Categories of marketing

Traditional marketing vs non-traditional AKA digital marketing is the new dilemma that businesses who are trying to develop their marketing strategies face. They should decide whether to use traditional marketing like TV ads, radio, printed ads, billboards, or digital marketing like social media marketing website SEO, Google ads, SEM, etc.

Categories of marketing can be broadly classified into consumer marketing and business-to-business (B2B) marketing. Consumer marketing focuses on targeting individual consumers and promoting products or services directly to them, while B2B marketing involves marketing products or services to other businesses or organizations.

Traditional forms of marketing vs. non-traditional ones: which one is better?

Let me clear one thing right here, although a lot of marketing experts and strategists believe that digital marketing works better than the old methods, it does not mean that they believe traditional marketing is not working anymore, that really depends on your business. How important is it for you to open a business account on Facebook and Instagram? What about Twitter? Do you need a LinkedIn account for customer attraction and retention? should you go for a TV commercial or does your product needs direct sales?

Before the digital era begins, TV ads were the most popular marketing way along with billboards, radios, posters, direct sales, etc. The way they worked was simple, they used to tell one certain product is good and expected the customers to buy it and that was it. It was when the companies started to study human behavior against ads that made them get more creative and also made the market more competitive, and then the Facebook era began. What?

Yes, Mark Zuckerberg revolutionized the advertising world by letting companies pay for their ads to be shown to Facebook users while they were browsing it. It was the moment that the digital era began and marketers started looking for other ways to advertise online. today, there are endless possibilities for digital marketing from Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn to the almighty Google engine. Yes, Google makes it possible for any business to make itself visible online through the power of SEO.

Now let’s see, traditional vs. non-traditional marketing, which one is better?

Well as we all know, it is the digital era, so it is only natural to say that social services and social media platforms are taking over. Just think about it, most of us are constantly watching YouTube videos, and Netflix series, and using other video streaming services. I won’t mention the music and podcasts we listen to on services like Spotify instead of listening to the radio these days. Because they give us the benefit of choice, which the traditional platforms would not have. That is why fewer and fewer people watch TV and listen to radio stations every day.

The other strong point of digital marketing is the ability for finding target audiences which is impossible in the case of traditional ads like TV commercials. I mean, yes there are so many TV shows with so many audiences like the Super Bowl and the World Cup, but is it possible to target the exact audience that you wish even in these competitions? No.

Compare this to YouTube videos with the same amount of viewers in most cases. YouTube knows its demographic for each video and chooses the correct ads to be played for them to get the companies the most ROI possible. It can be done in TV or radio commercials as well, but is it trackable? No.

Another strength point is the expenses. Anyone can set up a digital account for their business for free and start posting content. This is the easiest way to make people notice you and your brand and give people content about your product and services.

You can set up a profile on Google maps business and let people who are searching in this engine find you. You also can have an Instagram account to showcase content about your products and services. Let’s be honest here, people love visual content and Instagram is the exact platform for that. The other ones can be Facebook and LinkedIn, they are both visual and content base at the same time and each has its own benefits. Facebook has more users even now and LinkedIn is much more professional and can be used for more high-tech products and services.

Now think of the money that businesses had to spend for a TV commercial that was even less than a minute long. Digital marketing is far cheaper than traditional marketing. The accounts and content are free, you can target your audiences and even if you choose to pay for your ads to be published on digital platforms, it still is so much cheaper than TV, radio, direct mail, billboards, etc. For instance, if you want a 15-second ad on the Australian TV channel Prime 7, you should pay around 15,000$ and you have no control over who is viewing these ads. Of course, you can choose the time and program that the ad is playing in, but that is it. While you can put it on Google or Facebook and be sure that 15,000$ can easily give you hundreds of thousands of impressions on your ads.

They are the people who can actually be your future clients because Google and Facebook actually aim for the most related people to your business. You can actually set ads for even one dollar on these platforms.

You can also track your results in non-traditional marketing, while it is not an option in traditional methods. Yes, the data has a very important role here. It can show you how many people saw and/or clicked on your ads, what their demographic is, how much time did they spend on your website, if they actually purchased from you or even showed the slightest interest, etc. They will actually help you to retarget certain people in the future.

