Marketing Advice: Don’t Overlook Traditional Channels in the Digital Age
For most of my career I have been tasked with drumming up as much exposure and as many leads as possible for mortgage originators and, invariably, when trying to maximize the impact of a small marketing budget for an individual broker, the clear best path was digital marketing. Often social media marketing to be more specific. I believe that in the current marketing landscape it may be time to take a more critical eye to the once clear savings offered by digital channels.
I credit two developments with the diminished return on the digital dollar. The first being a general increase in the amount of noise present in these channels. These media types might demand consumer attention, but the value of their impressions diminishes as more and more brands attempt to use them for their own aggressive marketing campaigns. The second catalyst has been simply a restructuring of the way platforms like Facebook and Instagram have structured their algorithms and advertising programs. Presumably, they realized that they were by far the cheapest cost per targeted impression available to any marketer and they could afford to bump prices up.
This is not to say that there is no longer immense value to a well constructed digital campaign. You can still reach just the right audience right where there attention is focused at a very reasonable price with many digital tools but today, if you had only $500 to spend for advertising as a mortgage broker, you would be remiss to not consider traditional options such as local billboards as well as social media or other digital options.
A billboard on a busy road in the center of your target geography might only cost $500 and could make daily impressions on thousands of locals. The level of phycological input clutter will (hopefully) be lower for a person driving a car than a person aimlessly scrolling Instagram, adding potential value to the impression. Many consumers can also generate more favorable associations and trust around advertisements and brands they interact with in the physical world over digital. In some cases, this might ad up to a marketing program based on local visibility and one billboard (and of course the obligatory unpaid social media presence, email campaigns, etc.) might be the best play for that particular broker as social media might deliver a slightly greater volume impressions for the price but they likely won’t stick quite as well because most of these social media impressions will merely amount to a quick scroll-by.
The horizon does not seem to hold any changes that will bring more value back to digital marketing dollars, as some believe the internet itself is at risk of an inevitable fracturing into a web of regulatory confusion or even fully isolated silos of users. I think the big players of the tech world will continue to find ways to offer us digital marketing products that are well worth spending our money on for the foreseeable future, but the time when the cost savings of digital marketing were a guarantee are behind us.
