Published on February 19th, 2020 | by Sunit Nandi

Traditional marketing methods that still matter today

The rise of digital marketing is believed to come at the cost of traditional marketing — overtaking and replacing it. With new technological advancements and a society that is increasingly online, there are more opportunities than ever before to use innovative, digi-marketing related techniques. But, the idea that traditional marketing is dying just isn’t a reality, and it’s a mistake that marketers just entering the industry repeatedly make.

Influencer marketing isn’t new and cold calls remain the top method for generating warm leads. Some traditional marketing techniques are certainly in decline, but many are not. This article will go over the old-school marketing techniques that are as strong today as ever before.

Billboards

A few decades ago, a large LED display would have been something of a novelty, and something that only large, successful businesses can afford. However, with tech advancements comes decreasing prices. Additionally, the products themselves are becoming better. Companies such as VisualLED are offering extremely robust outdoor displays that can withstand all weather and thus require very little maintenance.

Electronic as well as printed billboards have and always will be successful at gaining attention from the public. Public, visual adverts will not die out anytime soon, and are even the first thing we think of when imagining a city centre such as Tokyo and New York.

Direct Mail

Email marketing has gotten to a stage of white noise, where email systems are smart enough to allocate them to a seperate thread, and we have gotten better at ignoring them. One thing that prevails to be effective, however, is sending mail directly to your audience’s doors. Studies show that brand recall performs extremely well here.

At the end of the day, people pick up their mail whether they want to read it or not and this method has reliably proven to have great influence over readers. This is your chance at being creative and stand out in people’s email inboxes.

Flyers

The beauty of handing out (or hand-delivering) flyers is that you do not need to be an established business with a large catalogue of customers’ (email) addresses. It’s a cheap way to reach a ton of people and it just requires a bit of time (or pay a teenager for their time). In fact, you can even ask a store that sells complementary goods (or just has a similar demographic) to showcase your fliers in their store for free. This way, those that pick it up will already be a warm lead, meaning you get a better ROI on your leaflet printout costs.

Cold calling

Most of us have no time for cold callers, but there’s a reason the practice still very much exists. In fact, telemarketing still rules this industry, and generates a ton of leads. Cold calls can be outsourced for cheap, with affordable labour in Asia who can speak very good English. Contrastly, you can have closely monitored, high quality cold callers to generate B2B leads, which remains to be profoundly popular.

Signage

The rise of the digital world has only served to benefit signage instead of compete against it. Digital photos and graphics design has leveraged signage from boring cardboard to creative and even electronic displays.

This has meant that signs are reaching an even wider audience than they ever have done. Even just a standard highstreet store has the potential to shine and stand out from its competitors. It will never not be a widely used method to catch consumers’ attention.

Product samples

Giving out product samples is the most simple yet a very effective marketing method to attract consumers. This is a great way to introduce consumers to a new product or prove that it is a good quality buy. Although product samples have always been mostly used in the food or makeup industries, throughout the years it has been adapted even to intangible products (such as giving a free trial access to an online streaming service before charging money).

There is no doubt that product samples are not going anywhere anytime soon. Even with the bigger production costs (in comparison to flyers), the ROI of this method can be impressive, as food samples in a shop may lead to an instant purchase.

TV and Radio ads

Many companies get frightened of the TV and radio advertising, as there is a myth that such marketing methods do not work anymore and people do not watch TV / listen to radios. Although this is partly true and consumers are gradually moving towards on-demand services, there will still be a need for some live television (reality shows, contests, news) for some years to come.

The key with TV and Radio advertising is to choose the right time and audience for your product- if that is done right, the advert will reach a vast number of people. In addition to that, this is when you can really be creative with the advert by using unique visuals, jingles, having an engaging storyline.

This isn’t to say digital marketing should be ignored either. In fact, a lot of digital marketing techniques are profoundly better at tracking results. You can track how many people were reached by your ad, of what demographic, which ones clicked onto your site, an average time of how long they spent there and so on.

Tags: matter today, methods, traditional

About the Author

Sunit Nandi I'm the leader of Techno FAQ. Also an engineering college student with immense interest in science and technology. Other interests include literature, coin collecting, gardening and photography. Always wish to live life like there's no tomorrow.