Running a successful business is not just about choosing the appropriate market or having a high quality product. It’s also about leveraging the right kind of marketing techniques in order to reach out to your target audience and convert them into leads or customers.

Some businesses may give less preference to marketing, but if any serious business wants to increase profits, it will almost always have set aside a proper budget for marketing.

Even if you do acknowledge the need for effective marketing, the whole digital marketing vs traditional marketing debate might stump you. The reason for this confusion may arise due to the fact that even though a lot of marketing is done in the traditional way, digital marketing is steadily gaining an edge.

Yes, there are a percentage of people who don’t use the Internet for conducting any transactions. However, a considerable chunk of the population is regularly using the Internet for multiple purposes, including making their day-to-day transactions.

As a business, you need to ensure that you are ahead of your competition. Which means you cannot just depend on outdated marketing methods anymore. You need to look beyond and understand how you can leverage the latest digital marketing techniques to grow your reach.

Before we get into the nitty gritty details of digital marketing vs traditional marketing, let’s first look into some of the basic ideas you need to understand clearly.

Digital Marketing vs Traditional Marketing: What is Traditional?

Traditional marketing is nothing new as it’s a form of marketing that we have been exposed to at one point or another. It is a conventional mode of marketing that helps to reach out to a semi-targeted audience with various offline advertising and promotional methods.

Traditional marketing is the conventional modes of marketing that have been used since the beginning of marketing and advertisements. This includes:

  • Television.
  • Newspaper.
  • Radio.
  • Flyers and billboards by the roads and highways.
  • Ads in related weekly magazines.

Traditional Marketing’s Advantages and Disadvantages

Because of its longevity, people are accustomed to traditional marketing. Finding ads in magazines and newspapers, or reading billboards are still familiar activities and people still do them all the time. Most of the time, traditional marketing is reaching only a local audience even though it is not limited to one. One of the primary disadvantages of traditional marketing is that the results are not easily measured, and in many cases cannot be measured at all. In most cases, traditional marketing is also more costly than digital marketing. And perhaps the biggest disadvantage today is that traditional marketing is static which means there is no way to interact with the audience. It’s more like you are throwing information in front of people and hoping that they decide to take action.

The Downside to Traditional Marketing

There is very little interaction between the medium used and the customers. It is more of providing information to the public that the brand exists with the hope of these people patronizing the brand.

Print or radio advertisements can be very costly. Printing materials can be expensive and you need to hire people to distribute these.

Results on this marketing strategy cannot easily be measured. Was the campaign successful?

What is digital marketing?

Digital marketing is the new age marketing method of the global realm. With internet finding its application and benefit in every aspect of life, marketing too has managed to not only create awareness or promote brands through it, but also give them a global platform to reach a wider customer base. It includes the following:

– Business networking sites such as LinkedIn

– Social media sites such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter

– Email marketing

– Paid pop-up ads

– Blogs

– Click baiting URLs for viral content marketing

Although all the marketing techniques used in digital marketing appear similar, online marketing is a far more versatile mode of marketing than conventional one.

Benefits of Digital Marketing over Traditional Marketing

Traditional marketing has its own advantages but there is no doubt that internet marketing has set a revolution ablaze. It has some clear winning benefits over traditional marketing and some of those are mentioned below.

1. Low Cost

While newspaper, television and other such media ads cost a lot, advertising through the internet is quite affordable. This in turn means greater fraction of the budget to enhance business.

2. Real Time Result

Digital marketing has an edge over traditional marketing since it is able to give quick results, while the latter keeps you waiting for long before showing any results. With online marketing you can measure and view everything from number of visitors, conversion rate, busiest period of the day and bounce rate too with ease.

3. Brand Development

When the question of brand image arises among digital marketing vs traditional marketing, digital marketing has an added advantage. Due to the limitation of space and low frequency of advertisements as is the case with conventional marketing, it loses at the hands of the online marketing.

Instead of a small column in a newspaper, you can own an entire website and showcase your ads or promote your brand whenever you want with the help of a social media page or your blog, unlike traditional marketing. This helps to build an image of your brand consistently.

