You might have come across the terms; Marketing and Digital Marketing and left wondering if there exists any distinction between both terms.
In a way, they might be the same, but in some other way, they are pretty different.
While digital marketing centers on a specific form of marketing that involves online channels to promote businesses, marketing is broad in scope.
We can say that digital marketing is one of the many offsprings of marketing.
Irrespective of whether you’re a professional or a newbie seeking to gain insight into digital marketing or marketing, this article is all you need to gain valuable information.
I’ll walk you through to provide you with a comprehensive explanation of both concepts and how they can benefit your business or research alongside their pros and cons.
Also Read: Digital Marketing Meaning And Importance
Table of Contents
What Is Digital Marketing?
Marketing is a broad term that refers to a company’s efforts to promote its products or services and communicate with prospective buyers online and offline.
Marketing adopts the use of its four P’s in business which is:
- Product
- Price
- Place
- Promotion
To implement these four marketing components, businesses must develop unique strategies to infiltrate the market space.
Marketing includes brand development, advertising, sales, and distribution methods. It helps a business identify prospects, attract these prospects’ attention to their products or services and convert them into buyers.
Perhaps, you might have wondered what makes marketing a vital component of sales because effective marketing equals reaching customers and making sales conversions to attain business goals.
Marketing aims to reach and analyze consumers through conducting research and surveys to gather the necessary information regarding prospects and ask where, why, when, and how your customers intend to communicate with your business.
The competition rate amongst businesses increases at high speed because many businesses are striving to gain a top position in prospects’ minds, hence the need to adopt out-of-the-box strategies to win the heart of prospects by delivering high-quality messages that resonate with their buyer-persona.
Having known what marketing is, let’s study its pros.
Key Benefits Of Marketing
No business will employ marketing tactics if there are no profitable results to show, and if you’re yet to grasp the benefits of engaging in marketing, then let’s explore below:
Customer Attraction
The primary intention of marketing is to attract potential customers and convert them into paying customers by creating mutual bonds between them and the unique offer, all directed at increasing sales.
For every business that intends to attract possible buyers, it is essential to target channels where these buyers are, informing them of what the product or service in the promotion can do for them.
Increases Brand Awareness
It is undeniably true that the principal aim of any form of marketing is to enhance brand awareness, increase clientele and grow the business’s income margin.
A business will expand slowly if only a few individuals know about its existence.
Creating brand awareness is the primary step a business must take if it intends to infiltrate the minds of its target audience.
Registering a business in prospects’ minds takes a considerable amount of effort to promote brand cognizance.
Effectively imprinting a business on a prospect’s mind can be done through digital communication, including display ads, social media posts, email marketing, and content marketing, amongst other forms of online communication, to reach internet users.
Likewise, connecting with the population of people who are not active on the internet happens through traditional media, involving radio, television, magazine, newspapers, etcetera, to market products and services.
Brand Royalty
Brand loyalty is a long-term commitment between a customer and a brand with its products, regardless of competitor actions or product changes.
Consumer brand loyalty manifests itself in various ways, including product purchases and good word-of-mouth recommendations.
When consumers have a level of loyalty to a brand, it will take much effort to shift their gaze to a similar competitor.
However, this doesn’t imply that businesses should become too confident when they gain customer loyalty because the competition in the marketplace will keep on increasing to win over prospects.
Disadvantages Of Marketing
Marketing in all its glory and capacity to transform a start-up into a multi-million conglomerate has its downsides. Below are the cons of marketing:
Cost-Effective
Marketing in its diverse forms requires money. Organic means of attracting prospects can also require expenditures.
Marketing is expensive, and without proper market research before setting off any marketing campaign, you may waste money because you did not gather the right amount of information.
It would be a severe and expensive mistake to waste marketing efforts by targeting the wrong audience.
Therefore, it is critical to run a preliminary study and reduce costs to a minimum. Choosing the best marketing plan, and developing and implementing marketing campaigns appropriately is crucial.
Marketing campaigns ought to run consistently to imprint the offer of a business into the minds of potential buyers.
