Traditional marketing vs. digital marketing

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It’s been quite a while since the debate of traditional marketing vs. digital marketing has been going on. Although both have their own perks, it can be tough to choose one.

Marketing is an indispensable part of any business which one cannot ignore. A wise and visionary entrepreneur will ensure setting a part of the budget for marketing efforts alone. However, it is an era where a large portion of people make online transactions, another chunk of the population doesn’t even know how to use internet. This makes it highly difficult for the entrepreneur to decide which aspect of brand marketing to concentrate on; digital marketing or traditional marketing.

To help you get an insight on the two methods of marketing and direct your efforts likewise, here are pros and cons of digital marketing vs. Traditional marketing.

What is traditional marketing?

Traditional marketing refers to the conventional methods of marketing used ever since the concept of advertisements or marketing came into existence. This primarily includes the following modes for brand promotion:

 Newspaper

 Flyers

 Radio

 Television

 Billboard advertising along roads and highways

 Magazine ads

What is digital marketing?

Digital marketing is the new age marketing method of the global realm. With internet finding its application and benefit in every aspect of life, marketing too has managed to not only create awareness or promote brands through it, but also give them a global platform to reach a wider customer base. It includes the following:

 Business networking sites such as LinkedIn

 Social media sites such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter

 Email marketing

 Paid pop-up ads

 Blogs

 Click baiting URLs for viral content marketing

Although all the marketing techniques used in digital marketing appear similar, online marketing is a far more versatile mode of marketing than conventional one.

Benefits of Digital Marketing over Traditional Marketing

Traditional marketing has its own advantages but there is no doubt that internet marketing has set a revolution ablaze. It has some clear winning benefits over traditional marketing and some of those are mentioned below.

1. Low Cost

While newspaper, television and other such media ads cost a lot, advertising through the internet is quite affordable. This in turn means greater fraction of the budget to enhance business.

2. Real Time Result

Digital marketing has an edge over traditional marketing since it is able to give quick results, while the latter keeps you waiting for long before showing any results. With online marketing you can measure and view everything from number of visitors, conversion rate, busiest period of the day and bounce rate too with ease.

3. Brand Development

When the question of brand image arises among digital marketing vs traditional marketing, digital marketing has an added advantage. Due to the limitation of space and low frequency of advertisements as is the case with conventional marketing, it loses at the hands of the online marketing.

Instead of a small column in a newspaper, you can own an entire website and showcase your ads or promote your brand whenever you want with the help of a social media page or your blog, unlike traditional marketing. This helps to build an image of your brand consistently.

4. Non-intrusive

People do not purchase a newspaper to look at the ads or watch a television to be interrupted by commercials, hence usually advertisements featured through such media go ignored. However, with online ads, one has the power to choose to see an ad or not, participate in a social media discussion group or read or ignore a marketing email. Besides, you can also target a specific audience for these ads which. All of this makes these ads more wanted and far more likely to generate leads. Hence by being non-intrusive and non-annoying as opposed to the traditional marketing, digital marketing has more potential to give desirable results.

5. Greater Exposure

Any traditional form of marketing device, be it television commercials or a newspaper ad, can only cover a certain area or population sector of a region. As opposed to this, an online advertisement has the ability to reach out to a widespread population, even the whole of world.

6. Better Engagement

No traditional marketing mode, allows you to interact with your audience and really engage them with your brand. With such marketing channels you have to wait to gain response only after which can you take any further step. However, with digital marketing strategies, you can not only interact with your targeted audience in the real time, but also make prompt and fruitful steps based on their quick feedbacks. You can also engage your audience in chats and discussions for registering better brand presence and gain passive advice to improve your product or service. Of course, the latter means that you need to be available and invest in more time for the engagement through a PR team.

7. Quicker Publicity

Owing to real time results with digital marketing, you get instant publicity and even if you do not, you can instantly know which of your ad isn’t working. The debate for traditional vs. Digital marketing is out of question here since the former falls way behind in this regard due to to lack of such a scope. On the other hand, the latter works like a chain reaction giving you newer audience and earning you a newer customer with every passing nanosecond.

8. Works for Every Stage or Field

Digital marketing vs traditional marketing battle often falls in the winning hands of online marketing arena with certain benefits you cannot ignore with the former. Digital marketing allows even small businesses with a handful of staff members to expand their brand presence and manage advertising and marketing front, which of course cannot be held true with traditional marketing methods which renders the small businesses and start ups at disadvantage.

9. Easy Analytics

With digital marketing measuring the your marketing efforts becomes very easy and quick. You can instantly see which strategy is working and which isn’t through Google Analytics, besides other aspects too such as general trend, inbound traffic, conversion rate, interested audience, bounce rate and profit. This all makes the digital marketing vs traditional marketing debate, highly unfair by putting the former on the winning side by a wide margin.