If you were to go back in time and ask someone from the late 20^th century if they could ever see televisions and newspapers being overthrown, they would laugh in your face. How they would eat their words if they now saw the complete inferiority of what used to be a necessity. There is nothing a television can do that the internet can’t do better. The internet acts as a hub for news agencies, movie streaming platforms, books, and many more resources to come together. Most recently, marketing has also taken up a spot on the internet. People in the past learned of new businesses through newspaper and television ads, and billboards. Now, however, with the rise of the internet and at least a dozen businesses starting up every day, digital marketing is the more popular form of advertising. It’s convenient and reaches the masses in a more personalized way than traditional marketing. It has brought about a lot of changes to the marketing industry and compares to traditional marketing in more ways than one. Further this blog will compare Traditional Marketing vs Digital Marketing.

• Medium of Communication

The main difference between the two modes of marketing is the medium through which people are exposed to the marketing message. Traditional marketing uses materials such as magazines and newspapers, while digital marketing uses online platforms, like social media and other websites.

• Level of Engagement

Digital marketing makes it easier for customers to interact with businesses. Through platforms like social media, you can clearly see what your audience thinks of your business and marketing strategies. It allows you to make necessary changes to your brand so as to make it more appealing to prospective customers.

With traditional marketing, it can be harder to interact with the audience. It’s more of one-way communication, as people consume what businesses put out there but there’s no way for them to give feedback. That makes it hard to curate your brand around what appeals to the masses.

• Personalized Targeting

Digital marketing comes with knowing a customer’s needs, wants, likes, and dislikes. This makes it that much easier to customize content and cleverly direct what kind of ads should be sent to whom. This feature also perks up a customer’s interest in the brand. For example, some businesses send their regular customers offers on special occasions like birthdays or weddings because this creates a higher probability that the customer will stick with the brand. Furthermore, in the case of social media companies, they recognize what a customer regularly scrolls through, and recommends content that they’re interested in.

This is a tough task to complete with traditional marketing as there is no engagement with users. The most that can be done for businesses that use traditional marketing methods is for customers to personally reach out to them and give them recommendations personally. Not many people would bother to do that nowadays, what with their busy schedules.

• Permanency

Printed materials are more permanent than things you would see on your phone or the internet. People tend to scroll past ads and promotions on the internet without so much as a glance at them, but if you’re a hoarder you will see printed ads every day until you decide to recycle or give away your printed material. Let me elaborate. Some people tend to keep their newspapers and magazines for months after they’re finished with them, and they’re bound to notice the ads in them at some point.

• Expense

Traditional marketing often costs more than digital marketing. For instance, if you’re a new business and you wish to reach out to a large crowd, you’d have to apply for a noticeable spread in a relatively reputed magazine or newspaper. However, chances are that you don’t have the funds for that. Digital marketing would allow you to promote your new business for free. It would also be a safe bet that all your followers would see it, and spread the information to their followers, creating a chain effect.

• Smart Tools

Digital marketing comes equipped with a lot of handy tools that help you track your progress and do various other tasks. It has strategies like search engine optimization that make your work more visible to internet surfers and allow your campaign to be tracked. Traditional marketing is lacking in this regard. It doesn’t have tools that allow its progress to be tracked, and whatever it does have is not half as in-depth as the tools possessed by digital marketing.

Although the prevalence of digital marketing can’t go unnoticed, traditional marketing still isn’t completely out of the window. For as long as magazines like Vogue and television shows exist, traditional marketing will stay relevant, albeit overshadowed by digital marketing. There are many aspects of traditional marketing that appeal to the nostalgic part of people’s brains. That makes it hard for them to completely shun all forms of traditional marketing.

 Digital marketing hasn’t been around long enough for people to develop an attachment to it, like with traditional marketing. What it does do though, is that it reaches out to you every moment of your life that is spent on the internet. Say you start your day by scrolling through a news app, chances are that you’ll see an ad first thing when you open the app. If you decide to watch a Youtube video, it is highly likely that you’ll see at least one ad at the beginning, middle or end of the video.  Suppose you’re booking a flight ticket online for a trip, you’ll almost definitely find a few ads popping up giving hotel recommendations.

That’s the clever thing about digital marketing. It is aware that people’s lives have shifted to being on the internet for the majority of their day, and it uses this information to weave marketing communications into digital platforms. Traditional marketing methods can’t do that, because people nowadays aren’t exposed to any of their marketing media as much as they used to be. And even if they were, there’s still a limit to how much they can be reached out to.

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If you want to learn more about the latest trends of Digital Marketing or brush up on your skills before starting out to offer your services, the Kolkata School of Digital Marketing can help you. Our courses are designed to help people make a mark in the digital marketing world.

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