Marketing has evolved dramatically in recent decades. Businesses are spent on marketing activities in traditional and digital media to encourage their messages to the target audience. If you are new to the business and will start a marketing strategy, it’s important to know the pros and cons of these two marketing channels. Let’s find out the difference between digital marketing vs traditional marketing in detail.
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What is Traditional Marketing?
Each ad in the mainstream media includes TV, newspapers, magazines, postcards, and advertising boards that fall under traditional marketing. This is a medium where you can convey your brand messages loud and clear. In short, traditional marketing is an outgoing strategy. Let’s discuss the pros and cons of traditional marketing.
Advantages of Traditional Marketing
Here are some of the advantages of traditional marketing:
- In traditional marketing, hard copies of ads can be maintained.
- It helps to reach more people in a short time. For example, if you have a full-page ad in a leading newspaper, you reach all their customers, the next morning.
- Another advantage of traditional marketing is that the message is clear and easy to understand by the audience.
- Easy to connect and interact with a local audience.
- Promotional material can be reused and recycled.
Disadvantages of Traditional Marketing
- Although traditional marketing has long been in the industry, this methodology does not allow prospects to interact because of their feedback.
- Marketing campaigns, especially expensive TV ads to run.
- Ironically, it is difficult to measure the results, such as how many people really buy products based on advertising campaigns.
- Unable to target a specific audience based on interest, age, etc.
- It doesn’t allow editing of ad copy once it is published.
- Traditional marketing is more expensive than digital marketing.
You might have a great idea about traditional marketing, its advantages, and its disadvantages. Now, let’s discuss the pros and cons of digital advertising.
What is Digital Marketing?
Now, digital marketing is an inbound strategy where the target audience reaches through the internet. The level of involvement here is multifold because the prospect can assess your product and also provide feedback that can be read by everyone and decide.
Advantages of Digital Marketing
Here are some of the advantages of digital marketing:
- Digital marketing is cost-effective.
- When compared with traditional marketing, Google ads and other digital advertising campaigns will not cost a lot to run periodically.
- It helps to reach a global audience.
- Second, the audience can directly interact with your ad in the digital space.
- It can collect prospect contact information.
- Next, there are web tools that can accurately track and measure how effective digital marketing campaigns are.
- Easy to collect feedback from consumers.
- It is easy to target an audience based on interest, age, gender, etc.
- Another important advantage of digital marketing is web analytics based on which we can optimize our campaign and get real-time results.
Disadvantages of Digital Marketing
- Real-time feedback can be a challenge especially when there are so many online users searching for additional information or services.
- Secondly, you have to face global competition to reach your target audience.
- Ad blockers and other tools can block advertisements so they are not displayed in the browser.
- Email campaigns can end in the spam folder. Many might ignore a digital campaign at all.
- Negative feedback & reviews are widely visible on social media and review sites which can hurt a brand’s reputation.
- Require different skills and training to run online campaigns.
- It is a time-consuming process. Creating a different strategy might consume a lot of time.
- If a digital marketing campaign is not done professionally then will not be taken seriously.
Considering high-speed smartphone and cellular internet penetration, coming years are likely to be dominated by digital media, and it is safe to say that, for effective brand reach, it is wise to invest more in digital marketing. While you can use a combination of both. Here are some reasons that support digital marketing.
Where are digital and traditional marketing join?
The transition from traditional marketing to definite digital marketing. Technology such as QR codes helps to link newspaper advertisements with cellular applications to bridge the gap between physical and digital media. With the introduction of augmented reality, users can be more personalized.
How does digital marketing win over traditional marketing?
Digital marketing has tools that can be used to measure the effectiveness and scope of changing strategies during unfavorable circumstances. Second, digital marketing costs are far less than traditional marketing costs.
The subscription model in a digital campaign helps to focus on a much better target audience that increases the conversion rate. Real-time analysis of marketing efforts helps improvise strategies while traveling. In addition, interactive digital marketing helps retrieve customer data and target marketing campaigns directly.
Conclusion
At present, we are at the stage where digital marketing seems to be following traditional marketing in cost-effectiveness and measurable results. While every marketing strategy has pros & cons itself, to effectively reach out to the target audience, we need to choose the right strategy. For old and traditional audiences, traditional marketing can work well. But if you targeting youth, especially millennials, be sure to allocate more budgets for digital marketing.
If you find any difficulties while creating a digital marketing campaign then you can contact us. IWD Technologies‘ digital marketing team is always happy to help you.