Traditional Marketing vs Digital Marketing

Marketing is an always-evolving field–which is both the joy and the challenge of the marketing profession. Over the last two decades, marketing has undergone a sea change as traditional marketing has in many ways taken a back seat for digital marketing. While it is tempting to situate traditional marketing and digital marketing as being in opposition, the reality is that these are simply different sets of tools to be used as needed in conveying your business’s message to your target audience. An examination of traditional marketing vs digital marketing can help explain the uses of each and the importance of digital marketing in contemporary marketing practice.

What is Traditional Marketing?

While marketing has always evolved as new approaches and new technologies become available, generally when we say “traditional marketing” we are referring to the marketing tools and tactics that predominated before the Internet of Things (IoT) became a reality. These include traditional print advertisements, fliers and mailers, billboards, radio promotion, and television ads among others.

As we’ve mentioned, traditional marketing dominated most of the 20th century, until the first stirrings of digital marketing in the 1990s. Traditional marketing would remain the primary mode of marketing for most businesses until the early 2000s and the rise of mobile digital culture via IoT.

What is Digital Marketing?

The rise of digital marketing coincided with the rise of IoT and the near-universal accessibility of the internet across the nation and around the world. Digital marketing makes use of digital channels for spreading the marketing message in question and reaching the desired target audience. Digital marketing is, if anything, more diverse than traditional marketing. It may comprise social media marketing, website SEO, app-based marketing practices, and the proliferation of viral digital content or memetic (meme-based) content. Digital marketing is innately diverse, flexible, and quickly evolving. 

Advantages of Digital Marketing

While digital marketing and traditional marketing are both tools to be used when appropriate, there are a number of clear advantages to digital marketing that are worth discussing. In leveraging digital culture and digital technologies, these marketing techniques offer a unique edge and ROI:

• Conversion in digital marketing is easy to track, easy to quantify, and easy to situation into your overall ROI. With an effective digital marketing approach you can watch clients and customers move through your funnel and see how your marketing approach translates into sales, contracts, and profits.
• Targeting the appropriate audience is far more direct and effective with a digital marketing approach. Properly executed, SEO, social media marketing, and email marketing can reach the audience you need in an effective, sustainable, and scalable way.
• Engagement is innately easy to track, easy to promote, and highly effectively with a digital marketing approach. By leveraging the various digital marketing tools available, you can build a community and identity around your brand, keep your audience engaged and invested, and ensure that your audience keeps coming back for more.
• As an extension of engagement, digital marketing makes client/customer communication easy, scalable, and timely. By making use of digital communications technology as part of your digital marketing campaign, you can stay in touch with your customers or clients around the clock, getting them the information they need about your business directly and efficiently.  
• Scalability is a huge advantage of digital marketing–you can grow your digital platform and digital presence as your business grows, expand to new markets as needed, and maintain your forward momentum in a trackable, ROI-positive way. 

Digital marketing offers flexibility and accountability that surpass many traditional marketing approaches. Properly implemented, digital marketing is an investment that pays off for the lifetime of your business, no matter where your success takes you. 

Wahha Designs: Digital Marketing Solutions that Work For You

The digital marketing services you need are closer than you may think. At Wahha Designs we utilize our bleeding-edge understanding of the digital landscape with your personalized approach to your business and your goals in order to build the success you deserve. Contact us today and schedule a consultation–your digital success awaits.