Digital Marketing is the way of using the internet or web-based resources to broadcast information about a firm’s products or services to its potential customers.

Digital marketing uses social media, email, advertising displays, and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) among others. As the internet has spread fast, digital marketing has become an important tool to grow our businesses.

As the potential customers spent their time on the internet over searching, researching, shopping and socializing, thus, digital marketing comes into play to target all those customers through digital marketing strategies.

Traditional Marketing

Traditional marketing is a huge category that contains many types of marketing and advertising. It is the most rememberable type of marketing that we see and hear every day in our daily life. The broad traditional marketing strategies contain direct mail, broadcast, telephone, and print.

Print marketing is first and also the oldest type of traditional marketing. This mainly defined as paper print advertising, posters or wall holdings advertising. Nowadays, this refers to advertising in newspapers or magazines, etc.

Broadcasting marketing mainly defines as including radio or television advertising. The first broadcasting channel (a radio program) established on 2 November 1920. Nowadays, television broadcasting is more popular since 1941.

Direct mail marketing defined as mainly includes direct messages or letters, fliers, brochures and postcards through mail portal to attract customers. The first and earliest of this is the Sears catalog introduced in 1888.

Telephone marketing is very famous in the modern world. This is also known as telemarketing. This is defined as delivering sales messages or advertise its products over calling by telephones. It is on controversies nowadays.

Both traditional and digital marketing systems have their advantages and disadvantages. As technology has evolved, digital marketing is growing exponentially.

Reasons Why Preferring Digital Marketing Over Traditional Marketing

Better audience reach. The internet is widespread, now almost a ubiquitous phenomenon. The number of people surfing the internet at a time in millions. Therefore the digital information reaches lots of people at a time. Moreover, the audience reach is not limited to a region or province; it could even be national or international. A large number of audience means the number of potential customers.

Cost-Effectiveness. The outreach to a number of people in lower costs or very less capital investment required to promote products through Digital Marketing. As compared to it, Offline Marketing may be capital intensive. It may require works like commercials, printing, and publishing which might require much higher capital and infrastructure.

Customer Satisfaction. Digital advertisements and media outreach could be designed to give the human touch. The internet provides for sophisticated messaging and interaction with a customer than print and paper ever could.

Digital channels could even be used to get customer feedback, complaints or reviews for any service or product. Such flexibility is not possible in the case of offline modes or where it is possible, it doesn’t come cheap.

Better tracking and strategy making. The software and analytics available for Digital Marketing channels allow marketers to assiduously track their efforts. Product or service feedback is available in real-time. This results in a strong strategy making, better assessment of outreach efforts, modification of responses thereby increasing the overall effectiveness of the online campaign.

Creating Brand Credibility. An effective, well designed and targeted Digital Marketing campaign can help build brand credibility. Through consistent and persistent online efforts a brand image could be transformed and its credibility is built.

Specific targeting. Some products and services are meant for particular demography. Digital marketing can help in designing and targeting promotions and advertisements for such targeting.

The use of social media for Digital Marketing could result in better targeting. Proper use of social media could help build a community or forum. These are the right target audience and it is easier to sell to this group of people the products and services instead of trying to reach some stranger audience.

The focus in the case of digital marketing, therefore, could be targeted at a narrow audience resulting in better revenues.

Less intrusive. In offline marketing, people may find unsolicited phone calls, letters, and emails a little unwelcoming. On the other hand, digital marketing displays information for potential customers and it is up to their will to follow those promotions or ignore them. This makes digital marketing friendlier and less intrusive.

Digital Marketing campaigns have the potential to go viral. Due to the vast reach of social media and the ease of information sharing, it allows commercials or promotional videos that capture the imagination of the general public may be shared widely.

This can let the information being shared by millions of users in a day or two thereby exponentially increasing the campaign’s outreach and garnering potential customers.

Immediate conversion. When potential customers see online advertisements, they click it. It may result in an online sale or transaction within a few minutes. This results in an immediate conversion of efforts. Such possibilities are less in offline campaigns as compare to digital marketing as the potential customer cannot directly buy the products or services.

The information available online about a product or service can be comprehensive. Information about a product or service can include text, pictures, videos, customer reviews, price comparisons, product comparisons among a variety of other information.

The visitor could enquire or read to their heart’s content for the information available online. This helps them in better decision making and the chances are that a visitor may turn into a potential customer.