What is the difference between Digital Marketing and Traditional Marketing? Which one should I choose for my product or service? What will be the cost and which method would provide me the maximum value?
These are some of the common questions that float in everyone’s mind, especially the new business enterprises that want to make a mark in the industry with the help of efficient marketing techniques.
This post will highlight everything that you need to know about the various characteristics that distinguish Digital Marketing and Traditional Marketing. So here we go but first, let us know the definitions of both the marketing techniques.
What’s Digital Marketing?
Simply put in words, marketing on digital mediums or platforms such as websites and social media is called Digital Marketing.
For example, when you are surfing a website or a webpage and a pop comes related to some product, or when you see advertisements on various websites and apps, that’s called Digital Marketing. All these brands are using digitized networks as a tool for marketing communication.
What’s Traditional Marketing?
Traditional marketing on the other hand is concentrated on using traditional channels like billboards and print media for brand promotion. Whenever you see a newspaper advertisement or a banner down the road, these are all forms of Traditional Marketing.
Until the time the internet has evolved in the 1990s, traditional marketing was pretty much the only form of marketing that was present.
Digital Marketing VS. Traditional Marketing: 7 characteristics that distinguish them
There is a huge gap between these forms of marketing. Both have their own pros and cons. Business units understand the utility of both the forms and the techniques to choose depend hugely upon the type of business you are running. Geological factors also play a crucial role while deciding the mode of advertisement.
However, as the internet has evolved and the digital era expanded like gunpowder, the customer is more inclined towards seeing what he chooses, and not something which he is forced to and that’s where Digital Marketing takes the cake. The Internet has empowered the user to choose whatever he wants.
But why does digital marketing have an edge over traditional marketing? Traditional marketing (also called offline marketing) focuses its mechanism of action on the product or service to generate sales. While Digital marketing (also called online marketing) on the other hand uses its action to connect with the user to generate a conversion.
Here are 7 Top characteristics that distinguish Digital Marketing from Traditional Marketing and make it more profitable:
Table of Contents
1. Segmentation
In Traditional Marketing, the message or advertisement is propagated to the masses. The concept is more generic where general aspects in terms of age, sex, income, location are studied accordingly. It typically works best at the local level. If you are launching a national or global advertising campaign through traditional marketing methods, it will require a lot of careful planning as the cost will be extravagant.
Whereas,
In Digital Marketing, the behavior in terms of choices and preferences in Social Media is studied which focuses on a more specific approach. The advertisement is catered to selected segments based on specific demographic characteristics of the audience.
Digital marketing empowers a company or an organization to market its business globally with a few clicks. For example, a PPC ad campaign can easily target a specific city, state, or country anywhere across the world.
2. Costs
One of the most important characteristics that distinguish Traditional Marketing from Digital Marketing is the cost element attached to it. Digital Marketing offers a much better return on investment when compared to traditional marketing. Especially small business units prefer Digital Marketing due to its cost efficiency and higher ROI.
Advertising on TV, Radio, billboards, and mailers are much more expensive than advertising through social media, Blogging, and Content Marketing. Also, not only these techniques are cost-efficient but also permanent, it’s there until you remove it.
For example, traditional marketing is 62% more expensive than content marketing, yet, Digital marketing can generate 3 times as many leads for each dollar spent.
Therefore, it is evident that the online method of marketing is more cost-effective than the offline method of marketing. So due to less cost digital marketing for startups is more beneficial.
The primary reason behind this phenomenon is when a business creates its online presence, for the business it will continue to earn new customers over time. On the other hand, a traditional advertisement will not be useful anymore as soon as a business stops paying for it.
3. Defining the Target Audience
Traditional marketing and Digital marketing also differ in terms of targeting a specific audience. Although a traditional advertisement displayed in magazines, billboards, or TV will have a large audience, the audience will not be much defined.
Anybody watching TV randomly will see the advertisement even if he has no interest in the product or service advertised. This can even lead to creating negative publicity for the product or service.
Digital marketing on the other hand works in a different manner. Digital marketing techniques help the advertisers to market their products to their targeted audience based on a variety of factors.
Pay Per Click and Social Media Ads can be customized and designed to target a specific category of people based on their age, sex, location, interests, choices, and preferences. People who discover a business through techniques like content marketing and SEO will be searching for relevant keywords online.
4. Buying intent
With efficient digital marketing techniques like SEO, the people who find your blog or website will do it by searching for a specific keyword related to your product or industry.
In Traditional Marketing, you would be targeting people who are maybe not actively looking for a product or service. As a result, the conversions would not be as per the expectations despite the message being conveyed to a massive audience.
Digital marketing, on the other hand, aims at targeting potential customers based on their interests. This means that people who come across your product or service online will be there because they are willing to make a purchase or are actively looking for the solution to their problem at that moment.
That’s the reason, the conversion rate in Digital marketing is much higher than in traditional marketing.
5. Customer Engagement
The next factor to distinguish the two marketing techniques is their ability to engage the customers. Traditional marketing takes an in-your-face approach while digital marketing (online marketing) aims at sparking a conversation that provides value first. The approach of digital marketing is inbound that pulls people into a business.
The traditional approach is sometimes more useful when the audience is slightly older that doesn’t use modern technology as much. Whereas digital marketing is useful when we are targeting a younger audience that uses social media and other online platforms.
6. Longevity
The next characteristic is the longevity that makes digital marketing different from traditional marketing.
There is a wide range of digital marketing techniques such as Search Engine Optimization and Email Marketing which can be fruitful for long term gains for your business. Techniques like video marketing, social media, blogging, and content creation will help you in increasing your online presence and eventually your business over time.
As most of these online techniques have a cumulative impact, hence your website or business will get new visitors and customers for months or even years to come.
Now when we talk about traditional marketing, it is often a one-stop type of a deal. As long as you are paying for a billboard ad or a TV Commercial, it will continue to display but as soon as you stop paying, it will disappear and the memory will eventually fade out over time.
7. Measuring Profitability
The seventh characteristic that differs both the marketing methods is the ability to track results and measure user engagement.
Digital marketing is far more measurable than traditional marketing is. Nowadays all social media and business websites make use of tools and plugins to track visitors and see what actually they came for and what actions they have taken.
Google also provides a tool called Google Analytics for tracking overall customer behavior. Digital marketing will provide you enough data to understand your customer by measuring the impact of a particular ad or any marketing tactic.
On the other hand, tracking the impact of traditional ads could be very difficult as they mostly rely on guesswork. It can be difficult to figure out the actual reason for a customer to come up to your business. It could be because of a TV Ad, a referral, a magazine ad, or for some other reason.
Conclusion
In the end, it is quite clear that Digital Marketing has an edge over traditional marketing. Traditional marketing is a more generic concept that targets a larger audience but with lesser targeted impact while digital marketing aims to cater specific audience based on the various factors like sex, age, demographics, salary, etc.
Traditional marketing is costlier and time-bound whereas Digital marketing is cheaper and will remain there forever as an online advertisement. Also, one important point to highlight is that Traditional marketing is useful if you are targeting an older audience who doesn’t use much technology while digital marketing is best for the audience which is younger and uses online platforms more frequently.
TNS Experts This post was submitted by a TNS experts.