With the rise of digital and social media marketing and social shopping, you might wonder why you should invest in traditional marketing. Is the ROI worth it? However, traditional marketing is not obsolete. People still watch television and read the newspaper. Depending on your niche and consumer audience, a hybrid marketing approach might be the best way to grow your business.
This article will discuss traditional marketing, how it compares to digital marketing, traditional marketing strategies, and five reasons to use digital and traditional channels to drive business growth.
What’s Traditional Marketing?
All marketing strategies employed to promote services or products that use offline platforms are conventional marketing.
Why Traditional Marketing is Still Important
There is no doubt that B2B marketers are spending more on digital than traditional marketing. For example, an August 2021 survey of B2B marketers reveals that conventional advertising was expected to increase by 1.34 percent in 2022. Compare this to an anticipated 12.55 percent increase in digital marketing spending.
However, traditional marketing is still essential depending on your industry and target audience.
Demographics
Your target audience may not be fully immersed in the digital ecosystem. For example, while it’s true that just about everyone has a cell phone or smartphone, some consumers don’t use these devices for more than making phone calls.
Who are these consumers? Those age 65 and older—the baby boom generation. There were roughly 70.6 million baby boomers in the U.S. in 2020.
Baby boomers don’t use the internet as much. They may use Facebook to stay connected to children and grandchildren, but they’re not surfing around the internet. Instead, they still ask each other for recommendations about products and services. The old word-of-mouth marketing reigns supreme among this demographic group.
Millennials, born between 1981 and 1996, edged out baby boomers for the first time, numbering 72.26 million in 2020. This demographic is more immersed in the digital ecosystem but still connected to traditional channels such as television and magazines.
If the majority of your target audience is Baby Boomers and Millennials, it would be helpful to employ some elements of a non-digital marketing campaign.
Local Marketing
Suppose you’re a small, local brand targeting primarily your local community. In that case, you’ll want to use traditional marketing strategies to reach your consumers. But, digital is also local, and research shows that the number of Google search requests asking for a store, restaurant, professional office near me is on the rise. Suppose you use traditional marketing tools such as flyers, leaflets, and brochures that you distribute through local coffee shops, supermarkets, and neighborhood centers, for instance. In that case, you might grab consumers who have come to your area because of a Google local search request. This would be a non-digital way to expand your organic reach.
People Won’t Forget Your Brand Name
While most people worldwide are used to reading all types of text on their digital devices, studies indicate that people read print text more easily. Furthermore, the study found that people who read a print ad are more likely to remember the brand’s name than when reading in a digital medium. And let’s face it, the digital world is crowded with promos, advertising, and social media content. Furthermore, consumers often keep magazines or hard copies of advertisements that they can refer to later and share with friends or co-workers.
NonDigital Marketing Disadvantages
Limited Reach
You can run national advertising campaigns, but you’ll most likely use local channels. Therefore, your reach will be limited to potential consumers within your locality. Additionally, unlike digital marketing, you can’t target your customer or create your ad message for specific customer personas. Furthermore, there’s no way to measure the results of traditional marketing strategies. For instance, you never know if someone read your ad or heard it on the radio unless you employ surveys. But surveys are only effective if the person shows up in your office or at your store.
Expensive
Traditional marketing such as television advertising or newspaper ads is expensive. It’s much more affordable (although time-consuming) to run multiple promos across viable social media sites, as well as run an email campaign.
A print ad in a newspaper depends on your location, the paper’s circulation, the ad’s design, and the day of the week it runs. For instance, a full-page ad in the Washington Post would cost more than $163,000, whereas, in Bozeman, Montana, the same ad would cost a little more than $2,000.
Magazine ads average between $500 to $20,000, depending on the publication’s circulation (local vs. national), and of course, the size and color of your ad.
A 30-second spot on your local television station averaged approximately $115,000 in 2020. (AdAge data) Compare this to a $100 targeted, segmented Google or Facebook ad budget that reaches thousands of potential customers.
Once published, you can’t change it
You can’t make changes once the ad is approved, printed, and distributed through newspapers or magazines. However, when you run digital ads or promos, you can tweak them even after your ad is running. By using analytics, you’ll see if you’re not reaching your target audience or marketing goals and can make necessary adjustments to your ad strategy.
Traditional marketing is a one-way conversation
Your promos go out, but you don’t hear back from your audience, no comments or reactions, no conversation. Digital marketing allows for a two-way conversation. Readers can engage with your social media content by reacting, commenting, or sharing with their network. By creating brand communities, podcasts, or live events, you can engage in conversational messaging that leads to long-term relationships.
What’s Digital Marketing?
Digital marketing is everything that’s happening on the internet.
With digital marketing, you can easily reach a global audience and expand your brand reach in ways impossible with traditional marketing. Furthermore, digital marketing levels the playing field between large and smaller brands. All you need to do is create engaging, entertaining, informative content, and you’ll enjoy the same success. Depending upon your use of storytelling and highlighting your brand purpose, you might even be able to cut into the base of your larger competitors.
You can be a startup or small business and quickly scale by promoting your services and products on the internet. By using digital channels, you can
- create brand awareness
- continuously update your customers about new offerings, events, and sales
- ask for feedback on your products and services
- find out what your consumers need
- build brand communities to bring your consumers together to share concerns, information, stories, and encouragement.
Five Reasons To Use Both Digital And Traditional Channels To Drive Business Growth
#1 Your target audience is over 60, or your target market spans all ages. In this case, you’ll want to use traditional marketing channels to reach those who are not full-time residents in the digital world.
#2 Consumers are using more and more apps to block digital ads, and social channels offer an ad-free experience for a premium membership. However, radio and television ads air when traveling in the car or public transportation and at home when watching your favorite TV shows. So it’s more of a “captive audience,” so to speak.
#3 People tend to keep their favorite magazines around for a while, even lending them to family and friends. How often have you seen something in your social feed and then been unable to find it again when you want to take a second look or share it?
#4 A multi-channel approach protects you from unexpected disruptions. Remember what happened when Facebook went down for several hours? True, people turned to Twitter, but the point is that it’s good to have some marketing strategies that are immune to internet outages or platform disruptions. In addition, avoiding dependence on a single source of leads empowers you to pivot when necessary.
#5 Using traditional marketing and digital marketing is not twice the effort. First, when you create print materials, such as brochures, posters, and catalogs, you’ll make them with digital tools. Then, you can upload these same creatives to your social channels. For example, you can attach your brochure to your email campaign and use your magazine ad as posters for social media platforms and website graphics.
Bottom Line
They call this the era of the “great resignation.” But, what has happened, is that thousands of people have decided to launch their dreams. The startup market is hot right now. This means there’s lots of competition, no matter your niche. A well-rounded marketing campaign will help you grow your business and build a loyal base of consumers.
- Diversify your lead sources.
- Identify your target audience.
- Go where your consumers are.
Traditional marketing still works.
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