Traditional marketing and digital marketing
In the field of marketing and advertising, choosing the right method between traditional marketing and digital marketing is one of the main concerns of businesses. No matter what field of business you have, for the growth and success of your business you must invest in advertising and marketing and by choosing the right marketing method you can effectively introduce your brand, products or services and attract the target audience. But given the popularity of the Internet and social media, should we abandon traditional marketing methods altogether and focus on digital marketing methods instead?
Which of the following best describes traditional marketing and digital marketing?
The choice between traditional marketing methods and digital marketing depends on several factors. Running a successful business is not just about choosing the right market or having a high quality product. Rather, it is about using the right kind of marketing techniques to reach the target audience and turn them into key customers. Some businesses may give less importance to marketing, but if a business really wants to increase its profits, it must have a good marketing budget.
There may still be a percentage of people who do not use the Internet to do business. However, a significant portion of people regularly use the Internet for a variety of purposes, including doing their daily trading. So as a business, you need to make sure you are ahead of the competition. This means that you can no longer rely on the old marketing methods. You need to look beyond this and understand how you can use the latest digital marketing techniques and Internet advertising to increase your reach.
What is traditional marketing and what are its types?
Traditional marketing is a relatively broad category that includes many different types of advertising and marketing. This marketing method includes ads that we see and hear every day. This type of marketing is also called offline marketing as opposed to digital marketing or online marketing.
Printed advertising is the oldest form of traditional marketing. This strategy, simply defined as paper advertising, has been used since ancient times, when Egyptians created sales messages and wall posters on papyrus. In general, traditional marketing strategies fall into one of five categories:
- Print ads (ads in newspapers, magazines, newsletters and other print content)
- Advertising via broadcast (TV, radio and…)
- Direct mail advertising (catalogs, postcards, etc.)
- Telephone advertising (telemarketing, SMS marketing, etc.)
- Environmental advertising (billboards, banner ads, lightboxes, etc.)
Benefits of Traditional Marketing
Brochures, posters and banners are all traditional forms of marketing. These methods have been used for many years and are still useful today. Some of the benefits of traditional marketing include:
Easy access to local target audience: When your business is promoted through local newspapers, magazines or radio, you can reach local potential customers.
Easy to understand: Since this style of advertising has a long history, almost all audiences are familiar with it.
Disadvantages of Traditional Marketing
Disadvantages of traditional marketing include:
Less engagement and less attractive to the audience: Traditional marketing is a more passive form of marketing than digital marketing in which you provide information and hope that your audience will be attracted, buy or sign up and interact with you. Traditional marketing is a one-way street where only one business is able to spread or present information about its product or service to its target audience.
Higher costs: Printing products such as brochures and advertisements in newspapers, magazines, radio and television often costs a lot. In addition, your ad in a local newspaper will only be effective if it is seen by your target audience on the day of publication, what is your chance of doing so? If you want to re-advertise a product or service or update its information, you need to create and run a new print advertising campaign. When you distribute posters or brochures in your area, you only have one chance to be seen by the audience. Now compare it to the content you create on your website, which can have the desired visitors for years to come at no extra cost.
Data Collection Problem: Unfortunately, with traditional marketing, you do not know exactly how many people have seen your poster or brochure or how successful your marketing campaign has been. Gathering this information in traditional marketing is almost impossible. But when launching an online marketing campaign, you can easily identify how effective and successful it is and examine its strengths and weaknesses.
What is digital marketing?
The principles of marketing are the same, creating a strategy to deliver the right messages to the right people. Digital marketing or online marketing means using tools such as websites, mobile devices and social media to reach more customers. In fact, everything from search engine marketing to marketing through Facebook, Instagram, etc. is called digital marketing.
Any business, regardless of company size or business model, can use digital marketing to promote their brand; Reach out to potential customers and turn more of them into regular customers. However, businesses will continue to use traditional marketing methods such as advertising, direct mail and public relations; Digital marketing adds a new element to marketing. Its flexible and cost-effective nature makes it especially suitable for small businesses.
The Benefits of Digital Marketing
The main advantage of digital marketing is that it can reach the target audience in a cost-effective and measurable way. Other benefits of digital marketing include increased brand loyalty and increased online sales. In general, the benefits of digital marketing are:
Global Access: A website allows you to access new markets and trade globally with just a small investment.
Lower cost: A well-planned and well-targeted digital marketing campaign can reach the right customers at a much lower cost than traditional marketing methods.
Traceable and measurable results: Measuring your online marketing makes it easier to determine how effective your campaign is by analyzing web analytics and other online metric tools. You can get detailed information about how customers use the website, or the advertising feedback you do.
Personalization: If the customer database is relevant to your website, every time someone visits the site, you can welcome them with targeted offers, and market them effectively.
Improve conversion rates: If you have a website, your customers are just a few clicks away from buying. Unlike other media outlets that ask people to make phone calls or go to the store, digital marketing can respond seamlessly to customer needs.
Disadvantages of Digital Recovery
Some of the disadvantages and challenges of digital marketing that you should be aware of are:
Skills and training: You need to make sure your employees have the right knowledge and expertise to do digital marketing. Tools, platforms, and trends are changing rapidly, and maintaining the knowledge of using these various tools is critical to the success of digital marketing.
