A solid marketing strategy is important for any business to promote their products and services to their target audience. Marketing trends today are changing at a fast pace and the market has now shifted from traditional marketing to digital marketing to get ahead of the competition and the times.
Between the tried-and-true strategies of traditional marketing and the new and innovative strategies of digital marketing, there are many ways for businesses to capture the audience’s attention.
However, which strategy works best? Which ones should businesses focus on? What are the differences between the two? Here is our breakdown of the different terms and strategies.
What is Digital Marketing?
Digital marketing refers to all the marketing strategies that are executed online on various electronic devices. It is currently the most popular marketing strategy adopted by large, small and medium-sized companies across the globe.
Common digital marketing methods include:
Email campaigns
Clickable ads
Affiliate marketing
What is traditional marketing?
Traditional marketing is a conventional marketing strategy that uses various offline promotional and advertising methods to reach customers. It is the oldest form of marketing and is tried & tested by many companies. Until the emergence of the internet in the 1990s, this was the only marketing strategy in use.
The major categories of traditional marketing are:
Tv commercials
Radio Commercials
Magazines
Newspapers
Billboards
Flyers and posters
Tele-marketing
Direct mailers, coupons
Digital Marketing VS Traditional Marketing
To understand the best marketing strategy for your business, you must compare digital marketing and traditional marketing.
1. Target Audience
With traditional marketing, it is easy to reach out to a specific target audience. Large companies may create ads in magazines or launch TV commercials that are viewed by people around the world. However, this may not be possible for a small company, due to their budget & cost of the ads. As a result, smaller companies may not be able to reach customers beyond local boundaries.
However, when one uses digital marketing techniques such as social media marketing, email marketing and digital ads, smaller companies would be able to reach customers not just locally, but also from around the world.
2. Customer Interaction
Traditional marketing has a more personal approach since the interaction with the consumer is more direct, it is easy for marketers to have an in-person relationship when promoting their brand or services.
Digital marketing, on the other hand, does not require any form of physical presence from the marketer, instead it offers a number of digital platforms where you are able to interact directly with your customers. Businesses will be able to interact and review customer feedback from social media, e-commerce websites or various apps where they are able to put their views on a product or any form of service.
3. Cost
Traditional marketing is more expensive as there are some printing involved and other forms of media like radio and television ads. For example, printing postcards to send out even to just a local audience can be expensive, and there is no guarantee that the recipient is interested in your business or the product/service you offer.
Digital marketing strategies incur a much lower cost and are more affordable as one can set budgets. Sending out an email campaign can save money, although businesses will still have to pay for certain online ads, it is still cheaper in comparison to both print ads and TV commercials.
4. Marketing Analysis & Outcome
Traditional marketing can take weeks or months to track results as traditional marketing efforts do not have real-time results, it takes longer to re-strategize with limited data available.
Digital marketing tools allow you to analyze your marketing campaign in real-time. There are more metrics available as well such as views, click-through rate, the source of your customer traffic, and the number of people who are converting to buyers. Based on these results, businesses will be able to tweak their digital campaign to make the most out of it.
5. Return on Investment (ROI)
Traditional marketing has lower conversion rates compared to digital marketing. Audiences in traditional marketing are less motivated to convert than with digital marketing.
Converting with traditional marketing channels often involves more steps than with digital marketing.
The increased effort and time it takes for audiences to convert means that there are additional chances for people to drop out somewhere along the way during the conversion process.
Digital marketing has high returns. Couple the high conversion rates with low cost, and you often get a much higher return on your investments than you would with traditional marketing for your business.
If you’ve already tried traditional marketing before and have not seen the rapid growth results you wanted, then give digital marketing a shot. There is very little risk and greater rewards. That is not something you often see through traditional marketing in the business world.
At Hashtaqs, we take the worryies out of your online advertising and digital marketing which allows you to focus on other areas of business.
Hashtaqs uplifts business through brand transformation and marketing advisory and implementation online and offline, internationalisation through business matching and community development.
Our consultancy work is supportable with the funding scheme of up to 80% for local businesses. Contact us for a consultation at +65 8868 1418 or email us at [email protected]. For more info, visit www.hashtaqs.com.
