Advertising vs. Web Marketing

Traditional marketing

To explain the concepts of traditional marketing and web marketing, I take this opportunity to tell a, let’s day, curious story. The other day coming back from work in the car, I noticed a beautiful and useful (more unique than rare) billboard on a centre of optics. I tried to memorize the website with the intent to go visit it as soon as I got home. Once home, I’d completely forgotten it. I tried to Google the topic of optics in Ticino and I got what I wanted, i.e. an appointment. The next day, again on the way home from work, I discovered that I had not visited the website of the billboard, but one of their competitors. The question that I asked myself was: what did they do wrong in terms of marketing? The answer is: probably nothing, but the competitors certainly have identified the most effective channel. This is just one example that happened to me, but it could apply to flyers, brochures, leaflets and other publicity (advertising). In addition to being difficult to quantify, it is necessary to see what is actually there to return on investment for this type of marketing. Typically, these types of data are printed to the customers we already know or people at random, without knowing if they have a real need.

Product-oriented Marketing

Trying to universalize the aforementioned example, it can be said that the billboards (like so many other types of traditional marketing) dwell more on the quality of the product (which is not in question, I hope that is clear!), Rather on the fact of whether the product is required or not. It is, in effect, an attempt to identify, by chance, people interested in the product that we offer. In addition, ​​a thorough study should be made on the timing of exposure because a wrong decision can affect the times the success of our marketing, because these types of advertising have a limited life.

Web Marketing

Going back to the billboard, it is stressed that the competitor has had the best interest of the client even if it had aroused the most billboard. Let’s say that being in the top positions of Google (or, in general, of all the search engines) favoured him because the user (in this case me) has the tendency and the claim to seek and find everything in the first page of results (SERPs). The question is: how did he become among the first?

Client-oriented Marketing

They simply did a statistical analysis of what a user is searching and developed their own website with a view to meet the needs of that user. It’s a diametrically opposed concept to traditional marketing; in the case of web marketing (or web marketing pay-per-click) starts with the customer’s needs, and then adapts the way we present our products to their needs. This allows you to focus on specific, targeted customers, who really need us. This web-focused marketing is also always, always available to customers 24 hours a day, 365 days per year.

Difference between traditional marketing (es. advertising) and web marketing

In the following table, you can better see the distinctions between traditional marketing and  web marketing.