There’s no denying that starting a digital marketing campaign is much easier than doing any form of traditional marketing. However, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t put your time and effort into traditional marketing. This is still incredibly effective no matter what type of company you have. For business owners on a tight budget, it can be hard to determine whether to go through traditional or digital means of promoting products and services. Here are some of the key differences between the two.

Marketing Cost

It goes without saying that traditional marketing is much more expensive than digital campaigns. After all, you have to pay for things like billboards, printing, radio and TV ads. On the other hand, you can create a digital marketing campaign with a very small budget. Making a campaign on Facebook can help you reach thousands of people for just a few dollars.

If you’re able to come up with a good social media campaign, you might not even have to pay a penny to promote your business. In case your post goes viral, you’ll automatically start getting visitors. On top of that, you have the option of cross-promotion with other businesses.

Another easy and inexpensive way to market your company is by improving your search engine rankings. If you have the knowledge to do this yourself, you won’t need to spend any money on search engine optimization (SEO). But even if you don’t have a clue about optimization, you can hire an SEO company to do this at a low cost.

Marketing Results

When you create a traditional marketing campaign, it will take you a while to determine whether it’s working or not. In some cases, it may even take a few months for you to get the results of your campaign.

If you already have some experience with marketing, you probably know that it’s hard to do everything right on the first try. It might take you several to analyse results, make adjustments, and improve your campaign. On the other hand, digital marketing allows you to get real-time results and make adjustments in a matter of minutes.

With digital marketing, you can try several different campaigns in a span of a few weeks. By analysing results like incoming traffic, bounce rates, and conversion rates, you can quickly determine which campaign you should use.

Communication

Traditional marketing involves one-way communication. You basically just showcase a product or service to your potential customers. Digital marketing takes it one step further and lets you communicate with consumers. This allows you to ensure your customers are satisfied.

Do Your Customers Have a Choice?

When you start a traditional marketing campaign, your audience don’t have a say in how they’ll receive the new information. If you start making cold calls to promote new products or services, there’s a good chance you’ll catch a lot of people at inconvenient times. This will ultimately have a negative impact on your sales. Similarly, if your target audience gets a lot of junk mail on the same day you send them flyers, they’ll likely throw them out without even looking at your special offers.

When it comes to digital marketing, consumers can choose how they’ll receive your content. Some might want to read a blog post, while others would prefer to watch an informative YouTube video. As long as you provide them with multiple options, your potential customers will be more likely to pay attention to your digital marketing campaign.

Personalization

Personalized offers are one of the main advantages of digital marketing campaigns. Since it’s not hard to collect data on your customers online, you can use it to create different groups within your target audience based on their preferences and behaviour. You can then use email marketing to reach people through personalized emails to boost your sales. Keep in mind that this would be very hard and expensive to do with traditional marketing.

Bottom Line – Which Is Better?

There are more advantages to digital marketing and it’s easy to see why it is superior to traditional marketing campaigns. Despite it being the inferior option, traditional marketing is still an effective way to promote your business. Nevertheless, if you have a limited budget and have to choose between the two, you should go with digital marketing.

In case you have a big enough budget, you should definitely do both traditional and digital marketing. This approach will help you reach more people and promote your business across all platforms.