Traditional Marketing vs Digital Marketing

Marketing is all about reaching your customers with the right product and through the right means. With Traditional Marketing and Digital Marketing, you now have two important mediums to choose from to decide on how to promote! Do you hunt down the popular newspaper and give an ad there or do you create social media accounts for your business and do your promotion there? So when given these two choices, an important question arises.

Which one should you use?

At first, this decision of what to use may seem like an MCQ question where you HAVE to pick one but that is not really the case. You can’t completely rely on one of these forms of marketing to help promote your product, you need a mix. In some businesses, making use of traditional marketing more can help you reach your customers better and vice versa.

This decision of how to market may have become a bit more difficult but to ease the difficulty a bit, look at these differences between traditional marketing and digital marketing that can help provide you with some base for this decision!

Difference between Traditional and Digital Marketing

Meaning

Traditional marketing means promoting your products via offline means like using the spaces you see on billboards, near bus stands, newspapers, etc.Digital marketing is promoted by using online means like Social media, mobile SMS, email, etc.

Reach

Digital marketing tools help you reach a much wider audience than traditional tools as more and more users are making use of the Internet. More and more people are connecting with their friends and others over social media! Traditional tools may be popular in some parts and the same things may not have much popularity if one newspaper is popular here, it may not be popular elsewhere. If you want ultimate reach via traditional marketing, you might have to give ads on everything popular to cover the entire market but then the costs will skyrocket.

Cost

Digital marketing takes the win on this one! It’s a cost-effective solution compared to traditional. Of course, Google ads and other such things are to be paid for but things like, creating an Instagram account and posting your content or Creating a YouTube Channel, do not cost much!

Even looking at online ads, they cost less than giving ads in newspapers and magazines and can even be tracked to see how many people have clicked on it or seen it! Can you do that with a newspaper?

Memorability

Which one is easier to remember? Well TV, and newspaper ads basically tools of traditional marketing take the cake. Think back to the Maggi ad with Amitabh Bachchan or the Boost ad with Dhoni. These ads created an impact in our minds and make us want to buy them as soon as we get to the supermarket. Instagram accounts, Emails, and posts are not exactly as memorable as them.

Measurement

Isn’t it great if you could know how many people the ad reached, and how many clicked essentially knowing how it’s performing? Well, that’s only there in digital marketing! Google ads, Facebook ads, and other ads you give on the internet can be easily tracked. You can see how well your ads are doing and if at not a lot of people are clicking, you can change them accordingly. But if you look at the ads you give via newspapers, you cannot know whether a person likes the ad even if he clicks on the newspaper!

Annoyance

People do classify social media ads, mobile SMS, and email ads as annoying and spam. Chances of this happening are high and sometimes people may overlook this only if the ad is really well crafted. I mean, you don’t want to be waiting for an official email from your boss and suddenly receive some email about “Sir, Do you have Insurance?” It’s annoying, right? It’s not to say that traditional marketing is not annoying at all but when you compare it to digital marketing, it’s less.

If not which, then how much of each?

With all these factors in mind, it’s important for you to recall that it’s not about deciding which to use but rather how much to use both. If you let go of digital marketing, you are throwing away the huge reach and cost-effectiveness you could have. If you let go of traditional marketing, you are throwing away the memorability and how impactful it is. So, by thinking of your customers, you can help decide on the right means to reach them. So ask yourself, are they youngsters who are on social media most of the time, are they elders who are more into watching TV, etc. can help you understand the right way to reach them. In some marketing campaigns, more traditional would be used and in some more digital.

But using only one of these two is one that shouldn’t be done.