What is Marketing?
Marketing is a set of activities and processes performed solely to sell any product or service. In a broad sense, it’s a collective effort, including creating marketing collaterals, exchanging benevolent offers, buying media, and printing and distributing materials, that ensure value to the clients and the community at large simultaneously. In short, marketing is the art of strategically selling products and services to people. Traditional marketing, also known as offline marketing, is an effective way of reaching the targeted audience without using digital media or the internet.
What is Traditional Marketing?
Traditional marketing, also known as offline marketing, is an effective way of reaching the targeted audience without using digital media or the internet. It comprises a wide range of promotional strategies to reach clients through many offline advertising verticals, such as telemarketing, direct mail, print media, outdoor advertising, and broadcasts like radio and TV ads, among many others.
While it’s undoubtedly true that traditional marketing methods are effective, it has their own drawbacks and limitations.
Potential Demerits of Traditional Marketing
Irrespective of the fact that digital or online marketing has many advantages over traditional marketing, it is still used to reach the targeted audience in this era of digital transformation. In this article, we aim to discuss some of the potential demerits of traditional marketing in detail that make most companies turn to digital or online marketing methods.
Below-mentioned is some of the major factors that make traditional marketing the least chosen option in this digital age.
Higher Cost
It is a proven fact that the traditional way of media buying is more expensive than the current forms of advertisement that include social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Google, and LinkedIn. For instance, if you are intending to advertise on Television, you not only will have to pay for TV spots but also for the development of your commercials. Also, you will be compelled to buy a lot more TV spots to get proper benefits from these types of broadcast advertising methods. The same rule applies to radio commercials as well.
Another example to illustrate the relative cost difference between the traditional and the new media is that when you want to put ads in newspapers or distribute pamphlets or flyers, you need to pay for it every single time you wish to run an advertising campaign. But, online media provides you with the opportunity to make changes to the content, schedule, audience, age groups, or budget whenever you need.
No Option for Customized Marketing
One of the major demerits of traditional marketing is that it doesn’t provide you with the opportunity to target your ideal customers. Traditional marketing allows you to target only specific markets. Once you placed an ad on traditional advertising media, such as newspapers, magazines, Television channels, or radio programs, your ad will be seen, read, or listened to by a group of people that the particular medium is used. Even if your product is made for a specific age group or gender, you won’t know who really reads or sees your advertisement.
Static Text vs. Dynamic Text
Usually, static text – a type of display text that can’t be changed at run time – is used in traditional marketing methods to advertise a product or service. There are two types of disadvantages in using static text in marketing; it can’t be edited and you won’t have an option to interact with your audience directly. For example, if you have put an ad for a particular product in a newspaper or a magazine and you’re running out of that product after some time, you will end up acquiring a group of unhappy customers. In digital media marketing, dynamic text is used and it offers you the liberty to edit the content whenever you need it.
Presents Less Information
In traditional or conventional marketing, it’s quite difficult to present intricate offers and pricing options of a product. In print media, it is expensive to buy more space to explain the variations of the price and offers that may appeal to your targeted customers. In digital marketing, you have all the liberty to showcase mind-blowing offers to appeal to your customers’ tastes.
Forced Strategy
Since customers as not specifically seeking a product you’re marketing through a traditional channel like a newspaper, it becomes a type of forced strategy to sell a product or service.
Shortfall of Timeliness
Traditional marketing methods don’t have the options to respond to changes in the marketplace as swiftly as the new media do. You will have to be ready with your commercials and advertising materials days, weeks, or sometimes even months in advance in order to place them in traditional media like TV, radio, or newspaper. However, in digital media, it is quite easy to make a last-minute update on an advertisement you are about to post.
People Can Ignore it Easily
People can easily skip or choose to ignore an advertisement placed on traditional media including TV, radio, or newspapers, by rapidly changing the channel or picking something else to read.
Less Conversion Rate
In today’s digital world, most people rely heavily on the internet to know the news. They use the internet to read online news and watch online TV programs to get the news, creating a downfall in the use of traditional media among the normal public. This phenomenon has adversely affected the conversion rates of traditional marketing methods undoubtedly.
Limited Accessibility
Online media always provides people with the liberty to contact the advertiser directly via a number of forms, including chatbots, email, or telephone. But, traditional media like newspapers or billboards only provide people with the option of contacting the advertiser via telephone numbers or physical addresses.
Other Common Drawbacks of Different Verticals in Traditional Marketing
Print – It is difficult to measure the ROI (Return of Investment) as it is impossible to count how many people have read or seen the advertisement. Even though 1000 people have subscribed to a particular newspaper, it is not necessarily to believe that all these 1000 people have read the advertisement the advertiser has placed in that particular newspaper.
Broadcast – It is more expensive than print media and the same, above-mentioned issue is there with the broadcast media like Television and radio channels.
Direct Mail – If you create a leaflet or a pamphlet for your products or services to send to your prospective clients, the chances of your prospective clients reading it is comparatively low.
Telephone – If you appoint somebody to make cold calls to your prospective clients, it is also an expensive and time-consuming effort as nobody in particular likes to be called by an advertisement to explain a particular product or service.
Conclusion
Traditional marketing methods can still be effective for businesses of all sizes, but only through an integrated approach using both traditional and internet marketing. Since the impact of consumer-to-consumer communication is critical in the marketplace, we can use the word-of-mouth strategy effectively by applying technology as it ensures faster delivery at a lower cost. Hence, it’s always recommended to build a marketing strategy that creatively merges both the traditional as well as digital marketing methods to effectively sell a product or service in this digital age.
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