Selecting the right marketing type is an age-old question on every marketer’s mind. The main difference between the two is the medium through which an audience encounters a marketing message. While traditional marketing uses traditional media like magazines and newspapers, digital marketing uses digital media, such as social media or websites.
In recent years digital marketing has gained a lot of traction. It has captured the imagination of marketers who want to create a strong brand positioning for their brands. This is so because digital marketing has proved to be a highly effective medium of marketing in comparison to traditional offline marketing methods.
Digital marketing is more cost-effective in comparison to traditional marketing
Traditional modes of marketing require huge budgets. Running television commercials across various targeted television channels requires media buying which is an expensive affair. Similarly, print media is also highly expensive in addition to running events all over the country. The high cost of rentals, production, manpower, and monitoring across all the above-mentioned mediums leads to organizations spending a major portion of their marketing budget on them. In contrast, digital marketing requires a fraction of the cost to reach the same number of customers or geographies through social media channels, search engines, emails, and shopping portals.
Provides an Excellent ROI
Well, digital marketing is not only about low cost or tracking real-time engagement. It is equally popular for providing good returns on small investments. When you compare it with traditional advertising like print marketing and media collaborations, advanced digital marketing methods are significantly cheaper and provide much more effective results. For instance, if you invest the same amount in PPC (Pay-per-click) and print ads, you will generate far more conversions in the former technique. At the same time, you will be able to better track your performance.
Digital marketing provides measurable results and high-quality analytics
Because every data of digital marketing can be accessed, digital marketers can analyze it and get improved results from their marketing campaigns. The data from social media channels, websites, etc can be analyzed and used to derive insights. These insights help in creating the right marketing campaign on the right digital channel for the desired customer segment.
Makes it Easy to Build a Global Presence
Digitization has brought the world close, and we are no longer bound by physical limitations when it comes to catering to global audiences. Traditional advertising is bound by localization. Whereas, digital marketing ad campaigns allow you to be visible in any part of the world. Both small and large enterprises get equal opportunities to go global and expand their presence beyond a single country’s border.
This has been possible through search engine powers like Google and various other social media channels. Facebook has about 2.89 billion active users as of the second quarter of 2022 from across the world. Similarly, LinkedIn, the world’s largest professional network, has 774+ million members in more than 200 countries across the world. When you build your company’s presence on these platforms, you can imagine how much exposure you can get.
Digital marketing provides an instant feedback
Digital marketing utilizes the internet to communicate with customers about a brand’s benefits. The channel of communication can be a social media portal like Facebook, Twitter or Instagram, etc. It can also use its website link in its campaigns and ask customers to visit its shopping portal. Whichever way a company chooses to advertise its product on the internet, it can easily track if the customers are interested in the product or not. They can check how many customers are clicking on the link or the social media engagement around the campaign through the hashtags etc. Thus, digital marketing provides instant and accurate feedback which was rare through traditional marketing methods.
Enables Automation
One of the major advantages of digital marketing is that it enables automation, which in turn saves time. Traditional marketing will always require manual efforts and more time to execute things. However, in the case of online marketing, you can make use of tons of tools to stream your digital campaigns.
For instance, using tools like social media scheduler, you can pre-schedule all your posts to be uploaded online. It ensures that you maintain consistency in the number of posts and your uploading time. Similarly, email marketing providers offer automation tools that allow you to design and execute email sequences for marketing campaigns. You simply need to write and design emails that need to be sent out. The rest will happen automatically. And the best part is that today marketers understand the value of digital platforms, so they aren’t reluctant to invest in these online tools. If you are a small business with limited resources, you can still find tools that will fit into your budget. There are hundreds of tools available online tailored to various types and sizes of businesses. In essence, streamlining your marketing efforts can enhance efficiency while optimizing costs. It’s not possible in traditional marketing.
Builds Long-lasting Relationships
Other than conversion, it also helps with building lasting relationships with your customers. When you build a presence online and stay active, it helps establish your credibility and build trust. It gives you a platform to interact directly with your followers and understand the issue they are facing. Besides, it enables your customers to provide direct feedback – communicate their experience on social media platforms by leaving comments. What’s more, companies get an opportunity to tell their brand story and connect emotionally with their target audience. It’s a great way to send out messages that resonate with your audience. Traditional marketing lacks this aspect as you can’t keep track of who is watching your advertisement and how they are reacting to it. In that case, the best thing is to check how some of the top market research companies conduct their research and decide whether your company should advertise itself through traditional marketing tactics or digital marketing.
Digital marketing provides higher engagement
Digital marketing can provide an opportunity to connect with the customer organically. Through methods like search engine optimization, it can appear on a customer’s search engine results only when the customer is looking for a solution that is related to the brand. Similarly, brand stories on Twitter or Facebook create a platform for engaging constructively with the customers. Customers can also touch base with the company for complaint redressal or any other inputs.
Measurable
Since digital marketing provides real-time results, it leads to high-end publicity for the brands. People start recognizing the brand globally with E-word of mouth (WOM) offered by digital marketing. It leads to more sales and boosts the organizational financial topography at large.
Better STP
The best feature of digital marketing over traditional marketing is that it offers customization. With the segmentation, targeting, and positioning of the target group’s interest (STP) strategy, digital marketing campaigns can be customized based on the target group’s interest.
Digital marketing is non-intrusive
Digital marketing is non-intrusive compared to traditional marketing. The people who buy newspapers do not buy them for the advertisements in them. Even so, a large part of a print publication is dedicated to advertisements. This means an already lower level of interest in the advertisement for the customers. The same goes for television channels or radio channels. Customers watch television for their favorite shows and listen to the radio for podcasts and songs. These days, streaming services like Netflix are completely ad-free and people love to binge-watch shows on them. We can hence, safely say that traditional marketing methods are usually intrusive and ignored as much as they can.
However, digital advertising allows a customer to choose to see an ad or not. In most cases, a digital promotion does not force itself on the customer. A customer can choose to ignore a promotional email. He can choose to not pay attention to the search engine-sponsored results. He can minimize the display ads when he considers them to be a disturbance.
A Landscape Overview
Of course, traditional marketing doesn’t mean it’s old-fashioned. Traditional marketing still plays an important role in people’s lives with the ever-growing need to step out of the digital world. By the same token, digital marketing is just as important as traditional if not even more so. Digital marketing uses every touchpoint of your daily use of the internet to reach you.
Using the internet for several hours each day is a normal part of most people’s day-to-day life. Digital marketing just uses this to its advantage by cleverly weaving marketing communications into every digital channel.
