Description: As digital marketing becomes more ubiquitous across the board, many in the industry are asking the question – should traditional marketing be ignored? We discuss this question and the future of traditional marketing.
Digital Marketing
The advantages of digital marketing over traditional forms of promotion and outreach have been well documented in the past few years. As digital marketing has become more and more popular, brands and companies have begun optimizing their investment in marketing to lay greater emphasis on digital marketing as compared to traditional.
The switch to digital marketing has been the product of a number of factors coming together. While the merits of digital marketing itself are highly lucrative, the loss of trust and interest in traditional advertising amongst the general public has been a major contributing factor in the gradual decline of traditional marketing.
This struggle between digital and traditional marketing has not been hidden from those in the industry. From marketing professionals in MNCs to a student at a digital marketing course in Delhi, everyone is watching the battle of attrition between digital and traditional marketing.
The debate between traditional and digital marketing is further raising questions about whether the former is even needed. As digital technology becomes more widespread, is the incentive to invest in tradition marketing waning? In this article, we discuss this question of whether traditional marketing should be put aside for a complete focus in digital marketing,
Do check: Guide to Local Digital Marketing
The Argument for Ignoring Traditional Marketing
Those who feel traditional marketing should be completely ignored base their argument in the increased penetration of internet and digital devices across the country.
As more and more people get access to digital devices and start spending more time online than ever before, it is obvious for digital marketing to usurp traditional advertising. The added benefits of using digital marketing further improve the argument for a complete subsiding of traditional marketing.
The relative inefficiency of traditional marketing plays a large role in making marketers move increasingly towards digital. While digital marketing offers marketers who a whole set of analytics tuned to understand the behavior of the target audience, traditional marketing is more abstract and often doesn’t offer concrete data points which leads to misleading conclusions.
These reasons and many others cause traditional marketing to be seen as an antiquated practice which doesn’t hold a candle to the likes of digital marketing. At this point, it is important to understand the need for brands to occupy space in the market.
Why Complete Ignorance of Traditional Marketing is Counter-Productive?
Brands and companies who have the resources to use traditional marketing are still not leaving the practice completely. It is important in general to understand the importance of all kinds of spaces in the market.
For example, consider you run a global sports apparel brand. After a lot of thinking, you decide to shift to digital marketing and leave traditional advertising aside. You jump into digital marketing, where you battle it out with your competitors for digital dominance.
While seeing you abandon traditional marketing and give up tonnes of advertising space, your main competitor buys up all this space. Now your competitor controls the marketing narrative in traditional marketing. Additionally, the competing brand also stands its ground in digital marketing. By leaving digital marketing, you gave up the traditional marketing ground to a competitor and could not quickly make up the gains in digital.
This example runs similar to many top brands in the world that abandoned traditional marketing and came back eventually. Giving up an entire branch of marketing is suicide, and something no brand should ever do.
Traditional and digital marketing should ideally be seen as two channels for outreach and promotion. While one may be more efficient than the other at the moment, giving up either is a recipe for disaster.