But is that a certain proof for digital marketing is superior? No, there are multiple occasions when the traditional methods work much better. To be honest, TV commercials can be shown to much more audiences even if you cannot control their demographic, still, it can be better for businesses with huge budgets due to the price tag of these commercials.

Traditional marketing types

Traditional marketing evolved for thousands of years and has a lot of different types, I am going to define some of them for you here:

1. Outbound marketing

Outbound marketing is where a company sends marketing messages to a huge amount of people at once. This kind of marketing has different forms like TV and radio ads, printed ads in newspapers, magazines, brochures, catalogs, events, exhibitions, cold calls, etc.

An example of this kind of marketing is when a young girl is watching an episode of her favorite show on TV and she sees an ad for a sporting goods store she thinks that she really needs a treadmill in her apartment to have some exercise. After a day or two she receives the flyer from the same store in the street and thinks about that treadmill again and then she forgets about that for she sees a cute cat on the street corner. After two months she receives a discount coupon from that very store in her mailbox and that convinces her to go for that treadmill. None of the ads actually referred to buying a treadmill, they just kept getting in her way until she made up her mind.

Outbound marketing is so popular even right now, but let’s be honest here, it is expensive, not trackable, and much less profitable than inbound marketing.

2. Print marketing

Newspapers, magazines, etc. are all different forms of print marketing. This kind of advertising uses physically printed media to reach its messages to a broad scale of customers. This kind of marketing is an expensive but effective method. It is so popular that according to statistics, companies spend an average of $25 billion annually on print marketing from 2015 to 2019 in the United States. The interesting fact is that marketing experts believe that this number is far less than the money they used to spend in the previous decades. Many believe that you can reach target audiences by this method, which can be true at some levels. I mean, when you print an ad about TV repair in an electronic-related magazine, you are actually aiming for some target audience.

3. Broadcasting marketing

literary is the most expensive and most popular form of traditional marketing. We used to have some limited TV and radio stations back then, but now, everything is different, there are hundreds if not thousands of TV and radio stations in every country, and a lot of them are focusing their content on a specific topic. We have a lot of channels that are focused on pets, traveling, culinary and food, different industries, education, etc. It is that broadcasting marketing can now actually target specific audiences. This marketing type can reach out to a really huge number of customers all around the country and some of them aim for consumers around the globe is probably the reason for TV and radio ads’ popularity.

The problem is the price that companies have to pay for some 30 – 60 seconds advertisements and the fact that the results are not trackable makes it harder to decide. I mean, there definitely are some results and they might actually be really good, but the companies that have broadcasting advertisements usually are so huge. That means they might have other types of advertisements as well and if those are also outbound marketing, they can never really estimate the ROI of the money they spend on this kind of marketing.

4. Outdoor marketing

You are road-tripping on a delightful morning and a buzzing sound gains your attention, a truck passes you by and you see a banner on its body that is advertising a B&B Hotel named Deluna that seems comfortable, cozy, and not that expensive. Then you remember that there were several billboards advertising the same hotel on the way. You also remember that flyer you saw at that gas station. Now you are thinking that “Hey, I drove all night and I’m really tired and hungry. I’m going to try this hotel. I hope all these advertisements are not for nothing.”

That is called outdoor marketing. It is what is called, a kind of marketing that is done outdoors. It can include different things, fliers, billboards, signs at bus stops, airplane tails and truck bodies, etc. It is said that more than 65% of traditional marketing efforts are outdoor marketing in the U.S.

Although it is said that this strategy is more usable for local businesses, we see billboards for international, huge brands like Coca-Cola, Sony, Apple, Ford, etc. in the cities as well. So it actually works for them too, considering reserving these billboards, printing flyers, having those posters and signs everywhere, etc.

5. Direct Mail

This type of marketing is when you open your mailbox or door and see a lot of catalogs, brochures, flyers, etc. there. It is one of the oldest traditional marketing strategies that businesses use even right now. The interesting thing is that it is used by online marketers as well. Meaning that it can be included in non-traditional marketing like cold mail marketing.

A business might send out thousands of emails every month in hope of a huge response and profit, although we all know that the response rate is usually too low even down to 1 or 2 percent. It usually depends on the price of the product and the number of pieces you send out there.

