Is Digital Marketing different from personal selling?

These days there is a huge emphasis on the marketers tailoring their messages according to the needs of their consumers. It is assumed that messages that had been personalized have this great impact to die for. Well that is in fact, true actually. But this is not something that is new, it has been there for as long as marketing has been. It is just that it was then given a little emphasis, if any at all.

Personal selling has been around as one of the marketing elements for a while. This marketing element has some characteristics of the now digital marketing. Remember the time when you are one on one with a friend trying to persuade them to do something for you? That is an act of personal selling. You are in a way also enabled to 'ask' in a way that would be appealing to your friend. That is the same to digital marketing which has received much interest as it enables users to tailor their marketing content according to the needs of their target audience.



Just as with personal selling where you would visit a place where you think that the people over there have an interest in a certain activity. People tend to subscribe to things that are of interest to them and that gives a digital marketer to identify niche market by so studying the subscribers' interests. After establishing these markets, a typical content producer would then compose the message according to the perceived needs and interests of their target audience. This enables marketers maximize the impact of their marketing messages and therefore achieve more Return On Investments (ROI).

With this said, these two marketing elements are not different. The only variation there is would be that with digital, the marketing costs are very low whereas we cannot say the same with personal selling. The element of time consumption on the side of personal selling is also a concern. However, both elements are able to close the deal, i.e, drive a prospective customer to a desired action.