It could take some time before prospects become familiar with the value of a product enough to get them to buy, so having to run campaigns over time attracts more cost.
Wrong Consumer Model
Identifying the right buyer personas and incorporating that information into your marketing strategy can be a difficult task when drafting a plan that will appeal to your customers in a relevant and appropriate way.
It requires extensive research, analytical thinking, creativity, and understanding of prospects.
Some brands assume they know their target market without discovering that not everything in their marketing approach fits their buyer persona.
A solution to this problem is having a well-defined plan and considering every aspect of one’s marketing strategy.
Creating a consumer model and considering whether your customer is genuinely interested in it and working towards delivering your prospects’ needs and desires is vital.
Failure To Adapt To Trends
The inability to evolve with the change in times for businesses that employ traditional marketing patterns is an issue because it is easy to stick to a routine which makes it challenging to adapt to the constantly changing business scene.
Recognizing that marketing is synonymous with constant change is half of the solution, then employing the right amount of action to evolve with recent trends seals the deal.
Moving further, let’s dive into digital marketing to gain in-depth insight into the concept alongside its pros and cons:
What Is Digital Marketing?
With the evolution in technology, the rate at which internet users have hit the sky has encouraged businesses to secure a space for themselves online, unlike in the past decade.
People spend more hours on the internet with little or no attention paid to traditional media, and because of this, most advertisements now happen online.
Businesses have sought new ways to reach their prospects easier and faster with evolving trends.
That is where the use of the internet for brand awareness came into existence, which explains the basics of digital marketing.
Digital marketing is a sub-area of marketing that includes all kinds of marketing strategies that involve using digital channels such as websites, social media, and emails, amongst others, as tools for business growth.
Any form of marketing that runs on a digital mode of communication to attract, convert and retain customers is digital marketing.
It is otherwise called internet marketing, so when you see the two terms used interchangeably, you don’t have to get confused.
Digital Marketing has become the core of any marketing strategy that brands seeking to connect with customers online and reach a broader range of prospects shouldn’t overlook.
You can attest to the undeniable truth that reaching customers online has proven easy and effective through digital marketing, doing business better than any other form of marketing.
Before digital marketing, there was barely any mutual mode of contact with possible buyers. The inception of digital marketing has made it seem likely to grow a mutual connection with potential buyers.
Other Things You Should Know About Digital Marketing
Being on the internet is like what food is to humans and seeing how one can easily reach prospects through the internet, businesses adopt the means of online marketing to attract customers.
Through Digital Marketing, companies have expanded their businesses online and employed digital marketing channels like search engine optimization, social media marketing, email marketing, and search engine marketing, amongst others, to infiltrate the marketplace.
All these tactics work together to ensure that businesses effectively connect with their potential customers, hence the need to adopt these tools to increase brand awareness.
You can agree that several evolving businesses have an online presence, with business accounts on different social media platforms to pass their brand message to prospects on these distinct platforms.
They also employ websites and digital ads to promote their products/services.
It may have caught your attention that sometimes, to know more about a brand and gain insight into their offers, you visit their website or social media pages to digest every necessary information you need.
That’s the importance of being online as a business.
Succeeding in digital marketing is not just about being on the internet and capturing attention.
It involves adopting unique and creative strategies with a mixture of uncommon marketing tactics that work best for a specific kind of business and can easily resonate with prospective customers.
Structured marketing plans are the core of digital marketing.
Marketers utilize digital marketing tactics such as content marketing to plan their digital marketing initiatives and get beneficial outcomes.
Digital marketing tactics are marketing actions that assist marketers in achieving their marketing objectives through paid, organic, and personal media, which are all examples of digital marketing channels.
A business that wants to get noticed online not only reaches possible customers organically but employs inorganic methods to gain a wider reach.
Now, let’s delve further into the key pros and cons.
Benefits Of Digital Marketing
The benefits of digital marketing provide an accurate case study of the market and the product via the Internet; some of the most important benefits are as follows:
Increased Engagement And Accessibility
Digital Marketing increases customer engagement by delivering a brand message, attracting leads, and converting them into paying customers. It has also increased the accessibility of customers to a brand.
