If your business is still relying only on traditional marketing strategies, now is the time to make the jump to digital marketing. Digital marketing is one of the most affordable, high return and measurable ways to grow your business. In today's atmosphere, it can mean the difference between profit and poverty due to the specific advantages that it offers over traditional marketing strategies. Let's get into what they are.

You Can Control Your Costs on the Fly

When you launch a newspaper, print or direct mail ad campaign, there's nothing else that you can do to control your advertising costs and return on investment. You'll have to wait on the results of your campaign and make adjustments after you spend a considerable amount of money. This is very difficult for businesses working with a small budget and the reason why it's so difficult for many businesses to make traditional marketing strategies pay off for them.

With digital marketing, you can control your costs on the fly. If your Google Adwords or Facebook advertising campaign is not performing, you can pause your campaign and prevent more of your budget from being lost. If a campaign breaks even or is slightly profitable, you can quickly optimize your campaign for better results. Making these kind of changes with traditional marketing is not as forgiving due to the costs of printing, shipping, hiring a list broker and many other factors.

It Allows You to Compete with Bigger Companies

In offline media, how much reach, visibility and impact is often determine by how much you're willing to spend. As a result, bigger companies often tend to dominate. But there are many characteristics of digital marketing that allows you to compete on a more equal playing field. Many companies that do well in the offline world are not having as much of an impact in the digital world. It's because they are not maximizing technology and cannot understand why Internet users behave differently in the online environment.

Smaller businesses are more agile and can often relate to Internet users better than big corporations. It doesn't cost a small business any more money to create outstanding content, build a large social media following and create a brand online. Platforms like blogs, social media, email marketing and apps allow small businesses to get visibility and reach without spending a fortune. It's just a matter of using the right strategy, being able to connect with your audience and carving out an identity in your market/industry.

It Allows You to Leverage Technology to Build Relationships

Speaking of blogs, social media, email and apps, these platforms are all amazing channels that allow small businesses to build relationships with their audience. By leveraging this technology, you're able to build relationships with a large amount of people with minimal marketing costs. In traditional media, many companies would use costly printed newsletters to communicate with their customers. Technology allows you to personalize your message, reach users more frequently and use data to drive your campaigns. This is relationship marketing on a whole new level.

The best example of this is email marketing. Companies can use send newsletters, links to their content and follow up campaigns to convert more leads into customers and develop strong relationships with their audience. Even better, data can be used to enhance the results of email marketing campaigns. Marketers can test which email subject lines get opened more, what days result in more opens, what kind of content people like, and more. If you're new to email marketing, here's a solid primer to get started.

These are just some of the many reasons why digital marketing can make the difference for your business. That doesn't mean you should abandon traditional marketing strategies if they're working out for you. You can use digital marketing as a means to building additional revenue streams and growing your business in a cost effective manner.