Digital Marketing vs Traditional Marketing

Traditional Marketing

Traditional Marketing uses strategies such as direct sales, TV, radio, mail, print, advertising (like magazines, coupon books, billboards and much more) and printed promotional materials like catalogs or brochures (often referred to as collateral).

Pros of Traditional Marketing

• Traditional methods may be only way to reach your target audience such as older generation such as the retiring generation.
• Person-to-person is a strategy of traditional marketing. Sometimes there is a definitely a time and place when this type of direct selling is most effective to market a product or service.
• Traditional marketing offers hard copy material. There is something to be said about handing a consumer some tangible printed material they can flip through at their leisure.

Cons of Traditional Marketing

• Expensive & Cost Prohibitive: to purchase advertising for TV, radio or print can be very costly prohibitive to most small businesses. Brochures, business cards and mailers are expensive to print hard copies.
• Difficult to Track Results: Traditional marketing is hard to track real quantitative results.
• Usually Requires Outside Help: Printing materials, buying media and creating radio advertisements require hiring outside that add to costs.
• Forced: Traditional marketing is usually forced upon the consumer that they don’t ask for.

Digital Marketing

Digital Marketing is the promotion of products or brands through one or more forms of electronic media. For example, advertising mediums that might be used as ap art of the digital marketing strategy of a business could include promotional efforts made via the Internet, social media, mobile phones, game consoles and electronic billboards. (Business Dictionary).

Internet Marketing is advertising and marketing efforts that use the Web and e-mail to create sales via e-commerce and sales leads from Web sites or emails. Internet marketing is based off SEO, email marketing, social network sites like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and many other sites

Pros of Internet Marketing

• Results are easily more measurable
• Decisions can be made using real data and qualitative results
• Ability to drill down into your demographics to accurately reach your target market.
• Social media (word of mouth marketing) enables to directly communicate groups and even individual consumers.
• Data and results are available immediately.
• Accessible to any business size
• Possibility to accomplish some of the Internet marketing on your own.
• The ability to build direct relationships with your customers through social media and communities.
• The ability to make marketing message changes on the fly.

Cons of Internet Marketing

• The company relies on the customer being more highly interactive on the internet.
• Can be highly demanding on your time. Content must continuously created, edited, approved and published. Comments must be responded to and sites and pages must be maintained.
• The ability to mismanage or be inconsistent in your brand identity in forums, blogs, social media and etc.