Traditional vs. Digital Marketing: How to Choose the Right One for Your Business?

Traditional and digital marketing both have very different goals and prerequisites. Not sure which marketing strategy to adopt to grow your business? This article will shed some light on the different options, in terms of budget and desired results.

Traditional marketing aims to sell a product or service through advertising in traditional media: press, radio, television, billboards, etc. We have all seen this type of advertising, but how effective is it and what are the costs? Let’s take the example of a billboard on the highway: it is a good strategy if you have a high budget, but especially a very large target audience. In this context, it will be very effective to increase your brand awareness. However, the average cost of a billboard on a highway across the island of Montreal is $18,000 per month, not including production costs which represent about $5,000 (Les Affaires).

Moreover, you will not be able to define your audience precisely since these billboards will be seen by anyone who drives by. On the other hand, with magazines and newspapers, you can target the audience of the magazine in question, but the costs are not to be neglected either: between $1,500 and $20,000 depending on the size of your ad in magazines with a large circulation. In terms of results analysis, if you have a visibility campaign running for a month and only based on a traditional form of marketing, it will be possible to measure its impact, for example, traffic on your website. However, when you mix several types of media, which is most common, it will be difficult to measure which channel worked best.

Digital marketing offers many advantages traditional marketing does not.

Indeed, its goal is to use digital media such as social networks and websites to promote and sell products effectively. The first significant advantage of this type of marketing is its cost: at Middle, a marketing campaign on Facebook costs $550, plus your ad spent, for a month. This way, you can launch numerous Facebook campaigns for the same budget as a single billboard and then adjust your advertising budget to what works best. The flexibility and low cost of social media advertising make it an extremely cost-effective proposition that is suitable for all budgets.

You will also be able to define your audience in detail, analyze your results, increase your interaction rate and constantly improve. At Middle, we use Google’s Data Studio tool to make automatic reports available to our clients at any time. With digital marketing, you can reach your predefined goals with a reduced budget.

However, for both digital marketing and traditional marketing, we advise you not to do it 100% by yourself, but rather to call on professionals. Certainly, marketing platforms offer online training and tutorials, but the constant updating of platforms and tools makes their use more complex than one might think. This is why we recommend you to think of a long-term strategy based on an annual marketing budget and to deal with professionals to create this strategy and to implement it.

Don’t hesitate, and make an appointment with us to discuss the positive impact digital marketing could have on your business!

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