However, depending on your business’ size and budget, it can be hard to know what marketing avenues you should explore. You may see competitors that have billboards or other print ads, some that operate solely online, and others that choose both. It can be confusing to know which approach to take when considering all your goals and your target audience.
Below we’ve described both traditional and digital marketing to give you a better sense of what they truly mean. Then we listed three pros and cons to each type.
Some business owners and advertisers might say certain forms of traditional marketing are not worth the time. However, traditional marketing, or advertising, is still a viable option for many brands. It all comes down to your brand and your goals.
Traditional marketing includes:
Traditional marketing has a vertical structure since the message starts with the advertisers, then goes to the network, (television network, radio show, billboard company, magazine, etc.) and then down to the consumer.
This type of media has one-way communication, meaning the brand is conveying a message to the consumer but the consumer doesn’t directly respond back. So, businesses won’t know how consumers will react until their campaign has officially launched.
There’s a generalization made about traditional media that it’s expensive. While it can cost more than various digital tactics, it shouldn’t be ruled out entirely. For example, radio ads can be cost effective and help you reach local audiences.
We created a list of three pros and three cons about traditional marketing below.
Pros
Cons
In our technology-dependent society, everything seems to have gone digital and marketing is no exception. Digital marketing became vastly useful for all brands and leveled the playing field for many smaller brands.
Digital marketing includes:
Basically, if the ad or marketing effort is online, it’s digital marketing. As traditional marketing has a vertical structure, digital marketing has a more horizontal structure.
There are still ways the ads are coming from advertisers to networks to consumers; however, with examples like social media there’s a peer-to-peer interaction. With content and social media marketing, brands can foster two-way communication where they present a message and consumers can give instant feedback.
With digital marketing, ads are generally in consumers’ feeds and aren’t interrupting in nature. TV commercials interrupt a consumer’s show or news program. Meanwhile PPC ads, that show up when a consumer searches on Google, are in the feed with all search results and Instagram ads are in the feed amongst the posts of a user’s feed.
Specific aspects of digital marketing can get very technical and convoluted to the average business owner. This is why agencies have specialists that work on programmatic advertising or Pay-Per-Click and SEO. However, overall digital is much more accessible to the average person compared to traditional.
Below we listed the three pros and cons of digital marketing.
Pros
Cons
In the world we live in now, all brands need to have some digital presence, at the very least in the form of a website. Traditional marketing is tried and true and has been tested over decades. So, experts say neither type will be cast aside any time soon.
Generally, brands use a mixture of traditional and digital, in order to reap the benefits of both and avoid putting all their eggs in one basket. As we mentioned before, what you choose to incorporate in your marketing plan depends on your unique business and your consumers.
