Traditional Marketing vs. Contemporary Marketing

When it comes to leads generation, my discussions with marketers mostly reveal that they use traditional methods like trade shows, email marketing, seminars, cold calls, advertising and telemarketing as their primary marketing approaches. These methods are called “outbound marketing” and involve the transmission of a marketing message in the hope that it would travel far and wide and reverberate with the needs of the target market. Well, my opinion is that outbound marketing approaches are losing efficacy for causes discussed below.

People Are Blocking Outbound Marketing Messages

Marketers blast the average consumer with more than 2,500 outbound marketing messages every day. Consumers don’t like the outbound marketing interruptions, so they are employing more effective approaches to block your message out. They are increasingly using methods like caller ID, Sirius satellite radio, spam filters and Tivo to dodge your forced marketing message.

People Have Lost Interest In Trade Shows And Seminars

Thanks to the advent of the Internet and allied services, more and more consumers are now using search engines, websites, social media and blogs to learn new things or shop for products and services. This is happening because the price of coordination in using the Internet is substantially lower than attending a seminar at a posh hotel or a trade show in another city.

How To Cater To The Changing Consumer Behavior?

Instead of spending thousands or millions of dollars on outbound marketing to deliver your message to consumers who are figuring out new ways to block you out, I support doing inbound marketing.

When you do inbound marketing, you actually help consumers interested in your products or services to find you. In other words, you help interested consumers to easily find you on the Internet. To do inbound marketing successfully, you should start by branding your website as the boss, or lead expert, in the relevant industry. Traffic would come to your website organically via search engines, blogs and social networks. I think that majority of marketers these days spend almost 90 percent of their time and effort on outbound marketing and 10 percent on inbound marketing. My opinion is that those percentages should change place.

I have come up with an analogy for traditional marketers. Making efforts to get the attention of potential consumers under outbound marketing is like lions aiming to hunt elephants in the forest. Remember, elephants lived in the forest some 20 years back, but they are apparently not there any longer. Those elephants have journeyed to the coastal region of Savannah, which in case of consumers is the Internet. So, instead of wasting your time, effort and money trying to hunt in the forest, I suggest opening a shop in the coastal area.

Read more: The Future Of Modern Marketing Is Human-Centered