6. Telemarketing

Telemarketing is the good old calls that marketers used to make (they still do it in some regions ) and the random messages we receive on our phones about a certain product or service. It is also called “inside sales” or “telesales”. You received them before, right? It is kind of a direct marketing, where the marketers used to market their products or services over the phone, fax, internet, SMS, or even robocalls.

Although you need to know that this type is not really popular among the customers. Especially for the so many reports of scamming and fraud related to this type of marketing.

Unfortunately, there are so many reports of pyramid scams, convincing customers to buy overpriced products, etc. It is considered unethical due to the perception of high-pressure sales techniques during unsolicited calls. It is also the robocalls that the companies really liked once. Since they could use a robot voice to automatically call different numbers instead of actually employing marketers, but for most of the companies, that proved to be a disaster after some time. Not to mention that so many customers complained about the robots that used to spam them by sending voice messages directly to their voicemail. These messages were hijacking their voicemail by filling it up and would not let other people be able to leave them voice messages which was troublesome, especially in times of urgency.

7. Partner Marketing

This type of marketing can be considered B2B and B2C marketing. In this type of marketing, two parties cooperate with each other to achieve their goals. just like the proverb says, “You scratch my back, I’ll scratch your back”

Cooperation between companies and influencers or other companies is one of the most obvious examples of this type of marketing. They use these popular faces to gain the trust of customers and in return, they spend a lot of money on these people or other parties. Just like what Zoma (mattress manufacturer) has been doing for years. It is one of the best ways to reach out to a wider customer population for both sides. Although there can be other reasons to use this type of marketing as well. Some of them could be a lack of resources like money, performance, or even products and services, gain missing expertise, rapid growth, etc.

8. Word of mouth marketing

Imagine that you are having a family dinner at your parent’s house. You are telling your brother about the problem you are facing with your car and suddenly he says he encountered the same problem and fixed it using special motor oil. That fixed his problem and he is using that certain oil since. This is the exact definition of word-to-mouth marketing.

This kind of marketing can also be done by encouraging your satisfied customers to express their feeling about your product or service on their social accounts and the posts they share, it gives other people a good and multi-dimensional view of a product they could use and it has a huge effect on the prospects if the marketers do not advertise it but a friend, a colleague, even a random passenger at the bus stop.

This way is one of the most attractive and popular forms of marketing because it is not only very effective but also free.

Currently, every successful brand is trying to be seen as much as possible on Google and other social networks and reach more target audiences. This is exactly what word to moth marketing does organically. Satisfied customers of companies share their experiences with others, encouraging more customers to use the goods and services of that particular brand. According to statistics, at least 83% of people trust the recommendations of their friends and family members more than marketers.

9. Stealth marketing

Advertisements were always in our life. we always get bombarded by different ads everywhere we go. Is it on the streets while driving or jogging? or is it at the airport? Is it at the dentist’s office? Is it a restaurant? Are you watching TV? It seems to be impossible not to see a kind of advertising anywhere we go. But did you know that there is a kind of marketing strategy that advertises a product without people actually recognizing it? It is called stealth marketing. Although many customers consider it unethical for they won’t be able to opt-out when viewing it, many experts believe that it is effective and there are a lot of opportunities in it for the companies willing to use this strategy.

Apple has been doing this marketing type for years. It is a known fact by now that it sponsors different movies, series, TV shows, etc. and they show apple devices in their episodes. But you may have missed that Apple never lets an antagonist have an iPhone or MacBook. Nike sponsors different sports teams and they wear its clothing in their plays, etc. that is called stealth marketing.

10. Door-To-Door marketing

You probably remember the salesmen who used to knock on your door and tried to sell you books, knives, magazine subscriptions, and even vacuum cleaners. In fact, this type of marketing might still be common in your area, and one of these salesmen may knock on your door every now and then. This type of marketing is one of the most successful, effective, direct, and at the same time most annoying types of marketing. What we have here is a balance of power, yes it is an all-out war. The more experienced the seller is and the better and more convincing he is, the easier he can convince the customer to buy from him, especially if he can recognize body language. This is despite the fact that sometimes, despite all these cases, the landlord may stick to his gun and refuse to negotiate. But this method has been so effective that many companies have used it for years.

