Digital Marketing vs. Traditional Marketing

Is digital marketing going to surpass traditional marketing? Will it completely take over classic marketing strategies? The debate continues as technology moves fast and companies can no longer ignore the importance of not only having, but monitoring, their online presence.

Let us start by clarifying the difference between these two varieties of marketing. While traditional marketing includes all the advertising methods like print ads, TV commercials, brochures and billboards; digital marketing means promoting a brand/company via the Internet, thus it refers to social networking presence, online advertising (Google Adwords, Facebook Ads, Twitter Ads, Youtube videos, etc.), blogs and websites.

With traditional marketing companies directly target and find customers, while through online marketing their objective is to have people find them.

Obviously, the success of a digital marketing campaign highly depends on the potential customers having access to the Internet and being familiar with the channels used to target them, be those social networks or websites. On the other hand, traditional campaigns on newspapers, magazines, TV or radio or street marketing campaigns are accessible for the large majority of people.

That being said, the level of segmentation you can reach with Internet marketing campaigns cannot be equalled by traditional promotional activities, as they usually reach a local audience and tend to be static. This is also valid when it comes to budget. If we consider the case of Facebook Ads, for example, you can create multiple campaigns at the same time targeting different countries, ages, genders, interests or even education levels and allocate the budget you consider reasonable for each, running a sort of A/B testing and monitoring the campaigns’ performance on a daily basis. This will allow you to take decisions quickly and refine your strategy in case you need to do so.

In addition, the ROI of traditional marketing campaigns is usually much more difficult to measure than for online campaigns, as for the former you are relying on potential customers being interested and deciding to take action, while for the latter you can rely on plenty of analytics platforms and exactly know your CTR, CPA and CPC.

However, some traditional campaigns, like events and street marketing in general, allow companies to have a personal interaction with their potential customers and get direct and real-time feedback, which turns to be extremely valuable when testing new products to be launched.

Personally, I think that no company should base its strategy on just one of these two branches of marketing. Neither can you just rely on online campaigns nor you can expect to reach your audience with traditional promotional activities only.

Strategies and marketing budgets should be adjusted based on the company’s sector and objective. So, for tech companies it probably makes more sense to focus on Internet campaigns, while for FMCG and more traditional companies in general it would be more reasonable to allocate a high portion of their marketing efforts to classic marketing activities, such as TV commercials and print advertising.

In any case, any marketing plan should be an “integrated” plan, where strategies are consistent between the two channels above and aiming at the same objectives.