How To Combine Traditional And Modern Marketing Techniques

The world of marketing has changed so much in the last few decades and there appears to have been a split. You’ve got the old school who are focused on the more traditional marketing concepts. The tried and tested methods that have done businesses well for years. Then you’ve got the new kids on the block, always preaching the importance of social media and digital marketing. While the traditionalists have adopted new forms of marketing, they still rely on those old concepts that a lot of the newer marketers don’t bother with, but which group is taking the right approach? The truth is, neither of them is. You shouldn’t be using one or the other. While it’s true that social media and digital marketing are unavoidably important, there are some core marketing concepts that you still need to be basing your strategy around. If you really want to maximise the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns you need to combine the two. Chances are, you haven’t been doing that, so here are some simple ways that you can integrate traditional and modern marketing strategies.

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TV Advertising

You’ve probably heard people saying that TV advertising is dead. Nobody watches live TV because they’re all watching Netflix and even if they are still using that dusty old TV, they’ll be fast forwarding through the adverts anyway. In reality, most of that is untrue. Of course, people are starting to use different platforms to view TV but so many people are still doing it the old fashioned way. Most people are using both. Taking all of your money out of TV advertising and putting it into digital marketing instead might seem like a sensible choice but it isn’t. Pepsi tried that and it failed massively. They ended up losing around $350 million and 5 percent of their market share in the first year of their new strategy. You should be using a combination of traditional TV advertising and newer forms of digital marketing so you’ve covered all bases.

Combine Marketing And Communications

Traditionally, marketing refers to the arm of the business that deals with sales, advertising, and brand awareness etc. Communications, also called PR, deals with direct interactions with customers. The problem is, there is a huge amount of crossover between those two now. When you’re advertising on social media, you’re also communicating with customers directly as well. If you’ve got two separate departments dealing with it, you aren’t going to have a cohesive marketing strategy. You need to accept that the two are intrinsically linked now and combine the two departments. When you’re dealing with SEO for example, your keywords need to be similar to language that your social media department are using when they speak with customers. They also need to be the same words and phrases that you’re using in your TV ads and on your posters.

The Internet As A Tool

The way that you consider the internet will guide your marketing campaign. Don’t think of it as this brand new entity that completely wipes out anything we knew about marketing, just think of it as another tool. The world might have changed, but the way that people think about and buy products haven’t, so use the old concepts and adapt them to the internet age rather than trying to start again from scratch.

Digital marketing has changed the way that we sell products, but don’t fall into the trap of thinking that none of those old methods are useful anymore.