Different types of digital marketing: non-traditional

Digital marketing or non-traditional marketing, as we said in the first part, started with Facebook and grew much faster than anyone could have imagined, to the extent that it practically dethroned traditional marketing. Not like this old type doesn’t work anymore, but the opportunities and types of digital marketing are so many that a lot of marketers are more inclined towards it.

1. Inbound marketing

As you might have perceived by now, inbound marketing is a method that experts consider the opposite of outbound marketing. Because, unlike outbound marketing, it does not feed you the product or service, it gives you valuable content and attracts you to the direction it wants. It makes a meaningful relationship between you and your customers and builds trust and long-term relationships. You give them a way to face their problems and they will become your followers, prospects, and customers depending on your approach and the quality of your content and your products or services.

The content type is different for any topic and can include:

• Blog Posts
• News Articles
• E-books & White Papers
• Infographics
• Research
• Videos
• Social Media
• Webinars
• Slide-share
• etc.

2. Search engine marketing (SEM)

Search engine marketing (SEM) is a form of digital marketing that leads to more website traffic and better rank on Search Engine Result Pages (SERP). This method includes Search Engine Optimization (SEO), content creation, and advertising.

It was not until 1990 that internet browsing took a real form for the engines and it took over six years, to 1996, for them to create a business model for themselves and create a Pay Per Click advertisement method. We all know what happened then, right? the first one was Yahoo! which started all of those search engine marketing and then Google took over in the 2000s and 2010s with its Google ads and then everything became so competitive. SEM is so important right now that companies actually pay experts to have it done the best way possible.

Is it different with SEO then? Yes, it is. SEM is a marketing strategy to increase your website traffic and give your website a better rank. It can include paid and SEO organic efforts. The simplest way to differentiate these two is that SEO provides you with website traffic for free while SEM is usually done by PPC (Pay Per Click) method.

3. Pay-Per-Click marketing

As you can figure out, this marketing type is a digital marketing method in which the marketer pays a fee to the search engine every time their ad is clicked on. That is simple, you know, it is not like there is a time limit or anything, you pay the engine only for the times your ad actually gets clicked on. Google Ads is one of the most popular forms of Pay Per Click marketing. Marketers pay this search engine to rank their website first on the Google Search Engine Result Page (SERP) for some specific keywords.

4. Social media marketing

We have a thorough article on social media marketing strategies on this very website. Social media marketing seems to be the newest marketing type. Investopedia defines it as: “Social media marketing (SMM) (also known as e-marketing) is the use of social media—the platforms on which users build social networks and share information—to build a company’s brand, increase sales, and drive website traffic. In addition to providing companies with a way to engage with existing customers and reach new ones, Social Media Marketing (SMM) has purpose-built data analytics that allows marketers to track the success of their efforts and identify even more ways to engage.”

This kind of marketing provides so many opportunities for marketers to find leads for free or at a low price, increase their sails, build a good relationship with prospects and customers and promote their brand by creating creative and attractive content. It is effective, cheap, and provides a perfect opportunity for interacting with your prospects and/or customers. Not to mention that you can track them and the strategy by the data different platforms provide you with to get more connections and sell more products and services.

However, you need to know how to work with social media to make the most of them for marketing. Just signing up on LinkedIn and opening a business page is not enough! You should connect with the target audience, get verified, check LinkedIn insights, weekly, write an attractive introduction, make trend posts, and so many other necessary activities. This story is the same for marketing in other social apps too.

5. Email marketing

Email marketing is a type of direct marketing method that obviously uses emails. Marketers send bulk emails to different addresses using an email list. They introduce the product or services they are marketing for, inform them of different offers, collect money, etc. it is estimated that only in 2006, different companies spent over 400 million dollars on email marketing. This kind of marketing is so popular because of its tractability feature. Marketers can see its ROI and optimize their efforts based on the data they receive every time they send these emails out. Like how many responded to the email, how many of them showed interest, what the recipient-to-buyer rate was, etc.

Emails have the potential to make people actually act. It also can direct the traffic to the place you want, whether it is a website or a social media account like LinkedIn if you cite it somewhere in the email body, or anywhere else. You can even use services like CUFinder to extract email addresses based on demographic factors like age, sex, industry, education, job, position, etc., and then choose the recipients who you believe are the best candidates for marketing a specific product or service.

