5 Advantages of Online Marketing Over Traditional Marketing

Marketing is transforming at a rapid pace. There is a sudden surge in digital marketing. But why is it happening? What advantages online marketing has over traditional?

As per a study done by CMR and Vivo, average screen time in countries like India has increased by 25%. Also, on average, an individual spends more than five hours on the phone and desktops. Thus, this makes every business do things to gauge the attention of these users on the screen.

But, this is just a part of the digital boom that we are witnessing. There are aspects of digital marketing that helps a company to showcase its product to the right user at the right place and at the right time. These aspects or advantages are what we will discuss.

So, here are five dimensions of online/digital marketing that give it an upper edge over traditional marketing.

1. Facility to collect and analyse customer data

Traditional modes like billboards, brochures, pamphlets etc. are the most common medium of marketing. Though, they do play a part in a customers journey in the initial stages like awareness; they can’t tell whether your intended customers saw them or not. This is where digital marketing takes the upper hand.

One of the major advantages that boomed online marketing is the facility to collect and analyse customer data. With your website and social media page, you can gain valuable information about people visiting it. Once this data is collected, you can just segregate it to know the demographics, region, and behaviour.

Tools like Google Analytics helps to know these important parameters on the traffic that comes on your website. Also, most social media platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, gives you the ability to know the background of your followers.

So, how this advantage of collecting and analysing data helps a company or an internet marketer? Well, this advantage brings with it the other major advantage, which is, targeted ads.

2. Ability to target ads as per consumer’s buying journey and background. 

a) Consumer’s buying journey

While persuading prospects to become paying consumers, they go through four stages:

1. Awareness

2. Conversion

3. Purchase

4. Delight.

Online marketing has the potential to create ads as per each stage. When a new consumer interacts on the website or engages with social accounts (awareness stage), tracking tools like Facebook Pixel facilitates categorizing your engaged users with the respective stage.

Once categorized, you get the idea of the number of users on each consumer funnel stage. This helps you in targeting and creating ad copies for those particular stages making the whole marketing more personalized and effective.

b) Consumer background

Suppose you are a marketer of a product based company and have products catering needs of people of different age groups and gender. Under such a scenario, it is very beneficial if you have the tools to show ads of products to the respective age group.

Online marketing helps you in this case. Whether it’s search engine marketing or social media marketing, every channel gives you the power to target those users and show customized ad copies. This greatly improves your conversion rate and unnecessary spending to a non-target group.

3. Know the critical points of the buyer journey

Before going further let clear certain terms to help you understand the following content better. Here are certain metrics that are common in online marketing: 1. impressions 2. CTR 3. Bounce rate.

An impression is something that a user sees while surfing the internet with/without interacting with an ad or content. Suppose you see an image ad on a website while scrolling that is considered an impression. CTR (click-through rate) is the number of clicks per impression, and bounce rate is leaving a website quickly after visiting a website without an activity.

So, when you have these metrics, you get to know the critical points of the buyer journey where a potential user make a decision. Like, if your advertising has high impressions but low CTR, it can be concluded that there is a problem with the advertising content.

The data from these metrics help you pinpoint problems in your marketing campaign and give you a path to make improvements. This ability to make data-driven changes is one of the major advantages of online marketing.

4. Organic exposure to millions of potential customers

Internet is known for viral content, and it works wonders for companies to get a high number of leads if their content goes viral. One of the most famous and viral online PR campaigns was of VOLVO named ‘Interception’. The campaign created 230 million impressions, with the highest sales of a car in February of that year.

If you create content that sparks the mind of the internet audience, then the social shares and talks about it on the internet can bring a huge amount of prospective leads for which you don’t pay.

Though, creating virality of content depends on the masses. You have to make sure to keep relevance between content and company objective to leverage it to the full.

5. Online marketing helps you in building a personal relationship with customers

In traditional marketing, it becomes hard to be in direct contact with your customers and know their genuine concerns. But, through social media channels, it becomes easier for companies to find the customers concerns in the social mentions. If a company takes them seriously and works swiftly to resolve the issue, it creates a good impression in front of a large userbase and increases brand loyalty.

Also, many brands focus on creating in-depth content, whitepapers, and data analytics which is posted in their blogs. This helps in bringing organic traffic from search engines and building a reader base. Some of these readers find a connection with your brand and become permanent customers.

Online marketing has tons of benefits, and it is taking marketing to the next level. So, for a business, it is inevitable to go online for marketing. What a business should remember is relevance, trust, and giving what is claimed are key to becoming successful in the online world.