Traditional Marketing in Digital Age
Does traditional marketing still matter?
The nuances of marketing have become far more sophisticated considering that today’s consumers have become more adapted to the digital life. It’s especially more apparent in the way they allowed brands to approach them.
It is a fact that business marketing has evolved drastically over the last decades. Newspapers, magazines, and billboards were once the “Holy Grail” to get your brand known by your audience, but with the global growth of online resources, many marketers argued that these ‘traditional marketing tools’ have outlived their values.
Yet, smart marketers know that the key to a successful marketing is to create relevant and valuable experiences that buyers choose to engage in.
Read also: The Importance of Immersive Marketing.
What is “traditional” marketing?
Traditional marketing refers to a conventional method of marketing that helps marketers to reach out to a semi-targeted audience with various offline advertising and promotional methods. It consists of four fundamental aspects: product, price, place, and promotion.
Today we know that digital marketing practices are dominating in almost every business industry, but in reality, there are still a group of people who don’t rely on the internet to handle their daily transactions. This means that even as the digital revolution continues to blossom, traditional marketing has hardly gone completely cold. Forward-thinking marketers realize that conventional marketing techniques can still hold value and relevance.
Here are some of the traditional marketing techniques that can still bring you results.
- Billboards
Times Square in New York is the perfect proof that large billboards still matter when it comes to advertising on a large scale. Billboards boasts less text and more images, which are great for raising brand awareness and appeal to the visually-aware consumers.
(Learn why visual content matters to customers here.)
Billboards can hardly be overlooked, especially when they are placed in strategic areas. Furthermore, they can easily leave a long-lasting impression. With clever taglines and eye-catching images, billboards can be quite memorable, making them a viable and effective marketing strategy.
2. Print ads
In this digital age, using print media in the form of flyers and brochures can still be a feasible marketing method, especially to promote special deals, discounts or offers.
Not a fan of flyers? You can also consider the value of distributing business cards that directly introduce your business to potential clients. From including testimonials, stamping your face on the cards, or provide links to your website, creative business cards can easily transform into a powerful marketing tool. They can elicit emotional reactions and are more easily absorbed than words on a digital screen, hence evoking strong responses and greater reach from your audience.
3. Direct mail
When it comes to advertisements, direct mails are not only creative, but also highly personalized. Direct mails yield faster responses than emails and consumers find them more trustworthy.
It doesn’t seem to be that shocking considering that most of the buyers are bombarded with emails nowadays. As such, direct mail provides them with emotional connections and excitement that emails fail to deliver. On top of that, direct mail makes brand message easier to understand and therefore, has greater persuasive power on them.
Understand how to re-target your audience here.
4. Face-to-Face
The primary motor of traditional marketing is human interaction. Granted, virtual marketing has changed the marketing landscape dramatically with the rise of social media, but I believe it can never fully replace the value of face-to-face marketing. Face-to-face marketing, after all, is all about transparency and trust.
Tangible and physical interactions can evoke a deeper sensation and a lasting memory, compared to logging onto a digital account or websites.
5. Events
In marketing, networking still holds a vital key to attract qualified talents and clients apart from high quality products and services. (Learn how to recruit like a marketer here.) One of the best ways to market your business and build valuable relationships with other experts in the industry is by attending events, conferences, or trade shows.
Not only that, event marketing also offers your business the opportunity to find investors as well as other businesses to partner with.
Final Thoughts: Merging Traditional and Digital
For many businesses, reaching the right marketing strategy is not easy. After all, running a successful business is not just about choosing the appropriate target audience or having a quality product and service. It’s also about leveraging the appropriate marketing techniques to convert your leads to potential customers.
While it’s true that some traditional marketing methods are declining over the years, but there are still some techniques that can be highly profitable if applied effectively.
Traditional messaging is accessible to all, no matter whether they’re online or not. Marketers need to look beyond the general buzz and understand how they can apply various digital marketing strategies and incorporate them with the traditional marketing methods to grow their reach.
After all, while digital marketing continues to thrive, conventional marketing techniques still remain an important variable for interactive and personalized marketing.
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