Is Traditional Advertising Obsolete?

With the advent of social media and inbound marketing, there seems to be a trend toward online advertising and away from certain types of traditional advertising. There are certain types of advertising that are used less and less lately.
There are many possible reasons for this, among them being cost. Traditional advertising costs money. Lots of money.

Inbound marketing, which is a marketing method that brings your customers to you, costs very little, if any, money. With the rapid development of technology, the world of sales, marketing and advertising is being drastically affected. One of the main reasons that certain forms of traditional marketing are fading into the distance is that with traditional marketing, it is very difficult to track the metrics, whereas, with online advertising, it is very easy to track the metrics (with such tools as Google Analytics).

Another sharp contrast between traditional advertising and online advertising is that you are not able to focus your advertising efforts so precisely with traditional advertising. With online advertising, you can pinpoint your specific niche and your specific potential customers and existing customers. You have absolutely no wasted efforts.

If you examine the way in which companies acquired leads a decade ago, you will see that it is very different from the way in which companies acquire leads today. With the competition being as stiff as it is, as a business, you really need to have a hook in order to succeed. Your hook has to be unique and effective and it has to be yours alone. One thing that is for certain is the concept that before you can even entertain the possibility of selling any product or service, you need to work long and hard on interacting with people and with building strong and meaningful business relationships with your business associates.

Modern marketing
Marketing today is very different than the marketing of the past. In traditional marketing, the company that had the money to buy more leads and potential customers won the business. With online marketing, money is not really relevant. What is relevant is time and effort and forming and maintaining relationships that have trust as a foundation and mutual respect.

There are some types of traditional advertising, types that have been in existence for a very long time, that seem to be fading to the background and there is a good possibility that they may become obsolete in the next several years.

• Newspapers: Newspaper advertising has been a time-honored tradition for so long. It is certainly an institution. More and more businesses are no longer using newspapers to advertise their brand and offerings. The idea that a business would have to spend many thousands of dollars on one advertisement that will only appear for one day seems absurd when compared with online advertising.
• Local radio: Radio stations, per se, will not disappear. However, the small, local radio stations are struggling more and more to stay afloat. The concept of a local radio station selling a 30- or 60-second advertising spot to a business and that the business must run the spot for 6 months in order to see any positive results seems kind of crazy. Radio advertising is short-term advertising. Considering the extreme effectiveness of online advertising, radio advertising really can’t compare. The reason that inbound marketing is so effective compared with traditional advertising is that with inbound marketing, people can’t do anything to block your advertising methods. In fact, they make conscious decisions to opt in. With traditional advertising, people have gotten very clever. They can block ads at will.
• The Yellow Pages: The Yellow Pages is no longer an effective form of advertising, in many cases. Many people receive the Yellow Pages and never give it a second look. Maybe they use it to even out the table legs or the stick it on the bookshelf and it quickly gathers dust. Why would people use the Yellow Pages when it is much faster and easier to search online for the same information? And the print online is so much larger!
• Direct mail: Direct mailings find their way into the garbage much more readily than anywhere else in a person’s home. Direct mail is expensive and often, people don’t pay any attention to it.
• Home shows: You pay a great deal for a home show. After your business has shelled out so much money, you don’t generally get a good return on investment. Home shows are not all that convenient. Many people prefer to find out about new products, services, etc, online than having to pay an entrance fee to the home show and walk around aimlessly for hours.

Conclusion
As sad as it is to think about, some forms of traditional advertising are truly becoming obsolete. That is not to say that all forms of traditional advertising are dying or that they are not very valuable. In fact, online advertising works most effectively when it is paired with traditional advertising. Online advertising enhances your offerings very effectively and traditional advertising enhances your offerings in other ways. As a business owner, you should not forsake one form of advertising for the other. You should use them for your business as complements of each other.

Via CompuKol Communications