Once you make posts or run ads, you can quickly discover the number of views your ads have generated, as well as leave mediums for individuals to drop comments in the case of social media ads.
Using the comment section, you can easily engage your potential buyers in conversations and can easily draw helpful information to input into your offer.
Customers can drop their reviews and make recommendations to other possible prospects.
Business growth becomes easy as an increased number of people become familiar with the brand from constantly seeing them online, increasing the chances of sales.
Increased Ability to Track And Measure Results
Consumer decisions were not easy to track before digital marketing. With the development in trends, you can now quickly analyze the source of traffic, where prospects drop, and when they are making a purchase.
That empowers businesses to communicate their message effectively.
Internet marketing makes it possible to analyze steps taken by a potential buyer. Using the Internet marketing tools, you’re able to measure:
- Click-through rates
- Engagement rates
- Cost per click
- Cost per action, etc.
Larger Audience
Online marketing aids business expansion. It provides a platform for reaching many people.
Businesses have gone global, enabling upcoming firms to equally compete with vast and established businesses that dominate the commercial industry.
Quite a considerable percentage of people use the internet. Imagine how much your business can grow if you reach at least 1% of the entire population.
The internet is essential if a business must expand globally. Businesses have to utilize every online platform to reach different people wherever they might be in the online space.
Easy Conversion
Digital Marketing enables prospects to take action immediately after seeing your offer. Using digital marketing, they can conveniently click a link and progress directly down the sales funnel.
Nevertheless, suppose prospects don’t make a purchase right away. In that case, there’s a tendency for them to make a purchase later, and you can efficiently run them through a follow-up procedure to keep track and eventually turn them into willing buyers.
We’ve discussed the benefits of digital marketing, and I guess you know that there’s a downside to digital marketing. Still, I’ll favor exposing a few disadvantages of digital.
Disadvantages Of Digital Marketing
Below, we examine a few of the many disadvantages of digital marketing. However, it is essential to know that the disadvantages of digital marketing cannot outweigh the benefits. Let’s dive in:
Increased Competition
With every passing day, businesses strive to gain relevance online, mapping out creative strategies to beat the high level of competition amongst similar brands.
Here’s a relatable example of how tough the market competition is. I’m writing to you now, exposing relevant information about digital marketing to you.
If I cannot give you adequate knowledge at a commendable level, I could quickly lose you to another source of knowledge, but ta-da, we cannot be separated.
Businesses are meant to plan marketing campaigns strategically to capture the potential customer’s interest while proffering solutions to their problems.
Issues Of Security
As a digital marketer, the most important thing to take seriously is security because a minor breach can drag your efforts in the mud.
Using encryption solutions like VPN to secure your network is very necessary. Your website security and privacy should be taken into consideration when building an online website.
Businesses should protect customer data to prevent any form of a data breach that can be detrimental to business.
Technological Dependence
Digital marketing operates only on electronic channels of communication, implying that without the internet, digital marketing cannot be possible.
Online marketing depends on technology which implies that a hack of the site or social media pages would affect the business.
Situations may come up where links might not be accessible, difficulty in loading websites, and the inability to post content due to network issues, which delays marketing efforts.
These limitations can result in prospects losing patience and seeking similar alternatives.
This situation shouldn’t sound alien to you because I believe that at one point, you might have had difficulty accessing a site, then sought another alternative.
Conclusion
The primary motive of any business is to make sales. There’s the need to maximize efforts and reach a wider audience to achieve this.
The process businesses employ to promote themselves and achieve their business goals is called marketing.
Marketing offers a variety of practical techniques that you should employ to expand your organization’s reach, resulting in brand growth and recognition.
By entirely using the benefits of online marketing through content marketing, social media posts, email marketing, and others, you can build a strong lead-generation funnel that will propel your company to growth, higher profitability, and success.
You see why maximizing the digital world with an online presence is essential to building a brand and delivering an excellent customer experience that attracts more leads with an effective digital strategy.