Understanding Traditional and Digital Marketing

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One of the greatest challenges that most businesses face presently is making a decision on the specific type of marketing they would do. Also, considering the fact that the budget may not likely be sufficient to execute both digital and traditional marketing at the same time. I'm going to discuss a bit about digital marketing and traditional marketing and hopefully provide useful tips that will help you make the best decision. Basically, there are several factors that you have to consider when choosing the type of marketing to do:

• You have to consider the best marketing strategy that will provide you with the best value for the money you will spend
• Also, you need to think about who to trust with your funds
• In the event that the marketing goes wrong, what will be the alternative?
• You might also consider doing the marketing yourself

I'll like to first explain what digital and traditional marketing means. When it comes to traditional marketing, it involves marketing your products and services via various channels such as:

• Broadcast Media like Radio and TV ads
• Print Media- This includes brochures, newspaper, newsletters, magazines ads and other printed materials
• Telemarketing
• Direct mail such as postcards, flyers, and catalogs

On the other hand, digital marketing involves the building of a website and advertising the products or brand name via various online platforms such as:

• Video marketing (YouTube)
• Websites
• Google ads
• Social media ads (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and several others
• Content marketing
• Banner Ads

So, in order to assist you in making a decision on the type of marketing to do for your brand name, let's take a look at the benefits of traditional marketing strategies.

Advantages of Traditional Marketing

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There several benefits of traditional marketing, although I may not be able to talk about all the benefits, you will find the ones below quite useful.

• Traditional Marketing Materials can be Kept- The audience is able to keep a hard copy of the advert materials like fliers and they can easily make reference to it whenever they want.
• It can reach your local target easily- Some traditional adverts can easily reach a local audience like a radio ad which might play in a particular location so this type of advert is good for businesses that target local audience.
• Can Be easily Understood- Since most people have already been exposed to traditional marketing mediums like billboards and flyers, they can easily be understood. In fact, a study which was sponsored by Canada Post and was carried out by TrueImpact (Canadian neuro-marketing firm) made a comparison of digital marketing (display ads and emails) and traditional marketing (paper marketing and direct mail pieces were used in the study). The result of the study indicated that direct mail ad was easier to process mentally and it also tested better for brand recall by the audience.

Disadvantages of Traditional Marketing

While it has many benefits, traditional advertising also has several disadvantages which every business needs to know.

• First, it gives room for little or no interaction between the customers and the mediums that were used. So, it basically provides information to the public indicating that a brand exists and that hopefully, they will patronize it.
• Another downside of traditional marketing is the cost of running it. There are so many things involved in traditional marketing, for instance, it involves a lot of money to print materials and when distributing these printed materials, you will need to hire people.
• One major downside of traditional marketing strategy is that it is difficult to measure if the campaign was successful or not and in the event that it was successful, how successful it was.

Well, this is just a brief introduction of digital and traditional marketing strategies. Look out for my next post where I will be sharing the benefits of digital marketing. Thanks for reading.