Digital Marketing or Online Marketing | Is There Any Difference?

Online marketing is another term for digital marketing, isn’t it? 

Simply put, online marketing does not cover all electronic mediums that work without the internet. Digital marketing does. Knowing the difference between digital marketing and online marketing can be the key to a successful marketing plan. Although the distinction is subtle and at times they overlap, both can improve a company’s overall marketing services. 

Digital Marketing vs Online Marketing 

Understanding the difference between digital marketing and online marketing will be more clear with the age-old marketing mix. In traditional marketing, the marketing mix comprises the 4 Ps. 

• Price – How the prices are defined and will the customer pay for it
• Product – Choice of product or service to sell
• Place – The location where the product is to be sold
• Promotion – Making the target audience aware of the product

The last two components of the marketing mix, place and promotion, emphasise how the marketing techniques (online and digital) differ. 

Finding the location/place where your target audience might be is crucial for promoting and selling the product or service. In the online world, the ‘place’ changes its meaning besides the geographic location. It can be social media networks. For example, LinkedIn is dedicated to professionals networking for jobs, while Instagram is more relevant for promoting small businesses and more. 

Talking about promotion in marketing, the objective is to reach and convert as many customers as possible. Here comes the channels, time of the year, a new geographic location (for a business expanding), and even converting customers from the offline world to online or vice versa. Promotion is all about building brand relationships and making it convenient for the customer to buy a product, whether it is online or offline. 

What Does Digital Marketing Entail That Online Marketing Doesn’t?

Digital marketing is an all-inclusive term that covers all the online marketing techniques and also reaches the offline world. Online marketing is limited to content marketing, SEO, social media marketing, email marketing, pay-per-click advertising, mobile marketing, and any type of marketing communication that solely relies on the internet. 

Online marketing also includes two closely-related concepts – internet marketing and emarketing. Experts when they speak about internet marketing refer to SEO-friendly websites and PPC campaigns, mostly with an objective to drive more sales. Emarketing should not be confused with email marketing and refers to all aspects of internet marketing with a broader focus on building customer relationships online. This is done through Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems such as Salesforce. 

Offline Elements of Digital Marketing

Check out how digital marketing works offline. 

Electronic Billboards 

Electronic billboards are the evolution of traditional billboards. With far better digital images that can be seen even in the worst lighting conditions, electronic billboards are used for building brand awareness. If you apply the marketing mix here, putting digital billboards en route where the target demographic frequently commutes is a win-win. They can also be placed in downtown areas that the entire city’s crowd populates.

Radio

This is another medium where digital marketing reaps benefits offline. A fairly recent Nielsen Catalina study showed that radio advertising brought 12 USD in sales per every 1 USD spent. Another important demographic to note is that it is the millennial generation most businesses target. It will not be wrong to assume that most millennials born before the early 2000s at least have a special connection to the radio. As a form of nostalgia, they still tune into it today, even if it is the included radio app on the smartphone. So digital marketers can encourage listeners to sign up for generating leads or increase brand awareness to use slogans used in social media on local radio stations. 

Print Media

Offline magazines, newspapers, etc are still published and print is not going away anytime soon. As magazines already sell to the target audience, it is not hard to use them for a digital marketing advantage. Digital marketers can put hashtags or URLs to encourage readers to visit them when using phones or computers. Print media gives more control on the buying decision power of the consumer as it is less intrusive than emails and targeted ads on WhatsApp. 

Digital Marketing Increases the Bottom Line Than Online Marketing

Here are some interesting stats that may shock you.  

• In the United States alone, radio advertising’s expenditure amounted to more than 26 billion USD in 2020 (Statista)
• 82% of consumers trust printed ads (Marketing Sherpa)
• 88% of people doing a local search on their smartphone end up visiting a related store (Think with Google)

Digital Marketing with Offline Channels For Business Expansion

When a business is building a market at a new location, the knowledge of social listening should not be just limited to how the target audience behaves virtually. It is simply not enough to create a full-fledged online marketing campaign. The behaviour and choices can be different locally. 

For instance, look at the renowned cosmetics brand Sephora, now owned by LVMH. Its marketing team saw that the online advertisements were bringing more customers to their offline stores. To track the consumer journey, the brand gave out loyalty cards to identify the store purchases through online transactions. They also set up Google Analytics for tracking offline conversions and transactions. As per InsightsWhale, Sephora, after tracking online and offline customer journeys, earned 3.9 times more return on advertising spend and found out that 70% of the time, customers checked the website first and then visited the store. 

Converting Offline Customers to Online

While everyone uses the internet for buying a product, physical stores and real-life purchasing experiences are not gone. Some individuals may still see no point in using the internet for shopping. What digital marketing can do is convince that demographic to switch to it. 

Consider, grocery shopping which is a basic household chore and is done physically. Bigbasket that started back in 2011 in Bengaluru has given enough reasons to do grocery shopping online. By 2018, it covered 26 domestic cities with 10,000 customers (registered). According to an interview with the co-founder of the company, Hari Menon with Adgully mentioned that in their overall budget for marketing, 70% of the business they earn is from the app. 

So how did they convince 10,000 loyal customers and remains the leading grocery shopping app in India? 

They partnered with Xiaomi smartphone manufacturer to integrate a seamless experience of grocery purchases and stayed true to the commitment of letting the farming community sell the products directly to the brand removing any middleman and using the right fertilisers. These factors, be it for highlighting sustainability, environmental concern or enhancing user experience, are essential for increasing brand awareness and generating leads even though grocery shopping can be done physically by everyone.

Choosing Digital Marketing Over Online Marketing

No doubt, online marketing using multiple social media platforms, optimising pages for search engines, etc are cost-effective, necessary and increase profits. But apart from the digital channels, utilising the offline market with radio, TV ads, etc., certainly brings more to the table. Both online and offline marketing techniques are essential for a brand’s growth. 

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