10 Advantages of Digital Marketing Over Traditional Marketing

Let me ask you a simple question. 

How much time do you spend on your phone every day? 

A survey revealed that 50% of respondents spend five to six hours on their phone on a daily basis, whereas 22% spend three to four hours on average.

And, how much time do you spend watching TV? That’s right, people are spending more time watching videos online than sticking to traditional cable TV. 

In this digital era, people are spending more time in the virtual world than in the real world. Besides, India has the second-largest Internet user base in the world. 

Businesses are becoming aware of this fact and thus, more brands are jumping the bandwagon to promote their goods and services on digital platforms. 

In this blog, we will talk about the advantages of digital marketing over traditional marketing, and which one should you opt for. 

Traditional Marketing Vs Digital Marketing 

Before we talk about the benefits of online marketing, let’s understand how these two terms differ from each other. 

The Importance of Marketing

Marketing is an important aspect of any business that informs customers about the products or services they are offering. 

It enables customers to understand the value of the product, its usage, and other additional information that will help customers make their decision to buy. 

Every company — whether big or small — will have some budget allocated for marketing alone. Earlier, a large amount of money was spent on traditional methods, such as running TV ads, printing ads in newspapers, and others.

Digital marketing vs traditional marketingSource: pinimg.com

But today, you will find most consumers doing transactions online while the aged group from 55 years and above aren’t much familiar with how to use the internet. 

While traditional marketing is not entirely dead, digital marketing is the new buzz. Both traditional and digital marketing have their own pros and cons, you need to figure out what works best for your business. 

What Is Digital Marketing? 

Digital marketing refers to the promotion of products or services using a digital platform. 

It is an electronic mode of action that is primarily internet-based conducted through mobile phones, laptops, and other digital mediums. 

The world is going digital, and millions of people are spending time on online platforms. 

Importance of Digital Marketing For The Business Success

1. Acts as a Cost-effective Solution 

We all know that the most expensive part of building a brand in the industry is marketing. 

While it may not be a big financial burden for large enterprises, small businesses can’t say the same. That’s why you will see how businesses are looking for every opportunity to cut down their marketing costs without getting the result affected. 

In simple words, online marketing is an affordable alternative to traditional marketing. 

If you compare internet marketing with print advertising, you do not have to pay anything. You can get started for free or make a small investment in online tools at the most. 

The best way to go about it is by creating a company profile on various social media platforms. It won’t cost you anything and at the same time, you can build an online presence for your brand. 

You can also target email marketing – with the second-highest open rate – to reach out to your audience. 

All you need is a mailing list and just a few bucks to subscribe to an email marketing provider. It’s far less than what you would be paying for print advertisements and other promotional material. 

2. Measures Real-time Engagement

Another advantage of digital marketing is that you can measure the effectiveness of your campaign running in real-time. Whereas, in the case of traditional marketing, you will have to wait for weeks or sometimes even months, to evaluate the veracity of a campaign.

Benefits of real-time engagement

Source: tangotelecom.com

For instance, if you are running an email campaign, you can easily keep track of your open rate, bounce rate, and click-through rate in real-time. This will help you understand what’s working for your audience and can make changes according to your audience’s reaction for better results. 

This real-time analytics applies to all kinds of online marketing, including live streaming, paid ads, SMS marketing, and others. 

When considering SMS marketing, it’s crucial to be aware of the distinctions between traditional SMS and RCS. The choice between rcs vs sms can have significant implications for your marketing approach.

The online world offers various analytics tools to measure your marketing efforts. For instance, you can connect your website to Google Analytics to keep track of traffic, lead generation, and other important metrics. 

Having access to relevant data allows you to better adapt and strategize your marketing efforts that can produce better results. Tracking your performance in traditional marketing is not as efficient as online marketing. 

3. Provides an Excellent ROI

Well, digital marketing is not only about low cost or tracking real-time engagement. It is equally popular for providing good returns on small investments. 

When you compare it with traditional advertising like print marketing and media collaborations, advanced digital marketing methods are significantly cheaper and provide much more effective results.  

