Traditional Marketing vs Digital Marketing: What Fits?

Throughout university (or college) my business professors worked hard to teach us the fundamentals of marketing. My classmates and I would groan as we read about billboards, radio, television ads, or as it was labeled in our textbooks, ‘traditional marketing.’

“They’re outdated,” we would say. “What’s the point of learning those when digital marketing is the new thing?”

And I have to admit, I felt like that for a long time. For much of my professional career up to this point I thought digital marketing was going to be the new way of doing things and traditional marketing was on its way out.

This new form of marketing is what drove me to get into marketing in the first place, however, I've found that traditional marketing still plays a crucial role-- much more than I was expecting.

I started digging deeper to understand what services and platforms would fit within the categories of traditional and digital marketing. So, in this article, I want to take the time to briefly define terms and provide a list of examples of platforms and strategies that are typically associated with either the traditional or digital realm.

Traditional Marketing

First, let’s define traditional marketing. Marketing software company, Hubspot, defines it as, “any type of marketing that isn't online.”

While this is short and to the point, I wanted to get another perspective. Feedough, an online resource dedicated to entrepreneurship, expands the definition to identify traditional marketing as, “the process of fulfilling the target audience’s needs using offline channels.”

Between all the resources I read, at it’s core, traditional marketing occurs offline, directed toward a local audience, and direct results are often difficult to measure.

Some examples of traditional marketing include:

• Broadcasting - Television or radio commercials

• Print - Newspaper or magazine ads

• Direct Mail - Directly mailed postcards, coupons, and informational packets

• Outdoor marketing/sponsorships - Billboards and fliers and arial banners

• One-to-One Marketing - Telephone calls and text notifications

• Referral Marketing - When the organization asks its employees and customers to recommend their products and services to their friends and family or neighbors

• Events - Conferences, meetups, and workshops

• Guerilla campaigns - Anything that is usually, tactile, and can be experienced in person. Typically B2C, but can be B2B as well if done right. Can cause a media storm

Digital Marketing

Secondly, I wanted to define digital marketing. 

According to the financial media website Investopedia, digital marketing is defined as “the use of digital channels to market products and services in order to reach consumers.” In my opinion, this definition was sufficient for what I wanted to know about digital marketing. 

After all of my reading, the main points I would want to highlight about digital marketing are that it is strictly internet-based, reaches a global audience, and the results of digital campaigns can typically be directly measured.

Here are a few examples of digital marketing efforts and their definitions:

• Search Engine Optimization (SEO) - The process of maximizing the number of visits to a website by ensuring the site appears high on the list of results returned by a search engine.

• Search Engine Marketing (SEM) - A digital marketing strategy used to increase the visibility of a website in search engine results pages (SERPs).

• Pay-Per-Click (PPC) - A model of internet marketing in which advertisers pay a fee each time one of their ads is clicked.

• Social Media Marketing (SMM) - The use of social media platforms to interact with customers to build brands, increase sales, and drive website traffic.

• Content Marketing - It helps advertise in the form of storytelling to the users. Providing valuable content that people want to see and informing them about its existence. This can include blogs, podcasts, webinars, online workshops, and more.

• Email Marketing - A direct marketing channel that lets businesses share new products, sales, and updates with customers on their contact list.

• Influencer Marketing - A strategy that leverages the existing audiences of influencers to increase the reach of a brand. This can also drive sales through affiliate marketing links.

• Mobile - Provides advertisements on smartphones, laptops, and tablets for the target audience.

The digital realm is what I grew up consuming, so it was all very familiar to me. Digging into the traditional side really reminded me of the power that these time-tested strategies have.

I’m curious to dig into traditional marketing more so if there is a specific topic or area of traditional that you’d like me to explore, send me an email at nathaniel@orangesliceak.com and we can start our conversation there!