4. Non-intrusive

People do not purchase a newspaper to look at the ads or watch a television to be interrupted by commercials, hence usually advertisements featured through such media go ignored. However, with online ads, one has the power to choose to see an ad or not, participate in a social media discussion group or read or ignore a marketing email. Besides, you can also target a specific audience for these ads which. All of this makes these ads more wanted and far more likely to generate leads. Hence by being non-intrusive and non-annoying as opposed to the traditional marketing, digital marketing has more potential to give desirable results.

5. Greater Exposure

Any traditional form of marketing device, be it television commercials or a newspaper ad, can only cover a certain area or population sector of a region. As opposed to this, an online advertisement has the ability to reach out to a widespread population, even the whole of world.

6. Better Engagement

No traditional marketing mode, allows you to interact with your audience and really engage them with your brand. With such marketing channels you have to wait to gain response only after which can you take any further step. However, with digital marketing strategies, you can not only interact with your targeted audience in the real time, but also make prompt and fruitful steps based on their quick feedbacks. You can also engage your audience in chats and discussions for registering better brand presence and gain passive advice to improve your product or service. Of course, the latter means that you need to be available and invest in more time for the engagement through a PR team.

7. Quicker Publicity

Owing to real time results with digital marketing, you get instant publicity and even if you do not, you can instantly know which of your ad isn’t working. The debate for traditional vs. Digital marketing is out of question here since the former falls way behind in this regard due to to lack of such a scope. On the other hand, the latter works like a chain reaction giving you newer audience and earning you a newer customer with every passing nanosecond.

8. Works for Every Stage or Field

Digital marketing vs traditional marketing battle often falls in the winning hands of online marketing arena with certain benefits you cannot ignore with the former. Digital marketing allows even small businesses with a handful of staff members to expand their brand presence and manage advertising and marketing front, which of course cannot be held true with traditional marketing methods which renders the small businesses and start ups at disadvantage.

9. Easy Analytics

With digital marketing measuring the your marketing efforts becomes very easy and quick. You can instantly see which strategy is working and which isn’t through Google Analytics, besides other aspects too such as general trend, inbound traffic, conversion rate, interested audience, bounce rate and profit. This all makes the digital marketing vs traditional marketing debate, highly unfair by putting the former on the winning side by a wide.

Is there a realistic balance between the two?

The world has transitioned into a very digital environment. Not only are magazines going digital, we perform many of our daily tasks such as banking online and much of our reading is done on e-readers. Because of the rise of the digital age, it just seems like common sense to invest in a digital campaign. Even though traditional marketing still has a place, it is diminishing in our digitally based world. For today’s businesses, it is imperative to have a website and use the web as a means to interact with their consumer base. There are some successful traditional marketing strategies, particularly if you are reaching a largely local audience, but it is important to take advantage of digital marketing so as to keep up in today’s world.

How We Use Both Digital & Traditional Marketing

Our traditional marketing methods support our digital marketing efforts. The two do not operate in exclusion from each other. But we only use hard copy marketing materials to further strengthen a relationship with a contact, referral partner or client. We don’t invest in television or radio ads, for example, but we will give brochures to someone who is interested in our services.

Rather than taking an all or nothing approach, it appears that a multi-channel approach that leverages the unique benefits of paper with the convenience and accessibility of digital will perform best.

Decision Time: Digital Marketing vs Traditional Marketing

We would hope we’ve convinced you with data and facts that digital marketing is definitely the way to advertise as a small business. If you’ve already tried traditional marketing before and haven’t seen the rapid growth results you wanted, then give digital marketing a shot. There is little risk and great reward. That’s not a combo you see often in the business world.

Our experts can even take off a little of the pressure. They do all the work for you. All you have to do is stay informed and approve material. At LYFE Marketing, we take the worry out your online advertising and digital marketing which allows you to focus on other areas of business that need your undivided attention. Contact us today to start your digital marketing campaign. It’s that simple