Traditional marketing vs Digital marketing

Digital marketer taking a break from work

Businessman taking a break from work

Digital marketing or internet marketing is a new tradition – everything from news outlets to our wallet is now available on our smartphones and computer devices. But when it comes to marketing – does digital mean better?

That is a long-standing debate among the small business owners because their budget will typically only stretch to one or the other, not both types of marketing. The decision is not easy and depends on the company’s situation, but this post will break down the merits and downsides of traditional and digital marketing.

Benefits of traditional marketing

Laptop in the kitchen used for digital marketing.

Reach your target local audience

You can use a radio station that is popular in your city or region to play your company’s ad. Another option is to send mailbox flyers to the households in selected suburbs. The hard copy can be kept, and your potential client can browse through it over and over again. This strategy can be especially effective if you are targeting the elderly community where people might not be very keen on technology.

More about the flyers: neuroscience seems to support the paper marketing. A study performed by Canadian neuro-marketing firm compared the effects of paper marketing with digital media one. The result showed that direct mail was easier to process mentally. According to the report, email required 21% less[1] cognitive effort to process than digital media, meaning that it is easier to understand and more memorable.

Downside of traditional marketing

Lack of communication

With traditional marketing, you are informing the public that your brand exists, but there is very little or no interaction between the business and the customers.

Higher cost

Radio ads and or thousands of flyers can be very costly. Printing materials is expensive enough, but you also need to hire people to distribute them.

Analysis restriction

Even if you think that traditional marketing is the right option for your brand, the results of such strategy cannot be easily measured. People tend to throw away the junk mail and lower the volume on their radios once the commercials begin. Or maybe, most people do listen to your commercial and hang your flyers on their refrigerators because your service is exactly what they need at the moment. There is no way to find out.

Benefits of digital marketing

Larger audience with

With digital marketing, you can target a local audience as well as an international one. You can tailor a campaign on specific audience demographics, such as gender, location, age, and interests. This way, your campaign will be more effective.

Gives your digital audience a choice

With digital marketing, your audience can decide how they want to receive your content. If clients hate receiving sales flyers in the mailbox or get annoyed by the phone calls at inconvenient times, they might decide to not deal with your company at all. However, online, people have a choice to opt in or out of the email subscription.

Easy to analyze the digital marketing results

Data and results are recorded. Using the insights tools such as Google Analytics, you can check on your campaign at any time. Unlike traditional marketing, you can see the number of visitors on your site and analyze when why the number of subscribers increases or decreases. You can adapt quickly to improve your results instead of waiting weeks to find out what is or isn’t working for your business.

Downsides of digital marketing

First impression matters

If you choose to save money on your website’s design, your campaign will not look professional and not trustworthy, which means that your products will not be taken seriously by your clients. You must spend a lot of time and money targeting people in ways that will establish a positive first impression.

Digital marketing can backfireMan doing digital marketing with a neck ache

When you are working online, you rely on the online service. That is if your digital marketing revolves around Facebook or Flicker and that site has a prolonged outage, so does your campaign. You have to rely on at least several online services when running a campaign.

Using both digital and traditional marketing

Rather than taking an all or nothing approach, try to combine digital and traditional marketing. For example, you can spend most of your money on digital marketing while also passing brochures to some neighborhoods but not investing in television or radio ads.

If you want to learn more how to converge traditional and internet marketing, visit Addiction-Rep, a direct response marketing firm. It will also explicitly describe differences between inbound and outbound marketing and teach about traditional marketing philosophies

 

Sources:

How Traditional Marketing Gives You A Leg Up In Internet Marketing

 

https://www.canadapost.ca/assets/pdf/blogs/CPC_Neuroscience_EN_150717.pdf

 

One Comment

Calvyn posted on August 31, 2023 at 5:04 am

a lot of business are in traditional try to change to digital, and we also can see a lot that never want to change, slowly getting out of business.

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