Marketing is a race in which every business participates, for the end prize which is the customer’s attention. It’s not a surprise to have heard about “Digital Marketing” quite frequently these days in the business landscape. Have you ever wondered why is that so? Before exploiting the massive potential of Digital Marketing, it is crucial to understand the Key differences between Traditional Marketing and Digital Marketing:
As its name suggests, Traditional Marketing involves ancient, conventional marketing that’s been passed on for generations. Basically, it reaches the audience physically without the use of the internet.
Examples of traditional marketing include right from billboards, pamphlets, newspaper ads to Television/Radio channels. On the other hand, Digital Marketing is the exact opposite of that. The triumph of digital marketing has contributed to the inevitable dependence on the internet.
Traditional marketing encompasses the classic advertising methods that businesses have relied on for decades before the internet era. Think of it as the "offline" way of reaching customers - like placing an ad in your local newspaper, putting up billboards along busy streets, or sending direct mail to people's homes.
These methods typically involve physical marketing materials and one-way communication with your audience. Common examples include print advertisements in magazines, TV commercials during prime time shows, radio spots during morning commutes, and promotional brochures distributed at local events. Traditional marketing also includes person-to-person selling, such as setting up booths at trade shows or giving sales presentations to potential clients. While these methods have proven effective over time, they often come with higher costs and limited reach.
For instance, a small business owner running a local newspaper ad can only reach people within that newspaper's distribution area. Additionally, measuring the success of traditional marketing campaigns can be challenging - it's not always easy to track exactly how many people saw your billboard or how many sales resulted from your radio commercial.
Digital marketing refers to all marketing efforts that exist online or use electronic devices to reach potential customers. It's like having a 24/7 storefront that can reach people anywhere in the world through their smartphones, laptops, or tablets. Unlike traditional marketing, digital marketing offers two-way communication, allowing businesses to interact directly with their customers through social media comments, email responses, or website chat features.
This modern approach includes strategies like search engine optimization (SEO) to help your website appear in Google searches, social media marketing on platforms like Facebook and Instagram, email marketing campaigns that target specific customer groups, and content marketing through blogs and videos. One of the biggest advantages of digital marketing is its precise targeting capabilities - you can show your ads specifically to people interested in your products, whether they're across the street or across the country.
Digital marketing also provides detailed analytics, letting you track exactly how many people clicked on your ad, visited your website, or made a purchase. This data-driven approach allows businesses to adjust their strategies in real-time and get more value from their marketing budget.
Below listed are some of the differences between Traditional Marketing and Digital Marketing in terms of measurability, reachability, affordability, & Interactivity.
Consider you’ve placed a huge billboard in your neighborhood or you’ve printed your ad in the local newspaper. Good for you, but, how exactly would you know how many of them actually received it? How would you know who is showing interest in it? How would you keep a track of it at ease?
Sounds complicated and redundant, right?
But, this is not the case when it comes to Digital Marketing. If you are running a paid campaign (Example: a Google Ad / Facebook Ad), it comes along with a package of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) which denotes various factors such as number of clicks, number of times the ad has been shown, how long they’ve spent exploring your site and whatnot. You can basically measure their every action right from the very moment they see your ad.
Most importantly, Key performance indicators do not just measure a bunch of factors, it also accesses the growth of your business and helps you find out the areas of the business to thrive in the digital medium. You can evaluate which of your strategies are working and can check if they align with your ultimate business goals.
Running a campaign via print medium for a specific region itself costs a big budget. Because of this reason, it is extremely pricey to reach a nationwide or international-wide audience through print medium/television channels. Also, it is impossible in the case of billboards and posters. Traditional marketing keeps geographical target as its prime focus despite the audience’s age, gender or interests. Therefore, it is highly likely that most of the ad spend is gone into the drain.
But, digital marketing allows businesses to target a wide set of audiences across the globe. And the most fascinating part of digital marketing is, “Audience Targeting”. By doing an extrinsic Market Analysis and Competitor Analysis, like how we do it in The Alien, it makes it possible to identify the right set of audiences who would be most likely to convert into your customers.
Audiences could be targeted based on their demographics, interests, geographical areas, and even their web behavior. By doing so, Digital marketing makes it possible to target and reach the right potential audience at a much affordable cost.
Implementing a Digital Marketing strategy is hands down the most affordable type of marketing that there is. Comparatively, Traditional marketing costs way more than the former and the end results aren’t as great as digital marketing either.
The reason being: As the resources required to run traditional marketing campaigns are scarce and limited, they cost more. But in the case of digital marketing, the resources are abundant and the internet users are also not limited to a geographical area (unless you want to target an audience to a particular region.
Thus, digital marketing is affordable and a smart option to capture the interests of your potential audience.
Do you know that the average attention span of humans in 2021 is 8 seconds? Yes, that’s true. So, When a person looks at your ad in a newspaper and actually likes your product/service, it is highly unlikely for the person to make a move from his/her side. And there is no way for the business to know that this person is actually interested. And there goes the money spent on ads in vain.
This is exactly the opposite in the case of marketing via digital medium. One of the biggest pros of Digital marketing is the ability to track user behavior. It is possible to actually visualize what users did on your site and how they navigated their way through it. This gives great insights to capture the audience showing interest and remarket our products to them through different mediums at different periods of time.
Any marketing campaign will be regarded successful when it reaps maximum benefits by capturing user’s interest at the most affordable prices. In that case, Digital marketing not just targets the right audience and captures their attention, but it helps businesses to drastically increase their revenue by leveraging conversions.
Also, it helps create multiple touch points to the user who have exhibited their interest in some point of the user journey. Therefore, all in all, efficiency and digital marketing goes hand in hand to form a loyal customer base and of course, booming revenue too!
From the key reasons explained above, it should be obvious now that digital marketing is the saviour of your business. With growing inevitable dependance on internet, it is only wise to invest in digital marketing because, when done right, it has capability of bringing your business great turnovers!
To get started on your digital marketing journey towards success, leave us a signal - Get a free website audit from our SEO experts.