How to Use Traditional Marketing Techniques to Boost Your Business

Don’t leave out traditional marketing techniques when trying to promote your business, many focus solely online and miss the bigger picture.

In the marketing world, there are thousands of businesses and firms that are currently enamored by digital marketing and the fantastical ways in which online advertising can target the exact consumer you’re looking to bring in close contact with your products. It’s a marvelous development for marketing teams, replete with marvelous applications and tools, but it’s not everything. There still, certainly, a place for traditional marketing techniques to support growing ecommerce businesses or other businesses that are digital-first.

In this article, you’ll learn which of these traditional marketing techniques are most effective for your business.

Word-of-Mouth

The best and most unique companies can rely on a certain amount of word-of-mouth marketing to get them additional business. Why? Because their business is offering something exceptional, something worthy of mention in a conversation. You may also be providing a level of service, or a quality of product, that customers cannot help but mention to their friends and family. In either case, you’re being talked about and that’s good.

While there is no set way to strategize a word-of-mouth marketing campaign, far less to measure one, the factors that get people talking about products should be a part of your thinking when designing your product and your customer’s journey with it.

You could, of course, use a sly old trick, used by many digital-first companies: invite a friend to receive a discount on your next purchase. This both doubles your customer base, and encourages repeat custom with your existing customer, all at once.

Conference and Trade Shows

The next traditional marketing campaign idea that could benefit your business is in trade shows – those physical locations in which companies under a certain industry umbrella set up their stall and show off their wares. While you may find that you generate little business and contacts from these shows, it’s far better to be seen than to be missed at such events. Meanwhile, if you’re working with personable salespeople, you’ll be able to better sell your products to a wide variety of the visitors to such events, perhaps even hammering out lucrative deals once the show is concluded.

There’s no doubt that booking your spot at these trade shows could help your business jump to the next level, and preparation for them should be a top priority as the date draws closer on the calendar. Make sure you’re set up with a 10×10 trade show booth that looks the part, with your company graphics printed on the sides. You should also bring along your brightest and best to these shows, training them in what to say, who to speak to, and what to upsell over the course of the weekend.

Posters and Flyers

Town centers and city streets used to be awash with flyers and posters from hundreds if not thousands of different companies; now, these have all begun to land in email inboxes, or appear as banner adverts on newsfeeds. But in the space left by the migration to digital marketing, there are distinct opportunities for innovative campaigns to fill this space – and at incredibly low costs. You should consider one of the following options that may match your company’s aspirations:

• Distributing flyers outside university and college campuses for young consumers
• Putting up billboards at major intersections and place where traffic is common
• Using posters across towns that you wish to penetrate with your products
• Sending team members into towns and cities with flyers to discuss your business

While the returns from these initiatives may be small, it’s certainly worth experimenting with marketing in this way, as you’ll be offering a personal, tailored vision of your company, your brand, and your products to people on the streets across the country.

Email Marketing

Email marketing gets a bad rap from the innovative digital marketing community – a traditional source of marketing that has since descended into that bottomless pit that we call the spam folder. Nonetheless, with new email marketing software being released all the time, much of it set up to automate emails to your registered customers, you’re able to directly contact each and every customer who handed over their email details, with offers and incentives to spend more with your brand.

This is a cheap and effective way to boost your sales across the short term – and, if you’re looking to push out seasonal stock in preparation for new stock’s arrival, it’s a great way to share deals and special offers that’ll help you do that. Keep in mind that blitzing individuals with emails is a sure way to turn them off and leave them disgruntled with your brand, so send selectively, and at the right time to suit your product circulation.

Television Adverts

Considering the audience of terrestrial and satellite television tends to be older than your regular web user, television marketing has opened up once again as a cost-effective way to reach older consumers that may be interested in your products. In the last five years, television adverts have become increasingly cheap, as marketing fees have increased online. It’s the perfect time, therefore, to make the leap into advertising on TV, and you’ll not need a gigantic budget to create your video content, providing you go to the right agency to produce one for you.

If you’re marketing products or services that apply to the over 35 age band, you may experience significant successes in the televisual advertising world, where most consumers still perceive adverts of television to be trustworthy and professional expressions of a business’ might in its given industry.

You will also be able to decide which time slot your advertisement shows at, which, after researching the demographics that watch certain shows, will further narrow your advert’s viewership towards the audience of consumers you most wish to target. Search online for TV marketing tips to help you formulate a plan for your campaign on the airwaves, learning how to be format and approach this traditional medium for marketing.

These tips aim to draw your attention briefly away from the cutting edge of digital marketing – much of it crowded and expensive – to look at more ‘traditional’ forms of marketing that can still help to grow your brand, in turn boosting business and lifting profits in 2020 and beyond.