Traditional advertising refers to promoting the product or service by using offline channels like television, radio, newspapers etc. On the contrary Digital advertising refers to the use of the Internet to promote a product or service. Let us discuss each one in detail.
TRADITIONAL ADVERTISING AND ITS BENEFITS
Traditional advertising is a conventional medium of advertising that uses various offline channels to promote a product or service. The main components of traditional advertising are Print, Broadcast, Direct Mail, Telephone and Outdoor. The print component includes newspapers and magazines while the broadcast component involves television and radio. Direct Mail is further divided into catalogues, postcards etc. Telemarketing and SMS marketing are also forms of traditional advertising. Outdoor component of traditional advertising includes billboards, hoardings, posters etc.
Traditional advertising mainly relies on the 4 P's of marketing- Product, Price, Place and Promotion. Through traditional advertising, it becomes relatively easy to reach the local audience. Many people still do not use the internet, hence, to reach that group of customers, traditional advertising is the best method. It does not involve any complexities, therefore, it is easy to understand as well. There is no confusion in the minds of the customer. Another advantage of traditional advertising is that customers retain the hard copies of advertising materials like magazines which they go through repeatedly. In addition traditional marketing is much more interactive in nature as compared to digital marketing.
DRAWBACKS OF TRADITIONAL ADVERTISING
One of the main drawbacks of traditional advertising is that it involves huge costs. If you publish an ad in a newspaper, it will be effective only if it is seen by your potential customer on the day it is published. If you wish to reach your customers again, you will have publish a new ad and incur the huge cost again. Traditional advertising is not a sort of one time investment. You need to keep on spending huge amounts of money to advertise your product or service.Through traditional advertising, there is negligible scope of customizing your advertisements for a specific group of customers. Moreover, the results of traditional advertising cannot be easily measured and controlled. Hence, it becomes a troublesome task to compute the Return On Investment in Traditional Advertising.
DIGITAL ADVERTISING AND ITS BENEFITS
Digital Advertising helps a business to reach a wide range of customers. In addition, digital advertising is very cost effective as compared to traditional advertising. You can pay per click and at the same time reach your target customers as well. Another benefit of digital advertising is that people spend a lot of their time online which makes it easy to reach them. The future scope of digital advertising is also immense as the role of internet is going to increase exponentially with the passage of time. Measuring the effectiveness of digital advertising is much easier. You can check the number of people who clicked on your ad and for how long they stayed on your website. In this way, you can figure out what is going wrong in your advertising strategies and take appropriate corrective action.
DRAWBACKS OF DIGITAL ADVERTISING
Digital advertising has certain drawbacks as well. For instance, the negative feedback given by unsatisfied customers are visible to the public. This has a negative impact on the future sales of the product. Another drawback of digital advertising is that it is comparatively less interactive. Many people still use internet rarely or do not use it at all, hence, you cannot reach such customers through digital advertising. There are also certain security and privacy issues associated with digital advertising. When you visit a website, it demands certain permissions to access your data, hence, your privacy is at risk in such cases.
