Are you ready for a throwdown between a letter and an E-mail?
Just kidding! It’s a fast-moving world, so it’s not necessary that we get one winner in the battle of Traditional Marketing vs Digital Marketing.
In many studies it has been found that 51% of companies use no less than 8 channels to interact with their audience and customers. While digital marketing continues to be highly preferable and enjoys a larger share of budget, traditional marketing persists to be effective for every type of businesses.
Moreover since 45% customers visit a brand’s website after receiving a mail from the company, it’s clear that traditional marketing and digital marketing can work together,
What Is Traditional Marketing?
Traditional Marketing includes those channels which have been in use since there was no digital era and we had to rely on those channels.
Traditional Marketing is often bisected into two theoretical concepts:
ATL: Above the line. Reaches more people than the target audience via high-reach channels such as billboards, TV ads, and radio ads.
BTL- Below the line. Seeks to reach only people within the target audience via direct mail, sponsorships, and guerrilla campaigns.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATL_%26_BTL_Agencies)
Some Examples of Traditional Marketing
Direct Mail:
Direct mail has been one of the most successful mediums for marketers because people want to know about great details and local offers. While Direct mail is primarily used for B2C marketing it can also be effective in terms of B2B marketing provided your mail is sent to the decision maker of the company. If your audience is a small business owner with a physical address, you don’t have to worry so much about an office manager tossing your postcard.
Billboards:
Billboards can be very effective when it comes to tier 1 cities or metros because billboards attract huge attention which ultimately helps in increasing brand recognition, loyalty while also serving to spread brand awareness.
TV Ads:
Television advertisement has been the most widely used medium for advertisement since many years. All the big budget campaigns are telecasted on Television. Television Advertisement helps in creating brand awareness and recognition.
Conferences:
In-person conferences have been around for decades, well before the internet. While today’s conferences utilize specialized networking apps and QR codes and other gadgets, the human element, and bringing like-minded people together. Conferences has been a major marketing medium for many companies.
Workshops:
Business workshops have played a huge role in Traditional Marketing when a certain company organises its workshop in some organisation.
Guerrilla Campaigns:
A Guerrilla marketing campaign is very attractive and very impressive; people usually feel connected to this kind of marketing. This tactic is more commonly used by big B2C brands, who want to target the population at large, not highly specific groups of people. But when done right, B2B brands can use this tactic effectively, too.
Sponsorships: Sponsorship has been effective for both B2B and B2C business as sponsorships are usually done on some huge events where there is large gathering of people, which ultimately helps in higher business recognition.
Referral Campaigns:
Referral campaigns can be outcasted using any channel like social media, email, and in-product. But traditionally, they were promoted using direct mail. And today, many traditional businesses such as medical offices and mortgage lenders still use postcards and pamphlets to generate referrals.
Some Examples of Digital Marketing
Organic Social:
Out of every 6 minutes, a person spends his/her time on Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, Snapchat, LinkedIn and YouTube. Therefore, marketers can create their company page on these platforms to attract consumers and spread brand awareness among masses.
Paid Social:
There are billions of users who are using social media apps like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter etc, so companies can do paid advertisement on such apps.
Blogging:
Blogging is the most important method of Digital Marketing as content is the most important thing when it comes to blogging. Companies can publish blogs about their product portfolios.
Paid SEM:
By placing ads on search engines that are highly valued, businesses can reach their target audience when they’re searching for solutions to a problem, exploring competitors, and getting ready to make a purchase (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine_marketingdecision.)
Podcasting:
Podcasting has been a popular digital marketing tactic with B2B companies across the spectrum, from eCommerce companies to software providers.
Webinars: Webinars have become common these days and due to pandemic situation, they have become much more important than before. Webinars help in reaching to mass audiences.
Virtual Events:
There are lots of virtual events where many key speakers share their thoughts. Companies can organise such events to create brand awareness.
Why Companies Should Choose to Do Traditional Marketing?
While in modern world, nearly each and every company should do some form of digital marketing, the same is not true for traditional marketing
The answer to who should go for traditional marketing is discussed below:
- Location – Do you want to target people in a specific location?
- Budget – If you serve people in multiple locations, can you afford to target them all? Can you afford to spend on brand awareness?
- Opportunity – Analyse your competitors and then decide whether you should go for traditional methods or not.
Let’s take a look at some of the overall pros and cons of traditional marketing.
Advantages:
- Unmatchable brand authority and awareness
Can be broad (billboards) or much targeted (direct mail to certain households or businesses)
Disadvantages:
- Expensive MediumFeedback is generally not possible
- Little to no opportunity for customer engagement
Why Companies Should Choose to Do Digital Marketing?
Today, it has become very important for every company to have some digital presence because there are billions of active users on social media platforms.
The benefits of digital marketing are many, but it does have a lot of downsides, especially when the wrong types of businesses jump into the digital space and start wasting time and money.
Advantages:
- Easy Targeting
- Less expensive
- Wider reach
- Less time consuming
- Two-way communication
- Faster Feedback
Disadvantages:
- Can be wasteful for some types of businesses that would do better with direct marketing (e.g. small, local businesses)
- As digital advertising costs rise, traditional methods that get left behind can actually help generate higher ROI
Digital Marketing vs. Traditional Marketing: The Top Differences
As we have discussed about their meaning, let us now go deep into the key differences:
Target audience – With traditional marketing, it becomes easy to reach people in specific locations and of certain demographics. However, digital marketing allows for wider reach while also better narrowing the targeting towards interests and other specific attributes.
Audience engagement – With digital marketing it becomes easy for people to reply and comment on many different types of digital media and campaigns. With traditional marketing, it is a one-sided conversation.
Cost efficiency – Traditional advertising is much more expensive than digital media. The physical nature of the campaigns simply ads costs. Digital marketing provides numerous options for affordability and resource requirements. (For example, organic content marketing has labour costs but not placement costs.)
Speed of results – With traditional marketing, it can take longer to know the efficiency of a campaign. A digital ad provides easy analytics and insights, but with traditional marketing, you have to wait for the phone to ring or someone to come into the shop.
Attribution and decision making – Sometimes it is much harder to attribute the success of new sales to a traditional campaign than to digital media. This is why traditional marketing is often used for brand building versus direct sales.
Audience feedback loop – With more of an open line communication with digital marketing, it’s easier to understand how customers are engaging to a campaign. With traditional marketing, brand managers are often just hoping that they don’t get negative feedback in the form of a tweet that goes viral. This is why more money and time is poured onto focus groups and market research previous to launching a big traditional campaign. By the time a traditional campaign actually reaches its target audience, it’s typically too late to fix flubs.
Why Digital Marketing and Traditional Marketing Often Go Head to Head?
As we are going towards modern world it is quite difficult to avoid any one of them. On one side traditional marketing helps in brand building and creating customer loyalty but on the other side it is very time consuming and expensive. It has its own pros and cons and for some businesses it is very important to have traditional marketing.
If we talk about Digital Marketing than there are lots of benefits and every business should have some digital presence but this digital presence is only possible with properly attributed traditional marketing, for example: You can retarget website visitors who navigated to the landing page you put in your direct mail postcard. So, while the relationship might begin offline, you can then take it online with different forms of retargeting (https://neilpatel.com/blog/efffective-retargeting-strategies/?lang_geo=in)
Therefore, both traditional marketing and digital marketing goes hand in hand if proper research and comparisons are done at regular intervals while launching a campaign.