Traditional vs. Online Marketing – what should your business be using?

Choosing how best to spend you marketing budget can be a daunting task. Each business is different and needs to utilise the different types of media available. So what marketing strategy will work best for your business?

What is traditional marketing?

• Print media – newspapers, billboards, flyers, and other printed material
• Broadcast media – Tv and radio
• Telemarketing

What is online marketing?

• Websites
• Social media
• Banner ads
• Google ads
• Video marketing
• Basically any marketing effort anchored to an electronic device

Cost

Budgets are important to any business. Traditional marketing strategies often take huge sums of money. You need to keep promotions running, and the cost of printing on billboards or newspapers is often quite high.

Online marketing has the potential to reach thousands of people with a single post. With PPC (pay per click) ads from google and Facebook you can set your budget and know costs won’t exceed what you’ve planned.

There are also often low cost options like hiring a copywriter to post regular content on your site or someone to manage your social media accounts. Things like this can often have a bigger impact on website traffic and revenue than you’d expect.

Brand development

Having quality content online that targets the needs of your audience adds value to your product or service. This results in greater brand recognition eventually leading to more sales.

When using traditional forms of marketing it if often difficult to add extra value to what you are selling. They are used more for lead generation than brand awareness and reputation.

Communication

Online platforms offer a way for your business to reach a much larger audience, to connect with them in a way traditional platforms don’t offer. You can tailor a campaign to specific demographics meaning your campaign will be more effective.

Though, sometimes traditional marketing may be more effective for example if you are targeting an older audience that does not utilise the internet and social media.

Competition

With online marketing your business can compete with any of your competition regardless of their size.

With traditional marketing smaller businesses struggle to match the their larger competitors due to cost and resources.

Data tracking

All results from online campaigns are easily recorded and reviewed. Allowing you to look at a number of different indicators to see how successful (or not) your campaign has been. This makes it easy to understand your audience and make adjusts to your marketing plan to insure all of your campaigns are as effective as possible. Marketing online enables you to refine your strategy at any point in time and see any improvements or opportunities for further refinement almost instantaneously.

It is difficult to keep track of traditional marketing campaigns, there is no easy way to measure your audience their interactions or conversions. You need to put a lot of effort and time consuming research to gauge how your campaign has been received.

Time

Online marketing takes an inordinate amount of time. New content must regularly be created, edited and published, and comments must be responded to in a timely manner if you don’t want to loose the attention of your audience. It can also take a while to see results, you have to build awareness of your online presence.

Traditional marketing takes time to go from an idea to a finished project and once finished also takes time to print.

Interaction

Most traditional marketing forms are static and there is no way of interacting with the audience, whereas with online marketing people are able to, like, comment, follow and share. There can be plenty of direct contact between the audience and the business which means that the business can get some very valuable consumer feedback and the customer feels more valued instilling loyalty in your brand.

The question isn’t really what type of marketing is best, but instead, it’s what type offers the best way to reach your market and get them to purchase your product or service. Odds are there are strategies in both traditional and Internet marketing that will work. 

DeType has a wealth of experience in both traditional and online forms of marketing. Have a look through our portfolio to find out more about the work we do or get in touch with one of our team today to learn more about how we can help you effectively market your business.