The world of marketing is changing every day and it is not as simple as it used to be. As the paradigm continues to shift giving leverage to online advertising, marketing professional and business owners are often challenged with the question of which is more effective: Traditional marketing or Internet marketing? You want more influx of customers and increase sales, whilst using very fewer resources.
Marketing is a very crucial element for any business, choosing the right one to lead with is important for a successful brand building. You can make a better choice by understanding the pros and cons clearly.
What is Traditional Marketing?
Traditional marketing includes the promotional strategies used outside the internet, otherwise called offline marketing. It includes a number of marketing tactics that compromise direct sales, TV advertisements, radio, and email marketing, etc. Traditional methods heavily depend on print advertising such as brochures, magazines, billboards, and other printed promotional ways like convey their message to the buyer.
Pros of Traditional Marketing:
Old school marketing will come in handy even in this digital era. Traditional methods will help a lot when you are reaching out to a certain audience such as retiring CEOs; much of this demographic may not be interested in using social media channels or the internet. You can market directly to individuals which can be extremely effective. You will have the benefit of doing live demonstrations.
Cons of Traditional Marketing:
Few of the traditional marketing methods can be expensive such as buying advertisements for TV, radio, or print for small scale businesses. It can be very tricky to track the results when using traditional ways of marketing. It is very difficult to track real quantitative results. Using traditional ways sometimes requires outside help. This makes it more costly and more time-consuming.
What is Internet Marketing?
Internet marketing is the method of promoting your business or product online. Internet marketing isn’t only limited to online businesses, such as online blogging or an e-commerce business owner. Even a hotel and travel businesses can, and should, use the internet for marketing purposes. It uses strategies like a website, SEO, social media, pay-per-click advertising and more.
Pros of Internet Marketing:
Almost half the world’s population is online. This means you have a huge base of audience to reach out to. 95% of the brands’ tweet and are socially active on the various platforms of social media. Decisions can be made with the help of both real data and quantitative results. This will help in finding your target audience. Also, the data and results will be available in real-time which will help you build effective strategies faster.
Cons of Internet Marketing:
Internet marketing mainly depends on if your audience is online. If your market is not online, it’s not the most effective way of marketing. It demands your time. You need to create, edit, approve and publish content continuously. Pages must be maintained regularly. When you are on social media, it takes a lot of time and effort to get this all done. Sometimes it can be mismanaged with your brand identity. Internet and traditional marketing can work side by side too. Each has its own pros and cons, be wise enough to know when and how to use it for your business.
