Marketing is a very important function of any business process. The ultimate goal of marketing is to increase awareness about the brand, services and to sell more services and products to more customers and to make more money. Without effective marketing a good business can lose market share and can possibly shut down.
Marketing involves following topics
-
- Branding – Brand marketing conveys the basis of the business and its specific intentions to serve the customers. It creates awareness that such business exists to serve the customer’s needs
-
- Communicating services and Products – This aspect deals with spreading awareness of the services and products a business has to offer to its customers. The customers become aware of those and then start evaluating them for fitment to their needs.
-
- Promotions – This aspect of marketing deals with winning the customers by encouraging, motivating, enticing the customers to buy the services or products. It deals with customer’s emotions and influences them in its favour. This tries to tell the customers how their product or service is the right fit for the customers needs as compared to any other product or service
What is Traditional Marketing?
Traditional marketing evolved before the internet was in place. It relies more on the physical objects, presenting services in presence of customers or advertising in physical formats.
These formats include
-
- Banners, Boards – The shops display their name, logo, taglines and services. The banners can display advertisements and details of the services and products.
-
- Newspaper advertisements, ads on Electricity bills, Telephone bills, Magazines advertisements, advertisements at airports, bus,railway station, in trains, on buses are used as mediums to attract customers
-
- Branded gift items, shopping bags, diaries, calendars, pens, packaging boxes, on products themselves are used for brand promotions
-
- Leaflets, pamphlets, visiting cards are printed and circulated at important places where the customer footfall is more. This can reach a wider set of audience
-
- Workshops, conferences, Events, Kiosks at important places where you present directly to the customers
-
- Sponsorship of events like IPL, player, brand enables the sponsor to get excluding rights of promotions and display advertisements, branded material which the players wear during the sports events
-
- Word of mouth, MLM, Network marketing,door to door selling – To reach a wider audience these methods or techniques help the businesses to build scale
-
- Cold-calling, Telesales, SMS – These are techniques where business use telephone to reach out to customers situated in a wider geography to increase the reach
-
- selling at petrol pumps, food malls by giving demos, giving sample products for free, giving free sample along with main product purchased
What is Digital Marketing?
Digital Marketing has disrupted the Traditional marketing techniques. This was made possible by the widespread use of the internet. It involves use of digital tools for branding, advertising and promotions. These include
-
- Digital ecosystem – This deals with building an integrated set of digital processes across the available digital platforms leveraging the techniques to ensure acquisition, nurturing and servicing the customers. Following points explain various aspects of the ecosystem.
-
- Websites help businesses showcase their business online and users access the information online using the internet using mobile phones, tabs, laptops, PCs.The website talks about various services and products by effectively using images, videos. It also conveys the business mission, vision.
-
- Blogs – This is leverage to bring out domain knowledge, and expertise of the business and helps users to get relevant information to build trust in the business. It also guides the users for various available options and how to select them or how to use them in various situations.
-
- Content marketing – Youtube, Instagram, Twitter- There are various platforms available for marketing the services and products in the digital world. Youtube has become a very important medium for delivering content and to reach a very wide set of audience. The subscription feature of the youtube enables creation of alerts when any new content is delivered
-
- Social Media Marketing – Business can regularly post content in audio, video and text formats to talk more about products and services
-
- Messaging – Whatsapp, emails – These help out to reach out to a wider and targeted audience. There are techniques were a bulk distribution of these can be done to save on the efforts
-
- Branding – Logos, color scheme help to build the branding aspects of the business
-
- Search Engine optimization – These techniques can be used to display relevant information and to reach out the targeted customer based on their intent of any query
-
- Leveraging advertisement tools like Google ads, facebook ads – These tools help to do rule based identification of targeted customers and reaching out to them . It helps in minimising and effectively using the advertising budget.
-
- Building Online communities – This aspect leverages facebook,telegram, whatsapp to build groups where customers can come together and exchange their ideas, views, requirements. It increases the stickiness of the business
Advantages and Disadvantages
| Traditional Marketing | Digital Marketing |
| Cost involved is higher, needs bigger setups to create and distribute, install | Costs involved are relatively less, does not require bigger setup, distribution is easy |
| Changes/Updates becomes difficult, costly | Changes and updates are easier and cost effective |
| Time to market is higher | Time to market is fast |
| Scaling is difficult, Takes more efforts to reach wider, global audience | Scaling is easy, Wider reach, less efforts, |
| Difficult to track customers and their activity | Easier to tack customers and their activity |
| Results in lot of wastage of material and can have adverse impact on environment e.g. plastic bags, paint, banner material etc | It does not have such wastage and does not have harmful effect on environment |
| Reaching out to targeted set of customers becomes difficult and can take more efforts that involves physical interaction with customers | Reaching out to targeted customers is easy due to targeted advertisements, Search engine optimization etc. |
| The level of Trust is better in Traditional marketing | The level of trust needs to be managed from time to time by keeping the customers engaged |
Conclusion:
The effectiveness of digital marketing is far superior than traditional marketing. It helps in quick setup of the infrastructure, quick go to market of the information, services and products. It enables wider reach and business can scale very fast and become national and global. Hence Digital Marketing has become an integral part of all modern business strategies.