With the traditional vs. digital marketing debate going on, let us figure out what is most suitable for the marketing and promotion of your business. Online advertising vs. traditional advertising could seem like a tough decision to make but these pointers will help you make up your mind.

Marketing is that aspect of the business that you can never ignore. A wise entrepreneur will set aside a separate budget for the marketing alone. The problem is, we live in the generation where a huge part of the population does transactions only online while another chunk does not yet know how to use the internet. So the traditional vs. Digital Marketing decision becomes difficult.

However, you can think things through and make the decision of online advertising vs. traditional advertising. All you need to do is know the pros and cons of both and see how it applies to your business. Check the benefits of Digital marketing vs. traditional marketing statistics and you will have a good indicator of which mode of marketing you need more.

So, What is Traditional Marketing?

Traditional marketing is the conventional modes of marketing that have been used since the beginning of marketing and advertisements. This includes:

• Television.
• Newspaper.
• Radio.
• Flyers and billboards by the roads and highways.
• Ads in related weekly magazines.

What is Digital Marketing?

Digital or online marketing is the marketing mode of the global village. It is only obvious that the era of the internet will have its influence in every realm of life.

Digital marketing includes platforms like:

• Social media like Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram.
• Business networking sites like LinkedIn.
• Promotional ads via emails.
• Paid pop-ups.
• Blogs
• Clickbait links for viral content.

Online marketing is more versatile than traditional marketing, though all the types look similar. Now that we know what traditional and online marketing is, let us find out the winner of the traditional vs. digital marketing contest. Traditional marketing was a thing only because digital marketing did not exist.

Here are 10 reasons why digital marketing wins the traditional vs. digital marketing battle.

Benefits of Digital Marketing over Traditional Marketing

1. 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.

So, even school goers can have a startup thanks to the cheap cost price for online marketing. This in turn helps expand the scope of marketing across boundaries of age and finance.

2. 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:

• Number of visitors.
• Most active time of the day.
• Conversion rates.
• Bounce rates.

When you have the result handy in real time, you waste no time taking action.

3. Brand development

Digital marketing vs. traditional marketing statistics can be measured but one thing these statistics don’t take into consideration in comparison to online advertising vs. traditional advertising is the brand image the online advertising gives rise to. This is mainly because with the 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 consistent image for your Company. This is something one advertisement aired on the radio or posted in the newspapers cannot give you. And will also help in branding your business.

4. 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.

5. 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.

6. 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. This 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.

7. 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.

8. Non Interuptive

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.

9. 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.

10. 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.

Online advertising vs. traditional advertising statistics help you find out what is working for you and what is not. You get the online statistics almost instantly via Google Analytics and make the necessary readjustments. Traditional statistics would be too late to make any concrete strategy refinement on time.

Now that we know what the speculation regarding traditional vs. digital marketing revealed for us, we can agree that online marketing wins. A smart blend of traditional vs. online marketing, enabled by a good analysis of online advertising vs. traditional advertising statistics, will get your brand where you want it to be.