As digital marketing becomes more prevalent with every passing quarter, one of the most frequent questions people have is: Should we put our whole marketing budget into digital? Most marketers have heard this question so often that every individual marketer has their own opinions regarding general questions like, is traditional marketing outdated? Or, is digital marketing just a financial black hole?

For people inquiries about the differences between traditional and digital marketing, this article will be able to simplify it in a way that allows you, the reader, to leave this article with a personalized opinion regarding targeting a potential audience with various channels to achieve your maximum potential outreach.

Traditional marketing suggests reaching a targeted audience with a variety of offline advertising and promotional methods. A few examples of traditional marketing efforts include but are not limited to:

• Telemarketing
• Outdoor billboards and flyers
• Direct mail (brochures, letters, postcards)
• Printed collateral (newspaper & magazine ads)
• Broadcasts (TV & radio ads)

Over time, traditional marketing has maintained a high success rate with its ability to reach people who aren’t online and may find an internet connection in scarcity or people who spend their days unable to spend a substantial amount of time online whether it is an occupation or lifestyle choice. There are consumer groups of older and more traditional mindsets that view printed ads as more credible.

This is reinforced by a Business2Marketing Survey which recaps that 56% of respondents feel that print marketing is the most trustworthy type of marketing. Adding onto that, 79% mentioned that they read direct mail ads. This proves that traditional marketing will never go out of style and will always have a place whether it’s a brochure in your mailbox or on a billboard on the route to your workplace.

Traditional Marketing will always have outreach and will produce great results for your brand when it is strategically planned and successfully executed. With the emergence of the internet and the rise of new methods for people to obtain attention for their content, the discipline of marketing has expanded well beyond the confines of what is currently known as “traditional marketing”.

With a consistently developing society, marketing has dramatically evolved to create more possibilities and opportunities for businesses. That’s where digital marketing comes into perspective. Digital strategies can be proven to be a more cost-efficient and convenient way for businesses to connect and portray their messages to their target audience. By encompassing all types of online advertising and marketing efforts accessible via internet access while on devices such as mobile phones, computers, and tablets.

While using a device to access the internet, many companies will execute successful digital marketing tactics to target potential clients such as:

• Email marketing
• Social media influencer marketing
• Blog content marketing
• Pay-per-click (PPC)
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

These tactics are unique and are leveraged in a manner to maximize outreach to encompass a variety of consumers or to target a smaller specified audience that is likely to convert. Digital ads are great if content or copy is required to be updated frequently due to the speed and ease that they can be revised.

According to a Statista study, it was reported that 356 billion U.S. dollars were spent on digital advertising in 2020 alone with all the obstacles set by the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic.

With such funds going into a certain business operation, it gives a lot of companies the ability to remain flexible and creative with their different and unique twists further evolving the field of digital marketing. By pursuing creativity and experimentation, effectively connecting with your audience has become a norm by taking advantage of the internet’s limitless bounds and accessibility.  Just be aware that every update a social platform has, means that there is a new learning curve for developers and marketers. These curves can take time out of your workday to learn and incorporate into future strategies.

In this new digital era, people spend most of their time online, so it’s completely reasonable to manage brand positioning strategies, advertising, and marketing via social media, blog posts, emails, and a variety of other online platforms to enhance tour brand visibility.

Disadvantages to digital marketing do exist. Digital marketing depends solely on technology and as we all know, technology can break. If a social media website goes down and your social media marketer has posts scheduled to go live during that time, the only possible solution is to only wait it out until the site is back online.

However, that doesn’t mean that you should forgo traditional marketing altogether. If the budget is available and it works for your business, employing an omnichannel marketing strategy aware of the company’s strategic goals and budget considerations. By using both tactics to market effectively, you can ensure that your company’s brand can expand and exist harmoniously across traditional and digital platforms for a large amount of audience to increase your brand awareness across demographics.

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