Advertising always has one goal - getting eyeballs on your offering. But Digital Advertising has some distinct advantages over traditional advertising. Read on for 5 ways digital beats traditional when advertising your pharmacy.
Before we begin, it's worth defining exactly what we mean by both Digital & Traditional Advertising for pharmacy.
- Digital advertising never leaves a computer network. The adverts get distributed online through platforms such as social media, search engines and websites.
- Traditional advertising is delivered offline to the real world. You find real-world advertising in any space people look, from the sides of bins and buses to billboards, box offices, and buildings. Of course, there are adverts in the media, too. TV, Radio, newspapers, and magazines traditionally offered exposure on an unrivalled scale before digital advertising came around.
5 ways Digital Advertising for Pharmacy is better than offline adverts
1. Analytics
Traditional Issue
Let's take a fairly common example. You advertise in a local magazine. It might look glamorous. It might be the best-written ad ever. The problem is, there's no way of measuring exactly what impact your advertising campaign had on your revenue. Marketing is all about trial and error. Measuring what works and what doesn't. Knowing when to hold and when to fold. Sure, you might notice an increase in sign-ups or sales alongside a magazine or a newspaper advert, and you can roughly approximate it to the ad. But when you then run a different campaign and it doesn't seem to have the same impact, you can't easily compare the two. Did people just not see the ad? Or did they see it and not feel compelled to act? With traditional forms of advertising, there's no way of knowing.Why Digital Works Better
Digital Advertising records and tracks everything. How many people saw the ad? How many people clicked on it? It keeps all your work from all your campaigns. You can run A/B campaigns, where you run two different ads alongside each other and the best performing ad gets displayed more.2. Interactivity
Traditional Issue
You see an ad in a magazine for a product you like or a service you think would be useful. But you're reading a magazine. You turn over the page. The ad is gone, never to be seen again. You're relying on people remembering the ad the next time I've talked before about making it easy for people to buy from you. Advertising offline does the opposite of that. Here are the two journeys. [av_one_half first av_uid='av-5ecnew']Offline Ad 1. See ad. 2. Stop what you\'re doing to get your phone out. 3. See several notifications on your phone and explore what they are. 4. Forget why you got your phone out, put it away. 5. Look back at the magazine, and remember. 6. Get your phone back out again, (if you have data/signal) and search for the pharmacy. 7. Navigate the pharmacy website until you find the product or service you were interested in. 8. Hope it\'s easy to book/buy. (if it isn\'t easy, get bored and give up.) 9. Buy/book. [/av_one_half] [av_one_half av_uid='av-4ukmp4']Online Ad 1. See ad in whatever platform you were using, e.g., Facebook. 2. Click ad and be taken straight to the relevant product/service. 3. Buy/book.[/av_one_half] [av_one_full first av_uid='av-1yp4s8'] Out of those two columns, it's easy to see which journey has a higher chance of converting someone into a customer. With today's attention span, any extra steps in the buying process are just another opportunity for a distraction. This isn't the only way interactivity helps, but it's certainly something that impacts the ROI on your ad budget. Ads on Facebook, for example, present opportunities for conversation with you and allows questions about the ad they've just seen. You can't quickly send someone a WhatsApp if you see an ad in the newspaper. With digital advertising, there's often the opportunity to get in touch straight away.3. Flexibility & Control
Traditional Issue
Now, this point isn't applicable to every campaign you'll run, but it is always a risk. If you spend £1,000 on printing leaflets and then realise there's a GLARING spelling error, guess who's paying to get them all re-printed? This same risk applies across most traditional platforms. You have to supply the finalised design/advert ready for a deadline to print or air, and after that, you've no control.Why Digital Works
Made a catastrophic error on your advert? How about just logging back in, rectifying the problem, and continuing your advert? No extra cost, no fuss. Bullet dodged.4. Value
Traditional Issue
As you've seen, there are lots of measures of whether one form of advertising is better than another. But the one most people care about, is cost. How much will it cost me to show this ad to someone? Well, it costs far, far less to reach 1,000 people using social media than it does through any other form of advertising. (socialaxcessconsulting.com) Not only that but there's generally a minimum cost to entry with traditional advertising. I've seen local magazines quoting small businesses £500 for a half-page ad. You could feasibly drop that same amount on a Facebook ad. But you'd guarantee people are actually seeing your ad through Facebook. Why? You see the stats.In 2021, advertisers had to pay an average of 5.6 million U.S. dollars to air a 30-second long commercial during the Super Bowl LV broadcast