6. Mobile marketing

Mobile marketing is a multi-channel marketing method that is focused on reaching different audiences on their smart and featured phones, and tablets through SMS and MMS, emails, social media, etc. it is perfect, especially for you can make sure that the recipient actually received the message and saw it. It can be tracked so easily and has a great response rate on many occasions.

7. Content marketing

Seems obvious, right? Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach that is focused on creating and sharing valuable content on your LinkedIn company page, website, other social accounts, and any online platforms. Marketers usually use this type of advertising to attract attention, build trust, generate leads for free, expand the customer base, increase brand awareness, elevate online sales, etc.

8. Video marketing

It is a known fact that visual content has the best result among different content types, once it was TV commercials, and then when the internet took over the marketing world it was videos’ turn. As you can figure out, Video marketing uses videos to market different services and products, attract more audience and increase purchase rate. As Adobe Experience Cloud Blog suggests “Video can foster an intimate bond between product and consumer in a way that text cannot, especially if businesses use people in their videos.”

9. Voice marketing

This marketing type is an old marketing trend that people recently got interested in it again. So, radio was the primary form of voice marketing but it got fewer fans after televisions came to the market, but recently, it attracted a lot of attention again thanks to the Covid-19 pandemic, the Clubhouse application, and other factors. People started listening to podcasts more and more in recent years. A study shows that more than 55% of Americans listen to at least one podcast every week. It is a perfect and much cheaper substitute for Video marketing for companies with lower budgets.

10. Referral marketing

Referral marketing is so much like word-to-mouth marketing and is one of the most effective and popular marketing methods available out there. It introduces products to new customers and expands the customer base through mouth-to-mouth referrals. It uses customers’ satisfaction to do marketing and let me tell you that it happens spontaneously, although you can influence it through suitable strategies. The difference with word-to-mouth marketing is that referral marketing is more deliberate. You actually begin campaigns and encourage your customers to tell their friends and loved ones about your company.

11. Affiliate marketing

“Affiliate Marketing” also known as sales cooperation marketing, familiarization marketing, or relationship marketing, is one of the successful marketing strategies. In this marketing method, people collaborate with businesses to introduce their products and services to their audience and receive an amount as a commission for introducing each customer to the business. just like the Timex campaign #taketime and its wrist watches.

Affiliate marketing usually results in more sales. But some businesses use this marketing method to increase the number of “leads”, increase the number of users who use the free version of the products, increase the clicks on the website links or increase the number of downloads of their application.

Affiliate marketing is a great way to create new income streams for business owners who want to build an online business and monetize their website traffic. This marketing method is one of the most popular methods in the world and its popularity is constantly increasing.

12. Guerrilla marketing

Guerrilla Marketing is an irregular and unorthodox way of doing promotional activities on a very low budget. Such advertisements are sometimes designed so that the audience is not even aware of their existence, and it can be said that this type of marketing can be stealth marketing or hype marketing. In fact, Guerrilla Marketing is a type of irregular marketing that gets maximum results with minimal resources. It involves initiative and innovation, breaking the rules, and searching for alternative solutions to traditional marketing methods.

13. Behavioral marketing

In this type of marketing, the previous behaviors of online users are analyzed to determine which ads should be shown to them next time. This provides interesting possibilities for a deeper level of ad customization, as well as allowing businesses to understand consumer habits and desires better. Programmers consider the individual settings of each customer to display relevant content. Understanding how to execute behavioral marketing campaigns allows marketers to be more receptive to audiences. Unlike direct marketing, where companies send the same message to all audiences while they expect a lot of the recipients to ignore the message, behavioral marketing takes users’ online information and uses it to create the message for the user.

14. Nostalgia marketing

Nostalgia marketing is a very effective strategy that uses audiences’ feelings and bonds with their past. In these, types of marketing companies try to evoke positive feelings that are associated with your memories related to previous decades and then connect those memories to the product or service they are promoting. For instance, there was this company that used to produce a vanilla biscuit and their slogan was “taste your childhood again.” and boy that really tasted my childhood at least.

15. Neuromarketing

In recent years, marketing has become more complicated, and they have combined marketing science with neuroscience due to the more complex behavior of consumers. They have reached neuromarketing, which has greatly helped to improve marketing operations. They used this phrase for the first time in 2002, which was not welcomed in those years, but in recent years, it has become very useful and an integral part of most conferences and marketing speeches

The importance of digital marketing categories in the modern world!

