Imagining a priest going around the city of ancient Rome to promote his newly found god is not that difficult. Although we have gone past the era of parchment and public execution, marketing mediums are all but prevalent in 2021.
Between traditional and digital marketing, which is the best for your business is the topic of today’s discussion.
What is Traditional Marketing
Traditional marketing is a form of physical marketing which has been there for the longest time in human history.
Companies that are inclined to improve their brand awareness use different traditional marketing channels such as print, TV, direct mail, and telemarketing to promote their product to the masses.
Businesses that invest in traditional marketing use every ounce of their time and resources to generate as much creative and engaging material as possible to appeal to all. As the promotional materials are much more sustainable and used hundreds of times during their lifetime, it’s important to make the most sense of them.
Although digital marketing has crumbled the use of traditional marketing in many sectors, it still finds significance in areas that digital marketing still hasn’t been able to peek at.
What is Digital Marketing
At the surface level, digital marketing provides promotional solutions through online media like social media and search engines. In this era of internet supremacy, no one takes on a pile of books and newspapers to research laptops or mobile phones. Your audience likes the convenience that their mobile devices provide for the same.
Digital marketing is not as easy as its traditional counterpart. You need to understand all the interconnected platforms that users utilize to search and research your product. With all the data available on individuals, search engines and social media make the job easier for the marketing teams, but not to the extent of designing a website and promoting it with just a click.
Digital marketing for startups works in trial and error methods to stumble upon the best one that works for them. While modern-day digital promotions have opened new doors for comparatively new businesses, it’s still tough to establish authority on digital platforms without being informative and helpful. Thus, needing a lot of monetary investments and the best marketing teams.
Traditional Marketing Pros and Cons
The only time traditional marketing is discussed in business meetings is when it’s required to build a brand. If your audience doesn’t trust you, they will not buy from you. With that said, the various pros and cons of traditional marketing are discussed below.
Pros
Raising Brand Awareness
You are yet to launch your new brand, or your customers don’t know about your company, then it’s best to introduce traditional marketing in your campaign.
People trust traditional media more than digital media. The comprehensive effort they need to put into understanding traditional pitch is lower, which appeals to most of the customers.
The local newspaper, TV channel that you would put your ad into will radiate sentiment of belonging, which might lure your customers into believing your brand.
Emotional Element
Digital marketing videos need to be short and precious, as the concentration span is much lower in digital media. But, you can associate emotional elements of families or friends with your brand’s traditional approach while making a promotional video.
High-value Products
Suppose you are offering high-value products or services, like premium cars. It’s still best to employ traditional marketing. Building trust around your brand with a personal touch is quite important to appeal to the customers who would be ready to invest in your product.
Promotional Materials are Sustainable
You don’t need to provide a constant flow of promotional media for a traditional marketing approach to succeed. A billboard, a commercial, can be used multiple times before being discarded.
Cons
Expensive
Traditional marketing is more expensive in the general sense than digital marketing. While you need to invest a lot in promotional material and commercials through traditional marketing, digital media is cheaper to get started but adds up in the long term.
Metrics aren’t as Effective
You can’t really measure up the success of a particular billboard placed in a particular place. It’s theoretically impossible. While some mass media channels offer an estimation, it’s nearly not as accurate as digital media.
Targeted Audience
Traditional media can’t be customized by geolocation or demographics. Although you can design your materials to appeal to a demographic, you can’t just target your desired audience exclusively.
Losing Audience
No doubt that we are losing interest in newspapers and TV. Traditional media is losing its audience base by the hours.
Digital Marketing Pros and Cons
Pros
Reachability
Digital marketing media can reach a global audience. In this era of globalization, you need to expand your business beyond the limits of your country or state. Digital media can help you do that without any hassle.
Less Expensive
Digital marketing is much cheaper than traditional marketing. With digital media, you can customize your reachability even to curtail the costs of putting your brand online.
Trackable Results
What can I say about the feature-rich matrices of digital marketing mediums? Every digital platform has some sort of measurement of success inbuilt to let you and your marketing team know about the profitability of each of the campaigns.
As businesses approach digital marketing with the trial and error method, it helps them immensely to know what is working without losing a lot of money and resources.
Customizations
You can customize your audience according to their gender, ethnicity, location, preference and even financial status. The plethora of options social media and search engines offer a company to put their brand online is extraordinary.
Cons
Training
You need an experienced and exceptional marketing team to improve your chances of digital marketing success.
Recurring Investment
Even if you have a marketing team, you must ensure a steady flow of investments and materials to sustain digital promotions. Without those, your campaign is doomed to fail.
Competitive Market
A global market means global competition. There are bigger fish who can devour your campaign in no time with more fundings and better marketing. You need to be aware of your demographics and budget while running a digital marketing campaign.
The Bottom Line
If you are starting afresh, traditional marketing mixed with digital marketing could be the way to go. Assuming that you have a considerable amount of customers already in place, you can push new products through digital means for better interaction and engagement.
There’s no particular formula for promotional success. Choose wisely.
