1.4 HOW IS DIGITAL MARKETING DIFFERENT FROM TRADITIONAL MARKETING?

Traditional marketing was a thing only because digital marketing did not exist. Here are few reasons why digital marketing trumps over the traditional marketing system.

Reduced Cost: Newspaper ads, television ads, and the likes cost a lot. Online advertising on the other hand is something even young entrepreneurs can afford right out of some saved up money.

Real time result: With traditional marketing, you have to wait for weeks, sometimes even months before the boosts start to turn up. In this battle of traditional vs. online marketing, online marketing wins again owing to its quick results. You can see everything in real time including, as- number of visitors, most active time of the day, conversion rates, bounce rates, etc.

Brand development: Digital marketing vs. traditional marketing statistics can be measured but one thing these statistics don’t take into consideration is the brand image the online advertising gives rise to. Because of limited space and frequency of advertisements with traditional marketing, digital marketing clearly wins this category.

You can have a whole website instead of a column on a newspaper page. You can put forward things to people whenever you want once you own a blog or a page on social media. With this space, you can create a reliable image for your Company, which will also help in branding your business.

Non-intrusive: People buying the newspaper do not buy it for the ads in it. People listen to the radio for music and the weather forecast. Not to forget the radio is a dying concept already. People buying magazines go for it for the contents list which does not include the ads. So, it is safe to say, traditional advertising mostly goes ignored.

With online advertising on the other hand, you can choose whether you want to see it or not. It is not shoved into your face, apart from the annoying popup ads of course. You can choose to ignore that email as long as you want. You can choose to opt out of social media discussions on a particular brand page. You can also target interested audience as the social networking sites keep a tab on what you look for on the internet. Hence, in the battle of traditional vs. digital marketing, digital marketing seems to be the candidate that will know how to intrigue people and not annoy them.

Higher exposure: Now, you can’t claim that a television ad or an advertisement on every newspaper in town is going to cover the majority of the population. Any means of traditional advertisement is limited to a certain locality.

Whereas online advertisement reaches out to the entire world so you are missing out on nothing.

Higher engagement: With traditional marketing, you cannot really interact with your target audience. You need to wait out for the responses to come in before you can plan your next step, which is a long and tedious process.

Online marketing allows you to engage your audience in real time. You can chat and discuss a lot about your brand or Company with the actual audience immediately. Yes, this demands more engagement from your side too. You need to be prepared to invest that much time or a public relations team into the marketing budget.

Quicker publicity: Very much due to the real time results of online marketing, you get instant publicity. If you don’t, you at least instantly know that this particular ad isn’t working for you.

Traditional vs. digital marketing is an almost unfair comparison here because the former has no scope to deliver in this regard. Whereas with the latter, there is a chain reaction of shares and comments helping you reach a new audience and earn a new visitor every nanosecond.

Non interruptive: Audience can choose to skip Ads. Online advertising vs. traditional advertising have some lesser discussed but crucial differences. For example, the option of choice of ads. With traditional marketing, flyers are handed to you when you are rushing to board that bus. A television commercial comes up on repeat cutting right through a really interesting plot twist of your favorite TV show.

Whereas, online marketing will offer you the choice of time and media. Also, you cannot opt to receive a newspaper without ads. You can always skip online ads if you are not interested.

Good for all stages of fields: There are certain matters in which online advertising takes precedence with due course in the battle of traditional marketing vs. digital marketing.

You don’t have to worry about the size of your business and staff to reach the maximum potential of your online presence and advertising. With traditional advertising, smaller businesses are at disadvantage. Virtual expansion does not require large number of real people handling things.

Easy analytics: With online marketing you instantly know what is working for you and what isn’t via Google Analytics. You can measure the inbound traffic, bounce rate, conversion rate, profit, and the general trend of interested audience, all in real time.

This helps people using online marketing stay a big step ahead of people relying on traditional marketing.

Strategy refinement: The very point of getting results and the analytics in real time is to be able to catch up in real time. When you know how things are going down, you will have a chance to improve them from bad to good and good to better. With traditional marketing, a host of negative feedback won’t bother you much because your business might already have gone down the drain by the time you receive them.

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