Digital marketing vs. traditional marketing: Which is Effective ?

What is Traditional Marketing?

Traditional marketing refers to a form of promotion that reaches an audience offline. It uses strategies like direct sales, TV, radio, mail, print ads in newspapers or magazines and printed materials like billboards, posters, catalogs or brochures.  In most cases, the goal of traditional marketing is to create brand awareness.

 Although opinions about traditional marketing vary, a large number of marketers, especially in the B2B (business to business) space don’t believe that traditional marketing is effective.

Types of Traditional Marketing:-

• Direct sales:-Direct sales involves the marketing and sale of products and services directly to consumers, but not from a fixed retail location.
• Direct mail:-Direct mail marketing creates awareness of a product or service through postcards, letters, fliers, brochures and other printed pieces sent through the mail.
• Tradeshows:-Tradeshows continue to be a popular marketing channel for many businesses. 
• Print:-Print marketing creates awareness of a product or service through ads in a newspaper, magazine, the Yellow Pages, billboards, etc. 
• Referral:-Print marketing creates awareness of a product or service through ads in a newspaper, magazine, the Yellow Pages, billboards, etc. 
• Broadcast:-Print marketing creates awareness of a product or service through ads in a newspaper, magazine, the Yellow Pages, billboards, etc.

Advantages of Traditional Marketing 

1. Traditional methods may be only way to reach your target audience such as old generation. 

2. Person-to-person is a strategy of traditional marketing. Sometimes there is a definitely a time and place when this type of direct selling is most effective to market a product or service. 

3. Traditional marketing offers hard copy material.

Disadvantages of Traditional Marketing 

1. To purchase advertising for TV, radio or print can be very costly prohibitive to most small businesses. Brochures, business cards and mailers are expensive to print hard copies. 

2. Printing materials, buying media and creating radio advertisements require hiring outside that add to costs. 

3. Results are not easily measured, and in many cases cannot be measured at all. 

4. Traditional marketing is static which means there is no way to interact with the audience.

What is Digital Marketing? 

Digital marketing is the act of promoting and selling products and services by leveraging online marketing tactics such as social media marketing, search marketing, and email marketing. 

Through digital marketing, you can find people interested in your offering, interact with them, and build trust with your brand.

A digital marketing Strategy or plan is an essential tool for your business. 

Types of Digital Marketing:-

1. Search-Engine Optimization (SEO)
2. Search-Engine Marketing(SEM)
3. Social Media Marketing (SMM) 
4. Pay Per Click (PPC)
5. Social Media Optimization (SMO) 
6. Content Marketing 
7.  Email Marketing 
8. Affiliate Marketing (Influence marketing)

Advantages of Digital Marketing 
1. Digital marketing is an interactive means of reaching to local audience as well as to global audience when appropriate. 
2. Data is available immediately and results are much easier to measure. 
3. Social media enables to communicate directly with groups and even individual consumers like word of mouth marketing. 
4. Build direct relationships with your customers through social media.
5. It is 24X 7 marketing and capture the most energetic crowd. 

Disadvantages of Digital Marketing 
1. The company relies on those customers which are highly interactive on the internet. 
2. Content must continuously create, edited, approved and published. Comments must be responded to and sites and pages must be maintained. 
3. Though it is most vital in nature but the question of reliability still appears in the mind of people.

Traditional vs. Digital Marketing: How Digital Marketing is Better than Traditional Marketing:-

i) Greater exposure: Traditionally, it was possible to quite effectively reach a local audience. Digital marketing, however, now enables business to reach people all over the world, 24 hours a day.

ii) Cost-efficient: Digital marketing can save one’s company lots of money. With the right tools and partners a Digital Marketing strategy can be achieved fairly cheaply as it can eliminate the need for a presence in costly advertising channels such as newspapers, and more ‘traditional’ directories.

iii) Easy to measure: Through tools such as Google Analytics, it is easy to keep track of the traffic to your website as well as conversion rates, among other things, and you can adapt your marketing strategies accordingly.

iv) Customer engagement: Traditional marketing tends to be unidirectional. On the internet, however, communication goes both ways and digital marketing can be very interactive. Consumers can ‘like’, ‘share’, ‘follow’ ‘retweet’ and comment on social media, as well as review your products and servies. Digital marketing thus enables potential customers to easily engage with your business, while simultaneously giving you more publicity.

v) Easily refine strategies: Traditional marketing campaigns often take a long time to develop and are expensive. People cannot simply decide overnight to take a different course of action if their campaign does not seem to be working. Conversely, if the digital marketing campaign seems to be ineffective, one can just change your strategies.

vi) Greater brand development: Branding can be defined as “the marketing practice of creating a name, symbol or design that identifies and differentiates a product from other products.” This is much easier to do online than offline.   

vii) Level playing field: Finally, the internet has made it so much easier for small businesses to compete with larger organizations. Traditionally, smaller businesses generally did not have the resources to organize marketing campaigners with as a great a reach as those of larger businesses.

How we Can use Both Digital Marketing and Traditional marketing:-

Traditional and digital marketing sound like opposites, but you can use them together to achieve huge levels of growth. 

Diversifying your marketing strategies is great for long-term growth. Short of some marketing catastrophe where every medium fails, you’ll almost always continue moving forward.

• Newspapers and online ads
•  Radio and streaming ads
• Television and video ads
• Magazines and digital content
• Billboards and geotargeting

Traditional vs. Digital Marketing: Difference