Traditional Marketing or Digital Marketing – which works best?

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These days, online marketing is more important than it has ever been before.  With so many purchases being made online, not taking advantage of the online marketing tools available to your business could spell disaster for your brand.

By marrying the most effective elements of online digital marketing with more traditional marketing strategies, you will have all your basis covered, and a much higher chance of overall success for your business.

Here, we look at the benefits of both kinds of marketing for your small or medium sized business.

Benefits to Traditional marketing

Traditional marketing will always have a place in your overall strategy, regardless of how media savvy your audience is.  The main advantages of traditional marketing include:

  • Locality – it is easy to reach your target audience using media that only covers a certain area, for example local radio stations or local press advertising.
  • Longevity – Printed materials are easy to keep for future reference. They can be safely stored away and referred to as and when needed.
  • Established – Your customers will have looked at and responded to press and media advertising many times in the past, so it is a medium that they are already exposed to and that they trust and rely on.
  • Successful – If you get your press advertising just right, it can be extremely successful for both brand awareness and your bottom line.

It does however, have its drawbacks, these include:

  • Expensive – Press and media advertising can be expensive, especially if it doesn’t work for you.
  • Hard to measure – It has always been difficult to measure which parts of your overall media marketing strategy are most effective.
  • Hard to communicate – Press or media adverts are one way conversation with no way in which to interact with your customer directly. To hear back from them, they will need to respond to the advert in the first place.

Digital marketing encompasses a variety of innovative strategies that help your brand to be found online as you gather momentum and increase your reach and following.

Benefits of Digital marketing include:

  • Audience growth – it is very easy to create a wider audience using the internet. It is worldwide after all. This means that you have the greatest chance to reach more of your potential audience.
  • Content is variable – Your audience can choose how much information they receive from you, and how they receive it. It could be subscribing to an email list, following you on social media or just finding using a search engine to find you as and when they need you.
  • Immediate Interaction – online marketing, and most specifically social media marketing, allows for immediate interaction with your followers. This allows you to make instant decisions about your marketing strategies and to see what works best and when.
  • Cost -effective – Online marketing is far cheaper than traditional marketing, and in some cases is it even free, apart from the time taken to set it up in the first place.
  • Quantifiable – Digital marketing makes it easy to record your data and results. Using search engine analysis or other tools you can easily see how many hits your website has received, and find out other relevant information about the nature of your customers requirements.
  • Brand development – a great looking website that engages well with your audience is an excellent way to help grow your brand.

Just like traditional marketing, digital marketing has some drawbacks too:

  • Set up costs are high – whilst a lot of online marketing can be done for free, the initial set up cost of building a website is higher. You will need a great looking, fully functioning website before you embark upon any other kind of digital marketing.
  • Spamming – Just as quickly as people can say good things about your business online, they can also say bad things or take advantage of the opportunity to spam your site with other advertising. This is often undesirable and you need to have tight restrictions in place at all times to prevent this from happening.

We can help you with all of your traditional and digital marketing requirements.  Contact us today to find out more.

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