Time consuming: Things like optimizing online advertising campaigns and creating marketing content can take a lot of time. It is important to measure and evaluate the results so that you can ensure a return on investment.
High competition: Although you can reach a global audience through digital marketing, you are also facing global competition. Standing up to competitors and getting attention among the many messages that online audiences encounter on a daily basis can be a challenge.
Complaints and Feedback: Any negative feedback or criticism of your brand can be seen by your audience through social media and review websites. Effective customer service online can be challenging. Negative feedback or lack of effective response can damage your brand reputation.
Security and Privacy Issues: There are a number of legal considerations regarding the collection and use of customer data for digital marketing purposes. Be careful to follow the rules of privacy and data protection.
What do statistics say about traditional marketing and digital marketing?
Consider the current growth of digital marketing. Here are some statistics to help you understand the growth and prominence of digital marketing.
To date, 60% of marketers in various industries have shifted their efforts to digital marketing.
More than 80% of buyers do their research online before investing in a product or service.
94% of B2B marketers actively use LinkedIn for marketing.
90% of B2C businesses report social media as the most effective content marketing tactic.
Regardless of the job in which you operate, you need to consider the importance of digital marketing. Otherwise, you may lose the competition that uses the latest digital marketing techniques.
Invest in traditional marketing and digital marketing
Determining a marketing budget for a business is important, but it is more important to make sure that the advertising budget works well. So it makes sense to take a thorough look at traditional marketing and digital marketing and focus only on those marketing channels and methods that are likely to work best for you.
Given the advancement of technology and the popularity of the Internet, there is no denying the fact that digital marketing can be very effective in generating higher sales rates. If you look around, you will see businesses of all sizes using digital marketing. Digital marketing can help a start-up build a strong foundation for effective promotion, especially because of the lower cost and barriers to entry compared to offline marketing methods such as print advertising. To better compare these two methods, here are some aspects of them:
Invest in traditional advertising
There is no doubt that traditional advertising, like print advertising, can work well if done correctly. However, without consistency, print advertising will not produce the desired results. To advertise in an important magazine or local newspaper, you must be prepared to spend a lot of money in the long run.
Also, when it comes to print advertising, what many businesses do not realize is the circulation aspect. The number of readers who actually see your ad will be less than the number of magazines and newspapers in circulation. Because a percentage of magazine and newspaper issues remain almost unsold.
Investing in digital advertising
Digital ads are more customizable than traditional ads, which makes them less risky. For example, if you run an ad campaign, you can target your ad to a specific audience and then modify it. It is easily possible to adjust and change the settings of the ads based on the data.
Let’s compare magazine ads with an online advertising channel like Google Ads, where you only get paid for each click. This means that in some cases digital advertising can cost you nothing. So if you have a limited budget business and you want to increase your chances of success, digital marketing may be the best option for you.
By now you know the level of customization and tracking you get with digital marketing, and you have a lot more control over the performance of your ads and in-depth analytics, and you can improve them along the way.
Read more: The best online advertising companies in Iran
Why digital marketing can be a better choice?
So far, we have looked at the pros and cons of traditional marketing and digital marketing, and are relatively familiar with each. For some brands, especially popular brands with large offline audiences, traditional marketing can be so expensive that it can be overlooked by brand owners. But for many small businesses that are struggling to make ends meet, digital marketing can be a lifesaver. This is why many new and old businesses are using the power of digital marketing and rethinking the marketing funnel. Here are some important benefits and reasons for choosing digital marketing, including:
1. Higher level of customer engagement
Traditional marketing does not allow direct interaction with customers, while digital marketing offers a higher level of interaction, either through social media comments or emails. Your target audience can easily reach you through different digital marketing channels at any time and place. Your business will perform better when it meets the needs of your customers. Digital marketing allows you to meet customers and solve their problems without wasting time.
۲. Ease of measuring results
When you donate brochures, distribute brochures, or advertise in magazines, you do not know how successful your marketing will be. You may be moving in the wrong direction, but there is no quick and easy way to understand it.
Unlike traditional marketing, digital marketing allows you to easily measure results. You have access to a lot of information about your customers that will help you understand where you are going. For example, what percentage of the number of people who visit your website have become customers? This level of access to information and statistics that you can achieve with digital marketing does not exist in traditional marketing in the true sense of the word.
3. More audience range
Traditional marketing is limited in many ways. But one of the biggest limitations it faces is the inability to go beyond a regional or local audience. Your business may not be geographically limited, so why limit your access?
With digital marketing, you can create a custom campaign and expand your reach to different cities or even different countries. So say goodbye to the traditional approach to traditional marketing and welcome digital marketing, which allows you to push your campaign beyond your geographical borders!
4. Cheaper and more effective
When it comes to spending money on marketing, your return on investment determines whether your campaign is successful. Not surprisingly, digital marketing brings you a better return on investment (ROI) because it is in many ways cheaper than traditional marketing or advertising. Do you prefer to invest in a performance-based ad or in a high-profile newspaper ad seen by a limited audience? Online advertising allows you to spend less money while getting more results.
Conclusion
We hope that with the data and facts presented, you have a good idea of the characteristics of the two methods of traditional marketing and digital marketing. If you’ve tried traditional marketing before and have not seen the results of your rapid growth, then look no further than digital marketing. There is little risk and you will get amazing results.
