Riding on the wave of digitalisation, traditional business functions including marketing have been disrupted and transformed. Empowered by technology, consumers are also researching and shopping more via digital channels compared to before, pushing companies to adopt digital marketing to attract and retain customers. The debate between traditional and digital marketing has been ongoing – but when used strategically, both methods can thrive harmoniously to effectively market a brand.
Traditional marketing refers to offline methods of marketing – including print media, broadcast, radio, direct mail, telemarketing, and more. Even though digital marketing is imperative to reach the modern day consumers who are constantly on their phones, traditional marketing is still a strong contender that drives results.
Traditional marketing resonates with the older demographics – consumer groups born in the 1960s spend nearly twice as much time on traditional marketing channels as compared to the millennials. Hence, for businesses with products or services targeting these age groups, traditional marketing will allow for a higher level of success. Secondly, referral or word-of-mouth marketing – a traditional marketing technique, is one of the most powerful ways to reach out to new customers, as they trust the recommendations of their social circle more than advertisements that a brand rolls out.
However, the traditional way of marketing also entails higher marketing costs, lesser customer interaction, as well as limited customisation of content for different target audience – which are limitations that digital marketing methods can circumvent.
Digital marketing comprises of online marketing techniques including social media, email marketing, search engine optimisation, and more – propelled by the technological shifts and adoption around the world.
Digital marketing is a cost-effective way of marketing where businesses are able to directly calculate the number of potential consumers they can reach with a fixed budget. It also eliminates costly processes of a traditional advertisement, enabling the marketing team to reach and connect with global target audiences in a direct manner. Customers can also share digital content to their social circle easily, creating opportunities that increase the virality of a business or product.
Secondly, it allows for instant interactivity, where customers can interact with the campaigns through social media features. The instant interactivity brings instant results for marketers too – the statistics of how consumers are interacting with the marketing information are constantly updated, reflecting the real-time effectiveness of campaigns. From Instagram insights to Electronic Direct Mail performance, marketers can easily obtain complex yet critical metrics that traditional marketing methods do not provide, such as click through rate to determine the effectiveness of ads and keywords used, cost per click to determine the return on investment of a paid search campaign, traffic by channels, and more.
This enables brands to make data-driven decisions for their subsequent campaigns, and they can even tailor content types to different target segmentation with varying preferences, increasing the convenience of enhancing a campaign’s conversion rate. With traditional marketing, there are no insights generated as brands are unable to track if a consumer has viewed the advertisement on TV – yet digital marketing allows a brand to track the micro-details, including the time spent viewing an advertisement, as well as the action they took after viewing the ad. If a large number of viewers exited after viewing an advertisement, the brand will be alerted to refine the ad targeting.
By refining the digital ad targeting strategies, such as selecting optimal keywords, brands can easily reach consumers who are searching for a specific product or service, allowing them to connect with the right audience to convert them into customers.
Lastly, with media monitoring platforms, companies can also engage in social listening to closely monitor competitors in the market, compare their share of voice, and evaluate customer sentiments towards the content of each brand – empowering marketers with timely information to react to competitors’ marketing strategies.
Digital marketing brings a plethora of benefits. Brands should no longer use traditional marketing in silo, and they can pivot to include digital campaigns that complement traditional campaigns to enhance the overall effectiveness of their integrated marketing strategy – by preventing potential leakages in their communication plan.
