Key Differences Between Digital Marketing and Traditional Marketing

Traditional marketing has been around for quite some time. Since its birth, businesses have been using this method to promote their products and services. Today, companies are still leveraging traditional marketing to get their brands noticed by consumers. However, digital marketing, which involves online promotion strategies, is taking over the game. That's because so many people are surfing the internet and are using mobile devices. Therefore, it makes sense to reach them on various digital marketing channels such as social media, search engines and blogs. But why is digital marketing so different than traditional marketing? Is it better? Or are they equal in terms of lead generation and ROI?

Cost

Traditional marketing is usually more costly than digital marketing. Businesses that use traditional marketing methods have to pay for TV and radio air time as well as print ads in newspapers and magazines. Not to mention, many companies have to hire people to distribute those printed materials for advertising. For even more exposure, businesses use banners and billboards, which also cost.

On the other hand, digital marketing doesn't require the distribution of printed materials. It relies on the internet to share brand messaging and is, therefore, more eco-friendly and cost-efficient. Even though some businesses do invest in paid online ads, they don't pay as much as they would if they invested in offline ad campaigns. With pay-per-click (PPC) ads, advertisers only pay when someone clicks on an ad. Whereas, traditional marketers pay a set price to get their marketing material out to the public.

Intent

The goal of traditional advertisers is to make sales using ads that display the features and benefits of their products. Their primary focus isn't on the customer or providing value. In contrast, digital marketers focus more on providing value to potential customers through content marketing, which is a tactic that involves creating content that answers questions, solves problems and provides actionable advice. This helps build trust and makes customers feel like the brand actually cares about their needs and not sales. Gaining a customer's trust is key to turning them into repeat customers and brand advocates. This strong business-to-customer relationship is something that can't be achieved by a print or radio ad.

Analytics

With traditional marketing, it's not easy to measure the performance of your campaigns because it involves one-way communication. It also takes a longer time to test and track results. However, digital marketing campaigns are easier to measure and provide results in real-time. To get a better understanding of the way analytics differ in traditional marketing and digital marketing, consider an example. You purchase an ad spot on radio or TV and you want to know how your audience received it when your ad aired. You don't have access to much information except for the number of listeners in that market. But if you ran an ad online, you'd get much more information about the users you reached such as their age, online behavior, interests and more.

Target Audience

Traditional ads only reach a local audience, which greatly limits your exposure. This would be fine for a local business, but even local businesses need digital marketing to achieve substantial growth. Also, it can be difficult to control the type of people who receive your marketing materials. However, with digital marketing, you have even more control. You have access to a wide range of targeting options so that your ads get in front of the right people. For example, if you chose to run ads on social media, you could customize your campaign in a way that displays your ads to certain users based on demographics, location, preferences, online behavior and more. This customer segmentation is what will drive results and make your marketing strategies more effective.

Just because digital marketing is taking the advertising world by storm doesn't mean you should kick traditional marketing to the curb. Invest in both and you'll see a larger ROI.