Advertising is a crucial part of every business to sustain and grow in this competitive market. Advertising is a part of marketing that involves the activities that assist the business in promoting their services and converting the prospects into leads.
However, in today’s scenario, we come across two types of marketing: digital marketing and traditional marketing. These two types of marketing differ from each other in various aspects. Both digital marketing and traditional marketing may be different, but they both focus on promoting and advertising the products and services of a business. In this article, we delve into the advantages of Digital Marketing over Traditional Marketing.
What is traditional marketing?
Traditional marketing is the conventional mode of marketing that involves advertising products and services via everything outside of online marketing. Here are some of the traditional forms of marketing.
- Print advertising – It refers to advertising the products or services of a business using newspapers, magazines, brochures, leaflets, and newsletters. Print advertising basically involves anything that a business can physically distribute among the audience.
- Broadcast – Broadcast advertising is traditional marketing that refers to advertising over TV and radio.
- Telephone – The most popular form of traditional marketing is telemarketing. Receiving random calls from different companies promoting their services may be annoying for many people, but telemarketing remains on the top when it comes to advertising.
- Direct mail – It involves using leaflets and brochures for advertising and delivering it to the customers through postal service.
What is digital marketing?
Digital marketing, also known as online marketing, or internet marketing, involves advertising products and services over the internet using channels such as social media, SEO, email, and other mobile applications. Digital marketing has become a big deal in recent years because of its advantages over the traditional form of marketing. Digital marketing is a very wide field as it further involves different types of digital marketing.
Types of digital marketing
Following are some of the different types of digital marketing.
SEO (Search engine optimization)
SEO involves optimizing the content of the website to rank higher on the search engine result pages. SEO (search engine optimization) is the most important type of digital marketing. More than 90% of online experiences begin with a simple search on a search engine. To rank better on the search engine result pages, marketers use relevant keywords to help visitors find them online. SEO is further categorized into on-page SEO and off-page SEO; you can read more about it.
SMM (Social media marketing)
As the name implies, it involves using social media platforms for marketing the business. It is another most popular form of digital marketing as social media networks have dominated the online space over the last decade, attracting millions and billions of users from around the world. The most popular social media platforms that marketers use for implementing their SMM strategies are as follows:
- Instagram – 1 billion active users monthly.
- Facebook – 2.6 billion monthly active users.
- Twitter – 300 million active users monthly.
SEM (Search engine marketing)
People often confuse search engine marketing with SEO because of similar names. However, there are some important differences between SMM and SEO.
SEO is all about ranking your website organically by using keywords in your website’s content. On the contrary, SMM is all about increasing your website traffic from search engines using paid ads. The most popular SMM services are Google AdWords and Bing Ads.
Paid search (or Pay per Click / PPC)
Another most popular type of digital marketing is Paid search (or Pay per click/PPC), where marketers only pay for the number of clicks on the ads. PPC comes under search engine marketing as it applies to ads on the search engine result page and other websites.
Content marketing
Content marketing involves creating blogs, articles, videos, social media posts, etc., to promote and create awareness about the products and services of a business and provide relevant content to the target audience.
Email marketing
Email marketing is all about building your customer base by sending promotional emails in the form of newsletters, news updates, ongoing sales, and so on to inspire customer loyalty and gain valuable feedback from the customers. Businesses engage in email marketing to retain existing customers and attract new customers by sending them emails regarding their products and services.
Video marketing
Video marketing is all about promoting your business online using promotional videos. To create brand awareness among the target audience, a business can create different types of videos to promote their business, such as educational videos, demo videos, etc.
Influence or Affiliate marketing
Both influencer and affiliate marketing uses those in a position of power. For instance, a company will collaborate with well-known influencers on social media platforms like Instagram or YouTube and ask them to promote the products and services of a company for a fee. On the other hand, affiliate marketing is when a business gives commissions to third-party individuals to promote and generate leads for the company’s products and services. One of the most popular examples of affiliate marketing is Amazon affiliate.
These are some types of digital marketing that marketers opt for in their digital marketing strategies. Let us now move on to the advantages of digital marketing over traditional marketing.