No business out of there can say they do not need marketing. Let’s be honest: if you always have your regular customers and do not think of attracting newer ones, you will not grow your business. Well, yes it used to be like every business that wanted to use marketing had to spend some amount of money, depending on the traditional method they were using, but, that is not the case right now. Thanks to digital marketing methods they need to spend time and sometimes a little money.

The truth is that the world has changed a lot and if you insist on keeping the old good ways, you will see much fewer results in marketing and sometimes even none. People behave much differently now than even ten years ago, now think that some of the traditional methods are much older than 50 to 60 years ago. Marketing should change constantly and that is a fact. We are living in the internet era and it revolutionized people’s way of connecting, thinking, and acting. It is estimated that 4.9 billion people used the internet constantly in 2022 for shopping, education, communicating, working, and almost every other thing you can think of. They also use it to share that they had a bad customer experience or a good one.

The Internet is a perfect lead source for marketers with endless possibilities. It is perfect for finding new leads, interacting with customers, introducing and marketing new or old products and services, building trust and increasing your brand awareness, etc., for free or a meager price! Isn’t that perfect? Trust me, if you did not start using digital marketing, you already lost so many opportunities, but never say never! Start it today and see the result in a concise time.

Related Questions & Answers

what are the 4 types of marketing?

The four types of marketing are:

1. Product Marketing: Product marketing focuses on promoting and positioning a specific product or service in the market. It involves understanding the target audience, conducting market research, and developing strategies to effectively communicate the unique features and benefits of the product. The goal is to generate interest, drive sales, and build brand loyalty.
2. Digital Marketing: Digital marketing refers to marketing efforts conducted through online channels. This includes various tactics such as social media marketing, email marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), content marketing, and online advertising. Digital marketing allows businesses to reach a wider audience, engage with customers in real-time, and track the effectiveness of their campaigns through analytics.
3. Content Marketing: Content marketing focuses on creating and distributing valuable and relevant content to attract and retain customers. This can include blog articles, videos, infographics, podcasts, and social media posts. The aim is to provide valuable information, educate the audience, and establish thought leadership. Content marketing helps build trust, credibility, and brand loyalty by offering useful insights and solutions to customers’ needs.
4. Relationship Marketing: Relationship marketing emphasizes building long-term relationships with customers based on trust, loyalty, and personalized communication. It involves understanding customer preferences, delivering exceptional customer service, and engaging in ongoing communication and support. Relationship marketing aims to create brand advocates who not only make repeat purchases but also refer the business to others, resulting in positive word-of-mouth marketing.

These four types of marketing strategies provide businesses with a comprehensive approach to reaching and engaging with their target audience, promoting their products or services, and building lasting customer relationships.

Types of marketing management

Marketing management encompasses various approaches and strategies that businesses use to plan, implement, and control their marketing activities. Here are three types of marketing management:

1. Strategic Marketing Management: Strategic marketing management focuses on developing long-term marketing plans and strategies to achieve the company’s overall goals and objectives. It involves conducting market research, identifying target markets, analyzing competitors, and defining the positioning and value proposition of the company’s products or services. Strategic marketing management sets the direction for the marketing efforts and guides decisions related to product development, pricing, distribution, and promotion.
2. Operational Marketing Management: Operational marketing management deals with the day-to-day execution of marketing activities and tactics. It involves managing marketing campaigns, coordinating advertising and promotional activities, monitoring sales performance, and analyzing market trends and customer behavior. Operational marketing management focuses on implementing the marketing strategies outlined in the strategic plan, ensuring effective communication with customers, and achieving short-term marketing objectives.
3. Relationship Marketing Management: Relationship marketing management emphasizes building and nurturing long-term relationships with customers. It involves strategies to enhance customer satisfaction, loyalty, and retention. Relationship marketing management focuses on understanding customer needs, delivering personalized experiences, and providing exceptional customer service. It often involves the use of customer relationship management (CRM) systems to gather customer data and facilitate targeted marketing efforts.

These types of marketing management work together to ensure that businesses have a well-rounded approach to planning, executing, and evaluating their marketing efforts. By integrating strategic, operational, and relationship marketing management, businesses can effectively reach their target audience, create meaningful customer connections, and achieve their marketing objectives.

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