When was the last time you picked up a flyer? If someone didn’t hand one out to you today, I’d place a fair assumption that you don’t remember either.
Back in the 90’s and early 2000’s, the only way a company could get their name out into the world was to expand in marketing strategies that don’t have a quantifiable amount of useful data points that they can trust.
Things like flyers, posters, print magazines, television ads, cold calling, taste testing in grocery stores – all of which were either expensive or a lesson learnt on how to lose $1000 in an hour.
Now, if you’re a business owner, this “shift” away from traditional marketing strategies was caused by a multitude of things, way before the pandemic of 2020 struck. Consumers and buying behaviors have changed, so you need to ask yourself: why should I stick to the same marketing game? and what can I do about it?
Before you do that, let’s put ourselves in the shoes of our customers and ask, ‘Where would I not feel invaded by a cold pitch?’, ‘what makes one sales approach better than another for me?’.
Now let’s put it into an example: you receive a call from an auto service in the middle of dinner time with the family. That’s intrusive, time-consuming, and breaks the trust of your company.
Compare that with an ad showing on Waze or Google Maps for auto servicing and you’ll find yourself in a less obtrusive way to raise brand awareness without annoying someone.
Digital marketing with ads is like making 1000 cold calls in a matter of seconds.
Here are seven deadly sins of traditional marketing, and how to combat each one.
Money (ROI: Saving, Spending and Making it Work)
Let me paint a picture for you: You have a small baking business and you want more customers. Being the sweet baker that you are, you spent about $30 to make more or less to bake 60 chocolate chip cookies for people to taste test. You go out there, waiting for passersby to get one cookie, hoping they will buy more. One guy devoured 5 cookies, another took 3, at the end of the day, 60 cookies were given for free, But, how many did you sell? How many people in total did you reach?
If you got people to buy packs of cookies, then great! But that’s $30 worth of cookies you gave for free.
Now, think of advertising your cookies on Facebook. Cost of creating a Facebook page? $0. Cost of sharing your menu board? $0. Do you want to purchase Facebook ads to get more leads? You can do that with as little as $5. How many people can you reach? Limitless
Generally, when you either have a small business or an empire, digital marketing costs less, but the return on investment is actually more fruitful, if not endless. Just think of how you can efficiently budget your capital – the money you save from choosing digital marketing from traditional can be used for a lot more things.
Time IS Money
As a business owner, you do not want to waste your customer’s time, especially yous. And so, when you’re spending half of your days cold calling potential leads, what time do you have left to make real sales? Can you still knead your promising product, rest it for 2 hours and bake it at 350 for 30 minutes? Why do this if you can just draft a good email and send it to thousands in just a few clicks?
Don’t get us wrong, digital marketing also takes time (everything does), but not as long as it would take you to get thousands of mails inside thousands of mailboxes.
With Pain, There is Gain
There’s a saying, ‘No Pain, No Gain’ and this is true even for marketing, both traditional and digital. Marketing’s goal is to help aid people’s pain through products and services. But we have to remember that what was normal before can’t be effective now, especially that people nowadays know how to voice out their opinions, which is a good thing!
For example, we cannot advertise pots and pans as ‘a woman’s best friend’ today, as it will sound sexist. However, it is still true that we have to use pots and pans in the kitchen. Whatever gender we define ourselves as, we all have the pain to aid which is hunger.
So, what can you do for your brand? Well, focus on your product’s value and how it can aid their pain. Kow your customers and how they resolve their problems with your product then shout it to the world through a megaphone!
When I Say Jump, You Say How High? How Do You Measure?
How do you know when something is successful or not? You have to have data to analyze of course!
In business, it is important that every activity is measurable, and let me tell you, you’ll be impressed by how digital marketing’s analytical tools work. From clicks, devices, location, even dwell time, you can easily measure the effectiveness of your marketing campaign.
Sadly, this is not very doable in traditional marketing. Most of the time, you can only see the results on sales. Yikes!
Always Be Seen
We all know that brand visibility directly affects sales, and sales is what makes companies’ world go round. But what do we do when our brands can’t be seen? What do we do when sales locations close? How do we make sales?
One factor we have to consider is the ever-changing consumer behavior. Nowadays, even if we’re out in public, we’re still on our phones and we’re still online. This is true as well when it comes to brand visibility. People tend to overlook what’s in front of them and go online instead. They tend to favor brands that their friends share on Facebook or tweet about.
According to Vox, over 2,300 department stores closed from 2011 to 2020. The same article also showed that online sales jumped 32% in the second quarter of 2020, reaching $211.5 billion. The lesson in this? Go online!
Interact, Don’t Just Pitch
Marketing should be a two-way street. As much as you want to aid your customer’s pain, your customers would also want to voice out what these pains are. Digital marketing, with the use of marketing channels such as websites and social media, makes it possible for brands to develop relationships with customers, not just to sell. This is not limited by chats and or messages, but polls, trivia games, and many more count too!
Imagine, would the person on the TV talk back to you when you ask ‘well, how much do I need to pay for that service? I want my garden to look like that too!’? Traditional marketing has boundaries that make it hard to interact with your target market.
Listen to What They Want, and Sell Them What They Need
Like we mentioned, digital marketing channels make it easier for brands to interact with leads. Ultimately, it’s easier as well to get a hold of what specifically will turn leads to sales, as long as we know how to listen.
When your brand is online, clients will most likely be more confident in raising their concerns, as there is no need for face-to-face interaction. It’s super quick to post a comment or review, and email or a chat message, unlike picking up the telephone. From a simple query like ‘what else do you have for me’ or ‘I hope you had a matcha flavor’ to ‘I honestly did not enjoy my experience because of this..’, these feedbacks are key to develop a more successful product/service.
