Marketing tactics evolve over time. From door-to-door marketing to television commercials to digital advertising, marketing techniques are changing. With the evolution of technology, marketers tend to adapt to new trends and use new means to promote their businesses, products, and services.
Consumers are becoming smarter and they have changed their research activities. So, get rid of the outdated marketing techniques. Let’s study these techniques in detail.
Print marketing
Print marketing has been historically a prominent advertising method. There are several types of print media to promote your business such as:
- Brochures
- Business cards
- Flyers
- Magazines
- Newspapers
- Pamphlets
However, in the digital era, it is not very effective. Now, the majority of people are using digital mediums to search for information regarding a business.
On other hand, promoting your business through print media is more time taking and effort-demanding.
For example, Entrepreneur.com reports that the cost of magazine advertisements in local or national magazines ranges from $500 to $20,000. It can cost up to $500,000 if you want your advertisement to appear on the magazine’s front page cover.
It is too costly. Now newspapers are also available online. You can access e-newspapers on websites to gain access to news and information.
Outdoor advertising
Outdoor advertising or out-of-home marketing lets marketers place advertisements on outdoor locations such as:
- Highways
- Offices
- Restaurants
- Shops
- Shopping Malls
- Toll Booths
- Traffic Signals
- Walls
You can advertise out of the home via billboards, flex boards, posters, and signages. Outdoor marketing is very prominent whenever anyone is:
- Driving on the road
- Walking on the street
- Visiting markets
It is going to put more eyes on the product. However, it is costly. Billboard advertising costs between $750 to $14,000 monthly. Digital billboard advertising costs range from $1,200 to $15,000 monthly.
You do not need to spend too much money on advertising in public places. You can easily spread your business to people in their homes by expanding your visibility on digital mediums. By spending less on digital advertising, you can reach more people instead of depending on billboards and posters.
Focusing solely on acquiring new customers
It is essential to grow your business by expanding your outreach to attract more buyers. Marketers should focus on increasing their customer base. You acquire new customers and convert them into sales by lead generation.
However, you should not solely focus on making new customers.
You should ensure that you are not ignoring your existing customers. Keep promoting your products and services to your existing customers as well. This marketing tactic is called retention marketing.
Invespcro research suggests that selling to your existing customers is probably 60-70% while selling to new customers is probably 5-20%.
You can effectively implement your retention marketing by engaging your buyers with:
- Advertisements of new products or services
- Individualisation via focusing on the needs of each customer via a different approach
- Personalisation based on available customer information and purchase history
Sticking to a single marketing channel
The number of digital channels has increased with the emergence of digital technology. Marketers who use only one channel for marketing purposes have less engagement and conversion rates compared to omnichannel marketers.
Modern-day buyers prefer you to engage them through multiple digital channels. Notable technological research and consulting firm Gartner expect 80% of B2B digital transactions to occur via digital channels by 2025.
Some of the multiple digital channels today for effective conversion rates and return on investment (ROI) include:
- Content marketing
- Email marketing
- Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising
- Search engine optimisation
- Influencer marketing
- Social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Twitter, and YouTube.
Advertising only for promotional purposes
Advertising on different channels such as social media platforms and email marketing has been very successful. However, customers grow tired if you just keep on selling your business or services. Most of the time people report such campaigns or emails as spam.
Your content on social media should not be just all about yourself. For example, if you are running a marketing campaign on either YouTube, Facebook, or emails, you need to engage your customer with your content. You can do that by:
- Asking questions in polls
- Conducting webinars
- Educating people about valuable information related to the industry
- Highlighting customer needs
- Presenting testimonials
For email marketing, you need to segment your audience and send personalised emails to each segment for better engagement.
Yellow Pages
Yellow pages are directories that contain a complete list of contact numbers of businesses printed on yellow paper. It is the exact opposite of white pages which contain a list of non-commercial numbers printed on white paper.
Companies used to advertise their businesses by featuring their ads in yellow pages to reach out to other businesses. However, using yellow pages is an outdated marketing tactic. Now you can easily advertise your business on Google Ads instead of paying up to $5,000/mo to advertise on yellow pages.
Cold calls
Cold calling is a process in which businesses provide leads to their sales representatives. They later call these leads to convince them to purchase their products or services.
However, cold calling is a very difficult and annoying process. 55% of the people do not even answer these calls as per Keller Center Research Report. Even if they answer, most of them do not even listen to the full sales pitch and hang up the call. Callers can also get irritated with this process.
Now, Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp have connected businesses to customers directly making cold calling an outdated process.
Television commercials
Television commercials (TVC) are a very tried and tested way to promote your business. Currently, there are 122.4 million television households in the United States. So, if you promote your business on national television stations, you can easily reach so many people. However, the average cost of advertising on national television is $104.7 thousand.
Instead of spending too much on commercials, you can easily boost your digital marketing campaigns on YouTube and Facebook. You can reach millions of people with a comparatively lesser amount.
Excessive keyword usage
Whenever you write content related to your business, you enter trending keywords to optimise your content for search engines. However, you need to make sure that you use your keywords only when relevant. There is no need to excessively use your keywords. It interrupts the reading process of a reader.
Try to use fewer instances of a keyword which is enough to optimise your content.
Conclusion
Digital marketing is the new norm in the current age since our entire world has become a global village. So, it is better to adapt to new marketing tactics for an effective conversion rate and return on investment.