For instance, if you invest the same amount in PPC (Pay-per-click) and print ads, you will generate far more conversions in the former technique. At the same time, you will be able to better track your performance.

Source: icon-worldwide.com

Based on the Litmus report, it was found that email marketing ROI stands at 4,200%. That means, for every dollar you invest in marketing, you receive $42 in return. 

Moreover, running paid ads on various social media channels allows you to target your ideal customer persona. Thus, this automatically increases the chances of a high conversion rate. 

4. Enables Precise Audience Targeting

Identifying and segmenting your target audience is essential to better tailor your marketing message to their preferences and needs. 

Targeting a subgroup that is likely to be interested in your product or service is much more effective than targeting a broader set of audiences. That way, you generate leads in an affordable manner. 

This is exactly where digital marketing triumphs over traditional marketing – the former enables target marketing. 

Traditional marketing is all about running an ad in front of a large set of audience, hoping that a few people will like what they see and convert. 

On the other hand, online advertising allows marketers to target a specific segment based on their behavioral activities. Thus, it is comparatively more effective at driving higher conversion. 

What’s more, digital platforms like social media or/and email marketing allow you to add a touch of personalization to your campaigns. For instance, in your email campaigns, you can easily segment your subscribers based on their actions – send out recommendation emails based on their previous purchases or shoot out promotional emails to your loyal customers. 

Similarly, social media ad campaigns are only shown to users with a specific inkling. Social media algorithms are smart that help you chase your ideal customers and increase the chance of sales. 

5. Helps Create More Engagement

Today, the importance of digital marketing can’t be ignored. 

For starters, it allows brands to create various types of interactive content that allows them to engage with every prospect and lead. Take, for example, video content is made interactive which helps glue their customers’ attention throughout.

How to calculate customer engagement

Source: intercom.com

An interactive video refers to a form of digital video that supports user interaction. 

‍77% of marketers believe that interactive video engages customers pretty well. Besides, it’s not surprising that interactive video has 22% more engagement than linear videos. 

Moreover, digital platforms offer cut-throat competition. If you want your product or service to stand out, you need to provide the best in quality offers to steal your audience’s attention. 

This ensures that brands are creating top-class content mixed with superior customer experience (CX), leading to higher customer satisfaction. 

Getting customer engagement is a crucial part of the success of your business growth. 

6. Makes it Easy to Build a Global Presence 

Digitization has brought the world close, and we are no longer bound by physical limitations when it comes to catering to global audiences. 

Traditional advertising is bound by localization. Whereas, digital marketing ad campaigns allow you to be visible in any part of the world. Both small and large enterprises get equal opportunities to go global and expand their presence beyond a single country’s border. 

This has been possible through search engine powers like Google and various other social media channels. 

Facebook has about 2.89 billion active users as of the second quarter of 2021 from across the world.

Similarly, LinkedIn, the world’s largest professional network, has 774+ million members in more than 200 countries across the world.

When you build your company’s presence on these platforms, you can imagine how much exposure you can get. 

Moreover, you must read stories of how start-ups are blooming over a small period of time. Thanks to the global nature of digital marketing platforms. 

7. Results In Brand Development 

A good brand is crucial as it helps increase the value of a company. It not only provides employees with directions in motivation but also makes customer acquisition easy. 

If you look at it, the average daily social media usage of internet users worldwide amounted to 145 minutes per day as of 2020. It has been up from 142 minutes in the previous year. That’s a lot of time. 

Whether we are using laptops or smartphones, most of us always have the internet on hand. Businesses can use these digital platforms, particularly social media, to build a company’s brand and reputation.

Brand building strategies

Source: inkbotdesign.com

Today, every one in two businesses have a website and are building a full-fledged blog featuring useful articles. 

So if you are looking to raise brand awareness through digital marketing, social media is the best place to start. 

8. Easy to Adapt and Is More Time-Efficient

Another thing to consider while evaluating traditional marketing vs online marketing is time. 

A traditional marketing campaign takes a lot of time to prepare and execute, whereas a digital one doesn’t. It’s so much quicker to launch digital campaigns. Besides, you don’t need a full-fledged team to do so. 

