Few years back when digital marketing was a new concept, businesses were skeptical and hesitant to invest in online marketing. While traditional marketing strategies on radio, television, billboards still hold some relevancy at present times, digital marketing has totally changed the dynamics of businesses, how they interact, connect and reach their target audience.
Over the last decade, the paradigm shift in consumer’s behavior and needs have led the business to constantly look for out-of-the-box ideas to market their product and services. The marketing has made considerable progress from running the advertisements on billboards or drafting attention grabbing jingles on radio to niche market the business in front of their consumers’ eyes.
To help you to understand how digital marketing and traditional marketing differentiate, let’s look at what they are and what shadvantages
Digital Marketing- what is it?
Digital marketing refers to the advertising and promoting the brand, services or products through digital spaces such as websites, social media, search engines, mobile applications and much more. This means you can use text or multimedia messages such as audios, videos etc to communicate with your target audience.
Digital Marketing includes:
Social media ads
PPC (pay per click)
Email marketing
Search engine optimization
Website
Mobile marketing and much more.
Promoted campaign stories, influencer videos/trips and sponsored videos over the internet are examples of digital marketing and how big it’s become.
Traditional Marketing
But when we talk about traditional marketing, we talk about television, radio, billboards and newspaper advertisements. Any type of marketing which is not online. Traditional marketing has a significant influence in reaching the local target audience. Advertisements can be shared over a stretch of time, if they’re physical.
But, online marketing is important for every brand or business today. No matter what your organizational size is. Digital marketing brings a platform for every business owner to react out to its potential customer directly. In today's times, it has become our every practice to direct search on search engines and make decisions/ buys online.
Just yesterday, we looked up lunch places, priced online groceries and even consulted a doctor- just by using the online mode i.e. the internet.
Now, you are briefed about the two forms of marketing: digital and traditional marketing. Let’s dive into the digital marketing benefits over traditional marketing.
Advantages of Digital Marketing
Cost- Effective / Minimal Investment
In traditional marketing, tools such as television and newspaper advertisements and hoarding and billboards require an immense cost and are pricier than digital marketing. For example, it can cost between $2,000-$160,000 to run an advertisement in print media. Further, no one can tell who you'll reach your ideal audience with that cost since outputs are hard to gauge. Advertisers can't drive more individuals to peruse “The Hindustan Times” and they can't boost those promotions assuming they're performing great.
But with digital marketing, the expenses can get lower or are not cost-restrictive. Consequently, with online marketing, there is no difficulty giving out millions for promoting and publicizing. A brand can get maximum results with minimum cost or investment through online marketing.
Real- time Results
In traditional marketing, you need to sit tight for a really long time, sometimes even for months before the promotions begin to turn up. In this clash of conventional versus online advertising, digital marketing wins again attributable to its quick and fast outcomes.
You can see everything progressively including:
Number of people visited your page/website
Most active time of your target audience
Conversion rates
Bounce rate
At the point when you have the outcome convenient continuously, you burn no time making the next move.
Wider Reach
Another dynamic where digital marketing has an advantage over traditional marketing. Unless you’re burning a huge amount of money advertising with big newspapers, it’s actually practically difficult to assess the number of readers/listeners you’re reaching while getting an advertisement in newspaper or radio.
With digital marketing, you can actually pinpoint the specific measure of audience you’re targeting for your brand. Yet, even without digital advertisements, a SEO friendly website can assist you with taking advantage of new business markets and reach a worldwide audience with only minimum investment.
( Plus there are a number of free SEO tools available which can analyze your website performance and let you know your website’s shortcomings and solutions.) ALSO READ - What is SEO in Digital Marketing?
As of now, 50% of marketers believe that due to digital interaction with the target audience, brands tend to have an inclination towards digital marketing. Brands have full control of their audience growth and can see real-time results of their marketing efforts.
High Engagement
In traditional marketing media, you can’t interact or connect with your target audience. You have to wait for the responses before executing your following step. This is a tedious and dreary process.
But in digital marketing, you can engage with your customers and interact with them in real-time. Whether it’s on social media or other online set-up, you can discuss and talk about your brand with your audience and can immediately get their response/ reaction. You should be prepared to invest that much time or a PR team into the marketing budget.
Great Investment for all-scale businesses
You don’t need to stress over the size of your business and staff to arrive at the most extreme capability of your online presence and promotion. In traditional marketing, small scale businesses have a disadvantage. Investment is a big issue in traditional marketing.
But in digital marketing, small businesses can advertise and sell their products and services as per their budget. And you don’t even need to hire a team to maintain your brand’s presence.
Since it is now so obvious what the hypothesis regarding conventional and online marketing uncovered, we can concur that digital marketing wins!
If you are a brand looking where to invest, then digital marketing can bring out great results in a short span of time with minimum investment.
And if you’re someone who wants to explore the online marketing field, there are a number of digital marketing courses for free online. Some are by Google, Hubspot and Facebook etc.
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