Traditional. New media. No matter. Regardless of how you are marketing to your clients it is important to manage every lead effectively to win more deals. Take control of your sales process by using a simple CRM and sales tracking tool like Base.
Five to ten years ago, Yellow Pages salesmen were knocking on the door of every business…and making money. Buying an ad in the phone book was the best ticket to getting new clients. After all, if you need a plumber or restaurant, where did you look?
Print ads, billboards and local television commercials also held a prominent position among marketing techniques for small and mid-sized businesses. Back then nobody complained about the inability to track the number of new customers each technique delivered. But I digress.
Today you can get a television commercial at a fraction of what it would have cost you 10 years ago (and everyone fast forwards through commercials anyway). The Yellow Pages have evolved into an online deal and advertising site. Everything’s changed. So does that mean traditional marketing is dead?
How the Consumer Has Changed
The fact that many people prefer to interact with their favorite brands rather than read billboards has a lot to do with how the consumer has changed. We tired of having marketing messages shoved down our throats:
“Buy this! It’ll make you a better person!”
We stopped believing that hype a long time ago. But we’re still consumers, so by our nature, we consume. So we decided we wanted to have a more intimate relationship with the brands we buy from.
To that aim, we’ve used peer pressure to get brands to talk to us. We want them to blog about their industry. We want them to tweet about what they’re doing at their company. We want them to reply to our Facebook comments. In short, we want them to be our friends.
Why Traditional Marketing Couldn’t Deliver
Once traditional marketing realized it was standing on a soapbox shouting messages that no one was listening to, it realized it needed to change. It was slow for a lot of companies. Phone book advertising companies still wanted us to take out ads, even though few people actually opened their phone books. Larger companies were resistant to “that social media thing.” But now they’re realizing that they’re no longer in control–consumers are.
Not So Much a Death as an Evolution
It’s hard to say that traditional marketing is completely dead. For small businesses that market to older generations, strategies like taking an ad out in a small-town diner menu might still deliver. But the fact that consumers are going online to research local businesses and large companies plays a large role in where companies must advertise.
Think of it as an evolution: marketing finally caught up to where consumers are. The two are working in tandem to create better relationships and brand loyalty.
Technology makes for exciting marketing opportunities. Each year we see new innovation (like the “daily deals bubble”), and then we see it fade away. Marketing is meant to change. Staying stagnant is a fate worse than, well, death.