Traditional Marketing Methods That Are Still Very Effective

The basic of marketing is promoting the right product to the right audience. There is no point in marketing a comb to a bald man, but you can promote hair growth oil to the bald man. If you want to market to rural areas, promote the products that make sense to the rural folks, if you want to market to the teens, promote the products that the teens find useful.

Whether your business is online or offline, you need to market through an online medium or a traditional medium. Sometimes marketing might not be needed for an offline business. For example, if yours is the only shop or one of the few shops in the locality and if you are selling essentials, you may not need to spend money on marketing. Let’s say you have a convenience store and there is no other store within a radius of 5 km, you do not have to market. But if there is a competition, you will have to market, now you have two choices, either to market traditionally or to market through the internet.

Promoting Online Businesses With Traditional Media

Marketing needs a channel. You can either market traditionally through TV, Radio, newspapers, etc., or market through the internet. In order to market through traditional marketing, you will have to choose a media that is used by your potential customers. The same applies to internet marketing. Advertise on the right platform.

Actually, traditional advertising has a better reach compared to online advertising. Online media can reach only when there is internet and electricity. However, Radio, a popular traditional advertising platform can read hinterland even where there is no internet or electricity (you can power radios through battery or even solar energy). The newspaper does not even need electricity or a battery. The ads printed in the newspaper remain as long as the newspaper copies remain with us. Therefore, printed ads are considered more effective than any other ads. The first printed ads were made in China over 2000 years ago. However, with the evolution of the internet, traditional advertising became expensive.

Traditional Marketing Methods

You can use traditional media to promote your online store. For example, you can advertise on radio, TV, newspapers, billboards, banners, flyers, display boards, etc. If you watch Indian TV channels, you will see that stores like eBay and Amazon are widely advertised on TV. Even Google, facebook, and Whatsapp ads appear on TV channels.

I think billboards in public places are the most effective method of traditional advertising. This is also one of the low-cost advertising methods because it cost less to advertise on billboards compared to running ads on TV or in newspapers. Billboards can be placed anywhere in the city where people gather in large numbers.

Telemarketing

Telephone marketing or telemarketing as it is called is a very effective marketing method. Since these days most people have their own mobile phone, the reach for telemarketing is very huge. There are two different ways of telemarketing: voice calls and text messaging.

Research has shown that the chances of picking up the phone or reading text messages are very high. Here is a report published on the adobe blog in 2015. It is an old report but it clearly tells the effectiveness of telemarketing. According to the report email, open rates are 20-30 percent, however, 98 percent of SMS are checked, and over 90 percent SMS are read within 3 seconds.

One of the major disadvantages of telemarketing is related to spamming. The telemarketers call random numbers and try to sell the products. Instead of collecting phone numbers from the people who are actually interested in the products and services the telemarketing companies are selling, these telemarketing companies buy telephone numbers from various telecommunication companies and their marketers call these random people. Since telemarketers bother people a lot, telemarketing has got the bad name of spamming. These days most people do not even receive calls from unrecognized numbers, even when they take the call, they will soon hand up; therefore, telemarketing has a poor success rate.

First published on Trendri, in author's name.