Digital vs Traditional Marketing
In this article we will talk about Marketing. What is marketing? Differences between Digital and Traditional Marketing and which strategy is best for us to use in order to grow our business and network faster.
What is marketing?
Before we dive deep into the digital era and the digital marketing let’s first discuss about what marketing is and why is it important for one business to survive.
Marketing is an activity that one company or individual takes in order to promote the product or the service that the company or individual is selling. These activities include: advertising on different platforms like social media, radio stations, newspapers, TV, selling and delivering. Marketing refers to identifying the ideal customers and drawing his attention to the product or service that the company is selling.
Despite drawing the attention of the potential client, it is very important to keep his attention and maintain the relationship between the product and the service that the company is selling with the customer. This can be done by writing emails, returning calls, inviting clients to presentations of new products etc.
One marketing campaign is successful when we manage to put our product or service in the right place, with right price at the right time. This might sound easy but it takes a lot of research to achieve it. This is where the marketing mix (4 P’s of marketing) comes to play. 4 P’s means Product, Price, Promotion and Place.
- Product is the good or service that we are trying to sell. The marketers have to understand that their product have to solve any specific problem that the customer has. Before the marketers prepare an appropriate campaign, they need to find out how their product stands out from its competitors and whether there are similar products in their market, study them and find their weaknesses. Study the market and adopt the product or services according to the needs of the customer and learn from the mistakes of your competition.
- Price refers to how much money the product will cost. The price of the product will define the number of units that we will sell. When we are establishing the price of the product or service we must consider the cost of its development, marketing costs, distribution costs and the cost similar products on the market.
- Once we developed our product and set its price it is time to promote it. Promotion includes elements like: advertising, video marketing, email marketing, social media marketing, advertising in newspapers, radios and many more. No matter what channel we are using it is necessary for it to be suitable for the product, the price and the customer that is being marketed to.
- Place or placement is how the product will be provided to the customer. The key element is distribution. It’s critical what the ideal places are to convert prospects into real customers. Key considerations are: will the company sell the product in actual physical store, will it sell the product by using online store.
What is Digital Marketing?
Digital Marketing is a type of marketing that is used by the companies or people in general, in order to promote their product or service through usage of digital device like smartphones. The most used channel for Digital Marketing is the social media (Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat etc.).
Why social media? There are more and more people active on the social media. The research has shown that 4.5 billion people are using the internet every day, while the social media numbers has passed 3.8 billion people and the numbers are growing every day. Nearly 80% of the world’s population is already online. These numbers are the reason why companies are starting to use the Digital Marketing as their main form of promoting their product or service.
Despite the big number of audience that can be reached with digital marketing there are many other advantages. One of them is the cost. Marketing with digital platform offers a more reliable and affordable ways of promoting. With small amount of money or sometimes for free you can subscribe to email provider and start promoting your product by sending email campaigns to your email contacts.
It’s very easy to measure the results from your campaign. In the traditional marketing people had to wait with days or months to see the results. In the Digital Marketing you can measure instantly how your campaigns are doing. The email provider is providing you with information like: how many people of your contact list opened the email, how many of them clicked on the linked and visited your website, how many of them read the whole email etc. Google Analytics is also a very powerful toll that helps you to measure the activity on your website and the traffic as well. Google AdWords is also a powerful tool that helps you measure and monitor the performance of your ads and give you information about the conversation rate.
With all these tools you know the important information about your ads. If the add has great conversation rate and is performing great than you keep investing in it and make the conversation rate even better.
Targeting special audience is one of the best benefits of digital marketing. Digital marketing platform like social media have smart algorithms that are using artificial intelligence to help you filter or select your specific audience and promote your product or service to that audience.
With the digital marketing your ads can be visible all around the world. This helps the small businesses, startups or individuals to grow their business or network much faster.
Segmentation is a very big deal in digital marketing as well. Segmentation helps to group large customer groups in smaller ones by a particular classification. This helps to grow the sales and profit of the company. For example let’s take e commerce store that is selling perfumes. Segmentation helps the company to send email about specific perfumes designed for men only to men. You can also send the email to specific people that live in specific towns or countries. In order for segmentation to work correctly the business needs to have specific information collected from their customers.
Every day more and more companies are using the digital marketing to grow their business, with that the competition is growing as well. If the customer comes to your website and doesn’t immediately find what she/he is looking for, than they will leave your store and move to another one. It’s very important to keep engaging with your customers by updating them with new information about your product and services. This can be achieved by subscribing them to your newsletter, writing blogs, creating new promotions etc.
Traditional Marketing
Traditional Marketing it is marketing that is used by the businesses or individuals to promote their product or service by using the “traditional” methods of promotions like newspapers, advertising on radios, TV commercials, billboards, telemarketing, direct marketing and more.
There are still traditional marketing methods that still matter and delivering great results. Let’s talk about some of them.
Marketing your product through radio and television must not be missed because it still can reach a big number of listeners and viewers. The ad must be very attractive so the listeners and viewers will take action and buy your product or service after the commercial.
Billboards nowadays are using more images than text in order to attract attention. There is a saying that picture is worth a thousand words and compelling images are great for raising brand awareness.
Direct Marketing is not dead and still can provide good results. Disturbing catalogs and other promotional material in public places like squares or going from house to house can still provide brand awareness.
One of the biggest traditional marketing methods for raising brand awareness is Sponsorship. Supporting a local event or organization will put your brand name in front of thousands potential customers. Sponsorship will help you to distinguish your brand ahead of others.
Traditional Marketing vs Digital Marketing
There are many dilemmas about which type of marketing strategy we should use. Traditional or Digital.
The advantages of Traditional Marketing are: Proven success rate, it’s better to use over digital marketing if you are selling product for older people. They watch more TV and they are listening radio and reading newspaper than the younger people. With traditional marketing is easier to reach the local audience. The traditional marketing can help you interact with your customers in personal level, more what you can do online. With traditional marketing you can grow your brand awareness to the people that can’t be reach with digital marketing.
Digital marketing has many advantages as well. One of them is promoting your product to the specific audience that is designed for. Cost less than Traditional Marketing. You can also divide your audience in different categories for example man and woman and presenting different product to the specific group. If the ad is not doing well you can easily update it and adjust it accordingly. With the digital marketing you can also increase your customer service better than Traditional Marketing.
Which one should we use?
I think we should use both strategies but there is special place and time for both of them. Which one are going to use really depends on the product that we have designed. If it’s for the elder person than traditional marketing is a good idea, if the product is designed for younger people especially millennials then definitely digital because they spend most of their time on the social media. Analyze your product and service and the market and after define your marketing strategy. Combination of both is a great idea if you want to raise your brand awareness even more and push the competition of the track.
