Marketing has always been an integral element of a business’s success strategy. No matter whether you manufacture a specific product or deliver a particular service, you need to promote the same so that your customers are aware of your offering and reach up to you for their relevant needs.

The world of marketing has undergone a massive paradigm shift within the past few decades from the concept of traditional marketing to the innovative digital marketing. With the technological advances, and increase of usage of smartphones, PCs, laptops and other mobile devices, digital marketing has become the beacon of new-age marketing. This in turn, has make things much more convenient and easy for marketers. Here in this blog, let’s find out the difference between traditional marketing and digital marketing so that you can stay well-informed while developing a tailored marketing strategy for your business.

Traditional marketing – A brief

Being the conventional practice, it can be defined as the marketing and promotion of products and services by using offline communication channels including TV ads, newspaper, radio ads, magazines, posters and flyers, billboards, telemarketing, SMS marketing, direct mailers, and etc. To make it more simple, any marketing channel which, don’t need the Internet, will be considered under traditional marketing.

As revealed by the BARC, India has a total of 892 million television viewers, which sums up almost 66% of its total population and the average time being spent by each of the viewers is around 4 hours/day on TV.

Benefits

• Mass outreach

Traditional marketing allows marketers to connect with a wide spectrum of audience with the help of popular communication channels such as newspapers, TV, radio, and more. This marketing practice is the ideal one for the locations where the Internet is not much popular or available.

• Long-lasting impression

Traditional marketing practices allow you to connect and be with the target audience for longer time via the use of popular channels including TV, newspaper ads, direct mailers, SMS, magazine ads, and more. Hence, they are considered as long-lasting and come with a better shelf life.

• Easy to understand

As the concept of traditional marketing is quite common and has been into practice for the longer time, people find it much easier to work with these marketing practices. Research has also shown us that traditional marketing practices require less cognitive power to develop, implement, and monitor compared to digital advertising practices.

Digital marketing – A brief

Being considered as the future of marketing, it can be defined as the marketing and promotion of products and services by using different online communication channels including Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Search Engine Marketing (SEM), email, display ads, Social Media Marketing (SMM), websites, and affiliate marketing. So basically any marketing channel which makes use of the Internet comes under digital marketing.

As revealed by the TRAI, the total number of Internet users in India as of March 2021 is 825 million, which accounts for around 61% of the total population. Also the average time being spent by each of the users on Internet is 3.4 hours/day as recorded by Ericsson Consumer Lab.

• Enhanced customer interaction

As it facilitates two-way interaction with customers, it will allow you to foster higher customer engagement in between the brands and customers.

• Cost-effectiveness

Compared to traditional marketing practices, it is less expensive and doesn’t need any hefty budget. You can always implement digital marketing campaigns with a small budget and then after, you can scale up based on the outcomes.

• Accurate targeting

Digital marketing allows you to target your audience more accurately, which, in turn ensures that there is reduced spillover thereby, making it more convenient and cost-effective.

• Easy tracking

Unlike traditional marketing, this practice allows you track the response of target audience and measure the same at each and every step.

What are the differences between traditional marketing and digital marketing

Now that you’ve gained a fair idea of both the practices and their respective benefits, let’s dig deep further to find out the difference between traditional marketing and digital marketing.

Customer interaction

Traditional marketing facilitates one-way communication, which means the targeted customers won’t be able to communicate back or interact with your business. However, digital marketing facilitates two-way communication where your target audience can respond to you by accessing any of the digital channels.

Marketing channels

One of the fundamental differences in between these marketing practices is the channels being used for them. While traditional marketing makes use of offline communication channels like Print, TV, billboard, and others, digital marketing helps you to use online communication channels such as email, website, social media, search engine marketing, and more.

Expenses

Traditional marketing is scale-driven and an expensive option, and thus not considered to be ideal for longer time durations. On the contrary, digital marketing is known to be less expensive than the conventional practice and thus, can operate at lower scale.

ROI measurement and tracking

It is undoubtedly challenging to estimate the Return on Investment (ROI) in case of traditional marketing practices, as it becomes quite difficult to establish a direct and accurate correlation in between sales and marketing. On the other hand, digital marketing helps you estimate the ROI for each of the channels in terms of leads, clicks, conversion to sales all of which are easy to measure and track the performances.

Innovative changes

In traditional marketing, you won’t find much scope to modify or change the creative, after it is being released. However, in digital marketing, the nature of medium allows you to change or modify the ad creative easily, while considering the target audience’s response.

Targeting accuracy

The audience targeting is considered to be at a broader level with scope for lesser accuracy in traditional marketing whereas, in digital marketing, the audience targeting is much more narrow and accurate, which will further increase the effectiveness and efficiency of the campaigns.

Tailored communication

The ad’s creative and communication are considered to be the standards and equal for the whole target audience in case of traditional marketing. However, in digital marketing, you will get the scope to personalize or customize the ad’s creative and communication as per the narrow segment of target audience.

Speed of response

In case of traditional marketing, the response achieved from target audience generally has a time lag, as the medium of communication doesn’t facilitate any quick response. However, the digital medium of communication offers to get instant responses from the target customers in form of leads, clicks, sales, and more.

The bottom line

With such extensive information on the difference between traditional marketing and digital marketing, things are certainly going to get clearer and more understandable for the marketers. To ensure your marketing message is being communicated to the right audience in the right way, you need to develop a tailored strategy combining both the practices and ensure that your brand enjoys maximum visibility across the traditional and digital marketing channels. To help you on the same, experienced marketing analysts can be of great help for you indeed who will not only focus on preparing the right channel mix for your campaign but, also ensure that all your objectives are met successfully.

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