Advantages of digital marketing over traditional marketing
Lower advertising cost
The biggest financial burden any business has to bear is the marketing and advertising cost. While big-shot companies may not have trouble investing huge funds for their marketing and advertising campaign, small businesses have limited funds. They cannot invest large sums of money in advertising and marketing.
This is where digital marketing plays an essential role by offering an affordable alternative to traditional marketing. Newspaper ads, TV ads, or any other type of traditional marketing cost a lot. On the other hand, online advertising gives businesses an efficient and cost-friendly alternative for marketing their products and services. For instance, you can sign up for an email marketing service at very affordable rates and send promotional emails to thousands of customers.
High return on investment
Anything that matters the most for any business is high returns on investment. Every business wants to receive high returns with minimal investment. With online marketing, businesses can yield high returns on small investments. For instance, running advertising campaigns on social media platforms cost little in comparison to traditional marketing techniques.
Global reach
One of the most important factors that differ digital marketing from traditional marketing is the global reach. With everything going, we can say that the world has become a global village, and it has been made possible because of digitization. With digital marketing, businesses can now go global and reach out to customers from around the world. Digital platforms give an opportunity for all small start-ups or businesses to create their marks in the competitive market by reaching out to a wider audience.
On the other hand, with traditional marketing, we cannot really say whether the newspaper ads or television broadcasts are going to reach a majority of customers around the world.
Brand development
Businesses that use digital platforms rather than traditional forms of marketing have higher chances of building their brand and reputation in the market. In order to build a brand, the business can create a well-developed website of their company, a blog section featuring all relevant and useful articles, a social media presence on Instagram, Facebook, or other social media platforms for interacting with the target audience are some of the ways for brand development.
On the other hand, with traditional forms of marketing, it becomes difficult for businesses to create brand reputation due to a lack of interaction with the audience and the lack of proper space to create a consistent image for your company.
Easy to measure
When it comes to traditional marketing techniques such as distributing brochures, flyers, advertising in newspapers or magazines, you will not be able to measure how your marketing strategies are going and whether they will be successful. Unlike traditional marketing, digital marketing allows you to measure the success of your online marketing campaigns.
With digital marketing strategies, you can easily measure and analyze how the audience is interacting with your ads, website, blogs, etc. For instance, you can measure the performance of your ads on search engine result pages via Google analytics. Similarly, an email marketing service allows businesses to track- how many emails were delivered, how many were read, and so on.
High level of customer engagement
With traditional marketing, there is no scope for directly interacting with the customers, whereas digital marketing gives businesses to interact with their customers leading to high levels of engagement. A business can easily answer the queries of their customers through different platforms such as social media account, through emails, feedback section on their website and so on. Businesses can run better if they know the customer’s likes, dislikes or get other feedback for their products and services.
Precise targeting
With digital marketing, businesses can target the customers through campaigning targeted ads that are only shown to the customers based on their preferences or initial action. For instance, when you sign up on a website, there is an option for subscribing to receive promotional emails regarding sales, new launches, discounts, and so on. This is how businesses can target potential customers.
On the other hand, traditional marketing is a spray and pray method, meaning that the promotions in newspapers, fliers, TV, and radio might have positive results from the audience. Businesses are uncertain whether the audience will like their ads in newspapers or other traditional methods.
Easy to share
Most of the digital content is easy to share that allows customers to share the content of your website, social media channels, etc., with their friends and family. For instance, if you like something on a social media account, you have the option of sharing the content with a number of other users. The same cannot be said for traditional marketing.
Conclusion
It is clear that digital marketing may be a better choice than traditional marketing for promoting your business in the market. The world is transitioning into a digital environment with people performing many of their daily tasks online, such as online banking, reading books on e-readers, making payments through phone apps, taking online educational classes, and the list goes on.
With the rise of the digital age, it seems like the right choice to invest in digital marketing campaigns. However, traditional marketing is still indispensable for the audience who prefer traditional forms of marketing. Therefore, there is a need for businesses to have a smart blend of both digital marketing and traditional marketing to reach both local and global customers.
