All businesses need marketing to thrive. This is a fact hands down that must be accepted. How else are people going to know that you exist? “Should I opt for digital marketing?” “Is it worth all the money I invest?” “Maybe people still prefer the traditional methods.” “There is no way around it, I should just gamble and let luck be my lady.” I am sure these thoughts must have crossed your mind. This labyrinth of marketing strategies can faze even the best among us. Trust me, my friend, I have been there and done that. I understand your dilemma and for this reason alone I intend to share what I have learned.

Traditional methods are just very traditional. All approaches of marketing that deal with newspapers, magazines, flyers, radio, television, and mails fall under the category of traditional methods of marketing. Anything and everything used to propagate your business through the virtual channels of the internet be it Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, blog, pop-up ads, and e-mails come under digital marketing. Let us take a look at the boons and banes of each in a step-wise comparison.

Cost

Digital Marketing is definitely the way to go if costs are to be compared. The ability to reach a wide variety of audience at such giveaway prices as compared to the traditional marketing is a real bargain. You do not need to be a very big business that spends big bucks to be known to the world.

Traditional Marketing being antique is very costly on the budget especially for small businesses and entrepreneurs. Even the cheapest modes among traditional methods are way costly as compared to digital marketing.

Customer Engagement

Digital Marketing provides you with the opportunity to know what your customers think of you and what changes they expect from you. It provides real-time feedback that could save your business from going out of business. Looking from a customer’s point of view, they get a company that talks to them – it is the best thing that could happen.

In Tradition Marketing you will not get to engage your customers in a one-to-one conversation unless you design a pamphlet that talks to your customers on your behalf. By the time customer feedback reaches you, it might be of no use. As Bill Gates says - Your unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.

Tangibility

Digital Marketing does not produce that emotion of attachment as is done by a real thing.The entire existence is virtual the best bet that could happen is that the customers take a screenshot for future references. However, it is bound to get lost among hundreds of screenshots that are taken on a daily basis.

In favor of Traditional Marketing research has proved it time and again that customers find it easy to recall things that are tangible. Moreover, some collectible pamphlets or flyers invoke a sense of awe and serve as a reminder thus achieves the desired goal. People take it more seriously, period

Analytics

Since the inception of marketing industry the question of – “How they came to know about us?” has boggled many companies to evaluate which sources of marketing are best working for them. It has been made possible with digital marketing to know which people came to know about you from which source. You can count the number of people who visited your page from YouTube, people who came to shop from Facebook, the number of people reading your blog – their ethnicity, age, gender, locality everything is traced and presented in a well-formed report and all of it is automated!

With traditional marketing practices, it is impossible to know how many people read your ad in a newspaper or got to know about you from a billboard hanging in the main market. You can never know whether people are actually listening to your ad being broadcasted on the radio and whether it is even relevant to the age group listening to radio or not. None of the above is possible, and even the vague numbers given by marketers are not reliable.

Accessibility

Of all the books in the world, there is one particular book that is being read on an average daily, even by the illiterates – Facebook. What better place to find potential clients? The aim is to reach people where they are. And with the exponential growth of mobile consumers, which are 50% of all the internet users, by the way, we know where they are and what they want. The reach had never been so easy. Moreover, most of them are there looking for you, it is not the other way around. That means that when you showcase them what you have to offer you are not annoying them by your presence.

To particularly pinpoint the exact audience through traditional means is a task for the gods. There are different groups of people and distributing tailor-fit ads as per the age group and the taste is not possible. Moreover, people buy newspapers for news not for ads, they watch TV for entertainment, not your advertisement, magazines for content and so on. The sudden arrival of an advertisement that is not even relevant to the content alongside does not play out well. It seems violating and is thus losing its fad.

The chance of going VIRAL

With digital marketing, there is always a chance of becoming an overnight success simply because of the ease of access. If your content is good, regular and your channels are diverse and well maintained you always stand a chance of increasing the number of people talking about and talking to you in just a few hours.

Even if you design one of the best marketing campaigns, it is highly improbable that you will find people calling their friends and family just to stand in front of a billboard and admire your creativity. Think for yourself, how often you find people running around with a newspaper and telling people about a remarkable ad they stumbled upon. It just simply does not happen.

VERDICT

Though there are many perks of the trending digital marketing world, there is a certain aesthetic sense pertaining to the traditional physical materials. Physical things create memories which are yet to be achieved by digital media and might never be achieved by it. However, both digital and traditional marketing methods are not exclusive of each other rather you can achieve a lot by making a strategy inclusive of both forms of marketing. Digital Marketing is pocket-friendly, so it can work wonders for small businesses while traditional methods can work wonders if you narrow down your target audience and cleverly devise a strategy to get to them.  

2018/03/29