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Will Digital Marketing Ever Replace Traditional Marketing in 2021 or the Future?
Before the internet, how were you able to find things that you need? For instance, if you’re looking for a car repair shop because you need to change your oil, how were you able to find the mechanic or the repair shop you worked with? Traditional marketing had its fuel for years, but ever since the internet, it’s slowly replacing it. For many years, a lot of digital marketing fanatics are insisting on the fact that digital marketing has already replaced traditional marketing – but is it true?
What grounds can digital marketing have to prove that it has replaced traditional marketing? And would the future dictate the kind of efficiency and effectiveness digital marketing has over the age-old traditional marketing? Before we delve into that deeper, let us first know the usual traditional marketing strategies and techniques that companies and businesses used before they had a trial with digital marketing.
From the term alone, traditional marketing is the type and the kind of marketing that businesses have been using before they saw businesses they needed on a 7-inch smartphone. These traditional marketing procedures and strategies include:
- Direct Mail or Postcards
- Printed Advertising (Flyers and Newspapers)
- Magazines
- Books
- Radio and Television (TV Advertising)
- Referrals
As you may have noticed, these are physical items and objects wherein your business could be written down. To give you a concrete example, if you have a salon and you’re looking to market your services, you’ll have it printed on a magazine or a postcard for example.
If you need to market the new soap you have formulated, you can have it on TV commercials and place it in a slot when a lot of people are watching. The old, classic and traditional marketing tactics were surely something that helped our parents and our grandparents back in the day. They even searched for jobs at the back of magazines to see job listings of companies and businesses that are looking for workers and employees!
It’s not a lot, but it’s something that you can consider.
Going on to the next part of this post, digital marketing is the type of marketing where no physical things or objects are involved. These include email marketing, websites, content, paid advertising, videos, and the like. The only difference that they have is that digital marketing is something that you can actually access if you use the internet.
The most common examples of it would be:
- Social Media Marketing
- Website and Content Optimization
- Affiliate Marketing
- Email Marketing
- Search Engine Optimization
- And Many More
One common example that people would find easy to understand about digital marketing is if a company or a business has a website. If they do, they can easily create content about their business or their product; if they’re a steel company, they can post pictures about the steel they produce and manufacture, about the products that can be created using their steel, etc.
Another is through affiliate marketing. Companies can find blogs or social media influencers that can help them in widening the reach of their brand. They can use the wide reach of these channels to tell people about the business they’re doing. But, it is almost important that the influencer or the blog that you’ll approach would somehow be closely related, or even directly related to your business. It would look weird to have an advertisement for a dental clinic to a blog that talks about marriages and counseling.
Will Digital Marketing Replace Traditional Marketing?
The answer to this question is yes and no. Digital marketing has proven to be the most effective type of marketing and it allows people and businesses from other places to know about your services and your products fast and urgently. You can pay for advertisements and market to people from other countries and regions; you can let people know about your business from all different age ranges and not have a problem with it.
Therefore, we can say that it can overtake the usual and traditional means of marketing a hundredfold. But, there are just some instances where traditional marketing is better than digital marketing. These would include instances where older people are involved, let’s say, for example, your grandfather that reads the newspaper every single day. Say, he’s looking for a car rental for that particular day and he saw an ad in the newspaper.
Even if you’re reaching dozens of people, there’s no guarantee that they’ll rent, right? But with your grandpa, he found the ad on the back of the newspaper and immediately phoned the company in.
Billboards and Other Forms of Traditional Marketing
Another good example is with billboards. To let you know, billboards are a part of traditional marketing. Why did we use billboards as an example? Well, billboards are actually one of the most effective forms of marketing; in some angles, it beats digital marketing. Americans, on average, spend a total of 293 hours in their cars in their lifetime; that’s a staggering 17,600 minutes inside their car, driving. In that figure, let’s say every drive they take, they see a billboard, that’s a reach of more than 2,000 for that particular person for a specific advertisement on a billboard.
In this context, traditional marketing beats digital marketing; even if a certain person doesn’t want to see the ad, they’ll be able to. Add the fact that the sizes of billboards aren’t a joke; they’re huge, big, and they can clearly be seen. Those are the kinds of instances that can’t be erased. There would be situations that would arise in that sense and that’s something digital marketing can never solve.
Therefore, it is safe to say that digital marketing will take over and will replace traditional marketing in the sense that it’ll be applicable to a whole wide range of people, businesses, and networks. But, the little things of accessibility and ease-of-usage would always remain on traditional marketing’s side.
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