A professional digital marketer can plan, execute, and measure multiple campaigns simultaneously. 

Yet again, digital marketing gives you full knowledge of the performance of an ad running. This enables businesses to understand where to invest more and which campaign needs to be tweaked to produce effective results. 

In the case of traditional marketing, you can’t make any changes once it’s launched. It’s rigid as paperwork is involved. So even if a campaign is not performing as expected, it has to be stopped immediately or wait for the timeline of the agreed period to expire.

Thus, online marketing is an excellent way for small businesses or startups to launch their marketing plans

9. Enables Automation 

One of the major advantages of digital marketing is that it enables automation, which in turn saves time. 

Traditional marketing will always require manual efforts and more time to execute things. However, in the case of online marketing, you can make use of tons of tools to stream your digital campaigns.

Top benefits of digital marketing

Source: webfries.com

For instance, using tools like social media scheduler, you can pre-schedule all your posts to be uploaded online. It ensures that you maintain consistency in the number of posts and your uploading time. 

Similarly, email marketing providers offer automation tools that allow you to design and execute email sequences for marketing campaigns. You simply need to write and design emails that need to be sent out. The rest will happen automatically. 

And the best part is that today marketers understand the value of digital platforms, so they aren’t reluctant to invest in these online tools. 

If you are a small business with limited resources, you can still find tools that will fit into your budget. There are hundreds of tools available online tailored to various types and sizes of businesses. 

In essence, streamlining your marketing efforts can enhance efficiency while optimizing costs. It’s not possible in traditional marketing. 

10. Builds Long-lasting Relationships

I agree digital marketing seems to be more effective than traditional marketing in most cases. But what is it that we are trying to achieve exactly? 

Other than conversion, it also helps with building lasting relationships with your customers. 

When you build a presence online and stay active, it helps establish your credibility and build trust. It gives you a platform to interact directly with your followers and understand the issue they are facing.

How customer service impacts brand loyalty?

Source: oberlo.com

Besides, it enables your customers to provide direct feedback – communicate their experience on social media platforms by leaving comments. 

What’s more, companies get an opportunity to tell their brand story and connect emotionally with their target audience. It’s a great way to send out messages that resonate with your audience. 

Traditional marketing lacks this aspect as you can’t keep track of who is watching your advertisement and how they are reacting to it. In that case, the best thing is to check how some of the top market research companies conduct their research and decide whether it’s better for your company to advertise itself through traditional marketing tactics or through digital marketing.

Where Traditional Marketing Is Beneficial Over Digital Marketing 

We have seen various advantages of digital marketing, but there are some aspects where traditional marketing might be more effective than online marketing. 

1. Materials Are Tangible

When you publish marketing collateral such as pamphlets, magazines, or brochures, your potential customers can store it. It allows them to get back again if they ever come across your brochure on their table. This tends to make them remember the product or service better than simply seeing things on the internet. 

2. Target Local Audience

While digital marketing enables specific targeting, traditional marketing is not so bad either. It allows you to air your ad on certain channels, particularly useful when targeting local audiences. You can run ads on regional channels.

Behavioral segmentation of customers in digital marketing

Source: yieldify.com

Besides, you can also create a flyer and distribute them if your product or service caters to specific zip codes. 

3. Creates a Real Presence 

Even though we live in a virtual world, people still appreciate something more that has a physical presence. 

Social media is a great platform to create a brand image and interact with your audience. But having a real presence that enables personal approaches makes all the difference. People might start taking you seriously. 

No matter how popular digital marketing becomes, handing out promotional flyers will never get obsolete. 

Wrapping Up: The world is transitioning into a digital environment. Logically, marketers who are able to first take advantage of going digital will be one step ahead of their competitors. However, traditional marketing is not entirely obsolete or outdated. A smart marketer would know how to perfectly blend traditional marketing vs digital marketing and get your brand where you want to see it. 

Nikita is a SaaS copywriter and content marketing expert with almost five years of experience. She creates engaging and high-quality content for businesses that want to see their Google search rankings surge. When she is not writing, she is busy following the search industry news to stay updated on all SEO tactics.

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