Traditional Marketing vs. Digital Marketing – learn what can help better

February 3, 2020

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Table of Contents

Traditional Marketing

To start with, there is no such term applicable to ‘Traditional Marketing’. In fact, it is a reproduced term that covers all forms of marketing the businesses have been using over the times. The traditional marketing involves anything that helps spread the word about the business minus online marketing. To know more about the traditional ways of marketing, you can refer to the methods stated below:

1) Traditional advertising:

This includes placing newspaper ads or doing print advertising in magazines, etc., TV and radio ads, outdoor advertising like billboards and door-to-door advertising like distributing pamphlets. All businesses have been using a combination of all of these forms of marketing and letting the consumers know about the new arrivals, new launches, promotional schemes and so on.

2) Branding:

The traditional way of marketing business also involves making use of branding materials. Making business cards, getting logo embossed carry bags, t-shirts, caps, stationery, etc. constitute branding which is also a traditional form of marketing.

3) Media buying:

Traditional marketing does involve media buying. The marketers crunch the numbers and accordingly place TV ads, radio ad or the ads in newspapers and etc. Buying the best slots and the relevant slots between the TV programs, reserving a place for the newspaper for ads, and even buying the billboard spots in the city are the functions of media buying.

Digital Marketing

On the other hand, all those ways of advertising where the medium is the internet and not print, TV and radio are clubbed under the term digital marketing. Digital marketing makes use of the internet to reach the audience.

Though the number of people using the internet for buying or getting information is found to be lagging far behind the people who use offline means for such activities, still the increase in the number of digital buyers and advertisers have made digital media a thing of discussion.

The common forms of digital marketing are:

1) Blogging:

A very basic purpose of digital marketing is increasing the traffic to a website if the business is purely internet-based. The blogging helps the users to create inbound links and also be known as an expert solution provider for the problem whose solution consumers are searching for.

2) Social media advertising:

Social media marketing is where most of the consumers are spending their time. This media offers the tool for discussions, commenting, sharing and even posting the banner ads, which can work two ways.

First, it creates ripples among the correct and interested audiences. Second, it helps gather data about the user preferences for developing the product with changing times.

3) Re-targeting:

When a consumer visits any product page or leaves it without buying anything, it can be converted with the help of re-targeting by placing ads based on the internet activity of the user.

Thus, the businesses stay in the eyes of the consumer wherever they go and may get a new buyer if the process was left in the middle only due to lack of time.

4) Website development:

The businesses can start the whole process of digital marketing by starting a website or launching a social media page. The website is an online counterpart of a business office and can be the point of interaction for the buyers engaged in e-commerce, or m-commerce, etc.

The responsive coding helps the business offer consumable information in all the screen sizes be it a mobile phone, or tablet or laptop.

Thus, the businesses reach all types of device holders and spread information about their product or service or any new development happening at their end.

5) Content marketing:

Digital marketing is applicable to both offline and online businesses.

For the latter, it holds more value. Irrespective of the type of business, content marketing is a tool worth wielding.

The businesses make use of sum total of blogs, articles, guest posts, testimonials, social media posts and also of image descriptions and captions to use the content for promoting their services or products.

6) Email marketing:

Sending emailers to the target audience telling them about the launches, promotional schemes or just for letting them know the benefits of the business you own.

Pros and cons of traditional marketing vs digital marketing

The discussion surrounding traditional marketing vs digital marketing is incomplete without mentioning their pros and cons. The first pro of digital marketing is that its results are measurable.

One can easily find out the reason for the increase in sales and the contribution of various digital media into the same by referring to the survey results or by just clocking the people spending time on the website or any social media page.

Secondly, digital marketing is cheaper too. A billboard cost is way more than a digital ad. While a small business cannot afford a billboard, it can definitely try hiring a blogger or a content marketer and get satisfactory results.

One of the cons of digital marketing is that it does not affect offline businesses much. The local audience of a law firm or the users of soap or the visitors to a restaurant will never care to bother what the rankings of the business on a search engine if they are loyal to such business entities.

Also, the digital marketing caters to the handful few who are into checking the locations and businesses over the web prior to visiting them.

Secondly, the results of digital marketing can be manipulated too. There is always going to be a fight for finding the difference between the genuine and fake ids logging on to the website or visiting the page.

Thus, if your numbers do not contribute much to an online presence as guaranteed by the digital marketers, you surely need to work on other advertising media to get the real number of users and followers.

So, when designing the marketing campaigns, it is certainly not harmful to allot some budget for social media too. It helps tap those people who might find it difficult to reach to the place of business to check it out on their own.

Traditional ways of marketing are proven but costly, but digital advertising has its importance too.

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