The Differences Between Traditional and Digital Marketing

Marketing has grown in our world from the days when businesses would hire a child to stand on the corner and yell about the special offers.

The old feeling that word-of-mouth was the best form of marketing for any company is still true, but with the digital age upon us, this digital process is much faster than ever. Let’s explore the differences between what we know as traditional marketing and what digital marketing has become.

What Are These Two Types of Marketing

Traditional forms of informing the public of a business and what it offers to include billboards, printed media, and TV commercials. We still see most of these forms of marketing in our world, but they are now secondary to the digital communication we engage in several times a day. In fact, some of us find ways to avoid traditional efforts with services that skip over TV commercials entirely.

Digital communication is simple to understand and using this media to showcase a company is easy to figure out. The use of digital channels with websites and social media to let you know what you can gain from a company has become the norm. Much of this has to do with the widespread and immediate access that we have to digital devices that we carry around with us every day.

Should You Use Digital or Traditional Marketing for Your Business?

The simple answer to this question is “yes”. This is the right answer because you should be using both types of marketing for your business. This is the only way to know that you’re going to reach the largest audience and be in front of more people than if you only used one form of advertising for your business. Let’s take a look at the pros and cons of each type of marketing.

Traditional Marketing

Even in our digital world, we’re more familiar with traditional forms of advertising than any other. Think of the commercials we see on TV, the fact that some people only tune into the Super Bowl for the commercials, and the billboards you see when you’re out on a road trip. These traditional forms of marketing are still used and impactful in your decision-making.

One area where we have seen a drop in the use of traditional methods of marketing is in print media. With many newspapers and magazines going to an online platform only, print media isn’t as widely used as it once was. That doesn’t mean it’s not still effective in some areas, but it’s geared more toward specific geographic locations. If you’re going to engage in traditional marketing efforts, billboards and TV commercials might be best for your business.

The Drawback

While you can have a billboard or TV commercial run for whatever amount of time you pay for, these forms of marketing are often more expensive than what you’ll pay for digital efforts. Along with being more expensive, traditional marketing efforts are hard to measure because you have no direct interaction with the consumer. Unless you ask your customers how they heard about your business, you won’t know how successful your advertising efforts are.

Digital Marketing

You’re engaged in digital marketing every time you use your smartphone. If you have a social media account, you’re going to see some ads, which is a form of digital marketing. When you use search engines, this is part of what brings you the results you see. There’s a broad scope of activity from a digital perspective to bring ads to your view that relate to what you’re searching for.

The digital advertising campaigns that are created are easy to measure. Unlike traditional marketing efforts, you can see exactly where a lead comes from when it arrives in your queue through digital efforts. This makes it easy to see where your focus is and how successful it’s been to bring you the customers that are buying from you. There are several great ways to measure your marketing when you use digital media.

More Effort Required

The downside to using digital marketing efforts is the constant need to evolve and create new ads. Digital ads are less permanent in search engines and the companies that are continually working to offer ads that are fresh and new are the ones that will stay at the top of the list. Many users do find digital ads to be annoying and you might not find a ton of leads coming from these ads, but you do have the reach of a much larger audience than you do with traditional marketing efforts.