018 projects that digital media will account for 55 percent of total ad spending in the United States – the first time it will surpass traditional ad spending on traditional TV, radio, and signage. The increased spending on digital can be attributed to a couple factors:

• a cultural shift in how the public consumes media
• the tracking capabilities of digital advertising mediums

As Location3 Sr. Director of Marketing Josh Allen notes in a post in Franchising USA Magazine, “digital is simply more trackable, allowing for brands to conduct more detailed analysis regarding their return on investment when compared to traditional media.”

Allen gives a detailed breakdown of how digital tactics compare to traditional advertising strategies when it comes to reaching your audience, understanding your audience, and getting the most out of your marketing dollars. Here’s an excerpt from the post.

Digital Out-of-Home vs. Traditional Billboards & Signage

Out-of-home advertising on places like billboards or in taxi cabs has also made a major digital transformation in the past 5 years. Rather than running a single printed piece of media for a particular time period, digital out-of-home options have increased available inventory, lowering costs and increasing opportunities for placement.

Digital OOH buys can also be placed during key times throughout the day so that they appear in front of your target audience when those users are most likely to be in the area to view the advertisement (i.e. Digital billboard buy during evening rush hour commute). Opportunities for Digital OOH placements go beyond billboards and can include placements in shopping malls, movie theaters, gas stations, sporting events and more.

Read the full post here.

Beckman: Local Marketing is All About Content

Location3 Chairman Andrew Beckman recently joined Mike Boland on Street Fight’s “Heard on the Street” podcast to discuss location-based advertising. Beckman shares his backstory as well as how a SEO-based content strategy is at the foundation of all marketing strategies.

“There are all these channels, whether it’s Instagram or Twitter or Google on the search side. At the end of the day, the foundation is the content that’s being created and shared,” Beckman said. “If you’re not ranking organically, that’s what we call a keyword gap, and that’s what we fill with content. Google is still a major influencer on the customer journey, so we take care of that first. Then we take that same content and amplify it across the social channels.”