For a lot of business owners, when it comes to choosing the best methods for marketing their business it can be difficult to know what the best methods are. This can be down to finding what fits within your budget or what you should do for the type of business you own. In 2016, the main types of marketing can be split up into two techniques – digital and traditional.  With traditional marketing, the most common techniques are advertisements on newspapers, magazines, television, radio, cinema, direct marketing (door-to-door) and billboards. The other side, digital marketing, includes techniques which are usually reliant on the existence of the internet – with the main forms of digital marketing being seen with things such as search engine marketing, advertising on websites and social media marketing. This article further analyses both of these techniques and helps to describe which technique is best for businesses wanting to market their business.

One of the key benefits of traditional marketing comes with the fact that it is very good for when a business wants to make sure that they can perfectly mould their message and reach a wide range of potential customers. With television, newspaper and radio too they can make sure that the adverts can reach people who live within a specific area too. These can then be teamed with the business posting flyers to people within the local area which follow the same theme as the adverts.

This goes along with one of the biggest and best aspect of traditional marketing, which is the fact that it allows the business to give the customer a physical item which they can keep and make use of. However, businesses should be slightly wary with how this is done, because when people are given or posted flyers in this modern age – they often take one look at it and then it is thrown away without a second thought given to it. Therefore, a great alternative can be to use lanyards, keyrings or stickers as these can still be branded and the customer is more likely to make use of the item and it will be kept – meaning the marketing will have more of an effect.

Digital marketing is a technique which is renowned for the fact it allows businesses to tailor their advertising campaign to specific demographics, which means they can attempt to get their message across to the exact set of people they want to. Also in most cases, it is very cheap – and at times free – to post content on the internet, which means that businesses are able to get a great ROI on their marketing budget. This can be demonstrated with what is arguably the most popular form of digital marketing: social media, as this is undoubtedly one of the most cost-effective marketing tools available to any business. On top of this, social media allows for two-communication between the business and the customer – which means that businesses can receive instant feedback on their digital marketing campaign. Another aspect is search engine optimization (SEO) which – when done well – allows your company to show up higher on Google, which is, of course, vital for any business which is web-based.

There is essentially no simple answer to this question, which is down to the fact that both techniques have their downsides too. For instance, with the majority of the traditional marketing techniques, it can sometimes be difficult for a business to track the progress of their campaigns to see what exact impact they had in increasing inquiries or sales for the business. One of the downsides with digital marketing comes with the fact that the instant feedback can actually give the customers a lot of power, and this has been a downfall for a lot of businesses – particularly on social media – as any comments can be seen, liked and shared straight away.

Therefore, the main recommendation given to try and bring together the positives and overcome the negatives would be to try and integrate both of the marketing techniques when creating a marketing campaign. This can be put into practice by having a television advert which has a follow-up YouTube advert, and the traditional direct marketing techniques can be followed up with some digital marketing techniques. This will ensure all bases are covered should one of the methods fail.

—Ryan Duffy