Digital Marketing VS Traditional Marketing

Digital marketing is a relatively new kind of marketing. In today’s world, a large number of people are getting into the digital world every year. internet users are increasing and they are mostly young people. They are mostly accustomed to social media and YouTube rather than television or a newspaper.

What is traditional marketing?
Traditional marketing uses conventional methods of marketing to advertise your business. They are the ads you watch on TV or a billboard you see on the roadsides or a newspaper ad.

What is digital marketing?
Digital marketing has various types of marketing platforms it all may seem similar at first glance but they are very different from each other. We have listed the commonly used types of digital marketing here:

• Social Media Marketing
• Search / PPC Marketing ( Mostly Google Adwords )
• Content Marketing
• e-Mail marketing
• Paid pop-ups

Here are some reasons why digital marketing is better than traditional marketing.

1. Cost Reduction
Traditional advertising usually costs more than digital marketing. The ads that you see on the television, billboards, and newspapers will need multiple resources and it is going to cost you a lot. Whereas an online advertising cost is really low that even a startup with a low budget can afford it. This gives a relatively equal opportunity for all businesses no matter its size.

2. Creating a brand
Traditionally creating a brand requires a lot of resources and money. It usually requires physical stores, stocks and workers among other things. This is going to take a lot of time and work. But while creating a brand in the digital world you need not worry about these. In traditional marketing, the ads are run once in a while but digital marketing allows you to run frequent ads online. The content used to advertise in traditional marketing is very limited whereas digital marketing uses content extensively in the websites or social media pages.

3. Greater Exposure
An advertisement on the tv or a newspaper covers only a small number of audiences whereas online advertising has wider audiences. As mentioned above online marketing has different mediums in which you can advertise. Even the different social networks have a different set of audiences. For example, if you post an add on LinkedIn it’ll be mostly viewed by professionals, if you post an add on Snapchat then most of your viewers will be teenagers. Google ads are an excellent means to advertise on the internet, as a lot of people use Google as their primary source for searching.

4. Return On Investment
The primary goal of doing business is to get a good return on investment. And digital marketing gives a good return on investment like no other. With email-marketing or search ads or by running campaigns on social media your spending will be very little compared to the conventional or traditional modes of advertisement while giving more returns.

5. Quicker results
With traditional marketing, you will have to wait for some weeks, sometimes even months before the boosts start to turn up. In this aspect digital marketing wins over online marketing as it gives quicker results. You can keep track of the progress on a day-to-day basis by monitoring certain parameters like the number of visitors, most active time of the day, conversion rates, bounce rates.

6. Greater engagement with the customers
An advertisement on tv, magazine or a newspaper can only be displayed for the customers to view. You cannot know their opinion on the ads or the concerns and complaints the customers may have so there will be near to no means to rectify them. Whereas an ad on online platforms like Google, Facebook and other social media allows your customers to give feedback on your business from the comfort of their home. If they have any complaints or opinions on any aspect of your business they will find it easy for them to raise those to you without much difficulty.

7. Works for all stages of business
Often when people start a business they tend to forgo any kind of traditional marketing due to huge costs for their startups unless they have a very big investment. Whereas big businesses can spend more on conventional mediums like tv, magazines, billboards etc. But with the boom in the internet usage businesses at any stage whether they are small, medium or large can get a level playing field while advertising on the online market. Digital marketing requires only a fraction of the amount of money to advertise a large number of people.

8. Personalized ads
When you design an advertisement for the traditional media you’ll have to consider everybody i.e, even the people who are not your target audience before you publish it. That’s because these ads will be viewed by everyone even though they are not your potential customers.

But digital media ads can be designed in a more personal manner according to age, gender and the type of occupation as these ads are only going to be viewed by your targeted audience and can be made attractive to your potential customers.

9. Strategy
For the traditional marketing ads, you can only publish an ad and wait for the results without knowing the performance of the ad or how well it has been received. By the time you get to know the feedback back, it will be too late to re-strategize.
On the other hand, digital media ads can be monitored on a daily basis making it viable to know the performance of the ads and change your strategy during a particular campaign.

10. Google analytics
Tools like Google Analytics allows you to instantly know what is working for you and what is not. You can measure your ad performance through inbound traffic, bounce rate, conversion rate, the trend of the audience’s interest and profit. Whereas this cannot be done in traditional marketing.

Though online marketing is more effective, you cannot dispense traditional marketing. So both these should be used to attain a successful marketing campaign.