Many people who run businesses for a long time become routine or have habits that may not be the best way to decide on the most effective or productive strategies when it comes to marketing. What worked in 1980 or 1990 or even 2000 may not work today.
As we all know, times have changed and with them so have consumer purchases and purchasing preferences. Whether your customer is an individual or another business, decisions about what to buy, how much to pay, where to get it, and how to pay for it have been greatly affected by the Internet.
Years ago, if you wanted to buy a used car, you probably would have taken the classifieds section of the newspaper and scanned the corresponding listings. The same applied to real estate. If you were looking for a job, where did you look? Of course, the classified ads in the newspaper.
What about clothes, gifts, jewelry, golf clubs, books, or even shoes? Well, you’d probably head to the mall for a grueling day of browsing, asking a salesperson questions, trying things on, and loading shopping bags into your car.
What about tax services, medical consultation, planning a night in a good restaurant or pet care? Entertainment equipment, car insurance, office supplies, or finding a local plumber? We used to pick up the yellow pages for all sorts of things we needed. Remember those huge books full of fine print that list everything under the sun?
But we live in a brave new world. Nowadays, practically everyone buys everything online. Not only that, we use our credit cards to pay and receive everything at our homes or businesses for maximum convenience.
So how has that impacted how we reach our markets? Enormously! If you’re still placing classified ads in the newspaper or buying expensive display ads in the yellow pages, you need to take a step back and reevaluate your decisions, which may be a little out of date.
Instead, you should take advantage of all the free “yellow pages” listing directories available online. It might take some time to set up, requiring you to write a few short announcements (also known as paragraphs or “sound clips”) about your business, but they’re worth it for a couple of reasons. First of all, most people now use the Internet to find contact information for whoever or whatever they want to contact. And it’s impossible to know which yellow pages they’ll use, so you need to appear in all of them. But more importantly, if you have a website, which you should, all those listings that often include free links to your website will help you with your SEO or search engine optimization. (That means the time you spend putting up free listings will pay off handsomely by boosting your Google search ranking higher in the search results if someone is looking for your products or services online.)
I’m sure all the yellow pages sales reps won’t appreciate my suggestions here. But they’re not the only ones whose print products have fallen out of favor. I am still predicting the coming demise of the print newspaper and many magazines, just as much as I still enjoy sitting down to read the printed page when I have a few minutes. It’s probably just an old habit that I’ll have to break before it breaks me. First of all, as we get older our eyesight gets worse, and seeing that tiny guy on paper is a lot harder than it used to be twenty years ago. Since I spend most of my days staring at my computer monitor, I take advantage of the enlarged type feature which makes it much easier to read. And while I consider the little time I spend reading actual magazines and newspapers a rare moment of luxury, continuing to do so in the future will likely only take place online or via electronic tablets or e-reading devices.
This means that if you run a business, your advertising media must change as well. While you may feel that you still reach the target audience you are looking for through a print newspaper ad, which has undoubtedly become much more affordable compared to the fees charged in the past, you may change your mind once you explore the logic behind Internet advertising. . Online text ads, in addition to banner ads (display “billboards” on the Internet), appearing on properly planned subject searches that you control with pre-placement keyword decisions, are the modern and perhaps superlative method of destination marketing. In the same way that we used to buy mailing lists to reach a certain demographic that we appealed to through direct mail, today we can reach the markets we want by appearing within the Internet search topic. Granted, this is still pretty new, but it’s evolving more as each day goes by, clearly like the future of marketing.
Call me old-fashioned, but I have to say that direct mail can still be much more successful in its ability to get into the hands of a prospective customer compared to trying to get the click of a mouse off your customer’s scattered attention across busy results. Google search. page! The advantage here is that direct mail, if designed effectively, has the power to keep the recipient engaged with graphic influences of color, visual imagery, and size and font selection. By comparison, the inline text ad is just that, just text, and it looks like any other text ad on the Google page, giving you no more advantage in driving a click than any other. Whether the direct mail piece is opened, read and responded to or immediately dismissed without looking at it remains the challenging factor for marketers around the world. As with investing, there is no magic formula. To give a little guidance, if you’re marketing to everyone everywhere, perhaps online text ads might make sense because of the sheer number of people likely to see your ad. That’s as long as your location choices are in a popular area of interest. If your goal is too small, those numbers can drop considerably. While it’s also possible to appeal to a small market in a small geographic area through online text ads, doing so successfully may require some diversification and support from other types of traditional marketing. At least until the Internet is the only marketing medium, or until Google is toppled from its throne of Internet infallibility.
With the proliferation of ways to enjoy the vast entertainment industry that includes radio, television, movies, videos, games and more, to name a few, investing marketing dollars in the right singular medium in a target market has become much more difficult. . Trying to stretch your budget to attract the audience you want to reach can be frustrating with all the options, distractions, and short attention spans of most entertainment seekers. From a marketing standpoint and a history of 35 years of experience, my advice would be to save those dollars very carefully before making a hasty decision on where to spend.
While I admit that the new places have replaced the old, some of the old options still reach certain holdouts who refuse to accept today’s new technologies. Though few and far between, there are some markets that still respond to traditional yellow pages, newspapers, magazines, and other forms of advertising, which may warrant maintaining a judicious presence within such media. It’s hard to argue the merits of buying the back cover of phone books when thousands upon thousands will be delivered to countless homes, even if they are seen only once all year. The sheer numbers of that marketing reach are staggering. But doing it blindly in the future would be irresponsible, if not downright wasteful, when there is now talk of “no-deliver” lists being added to the “do-not-call” lists.
And when high-profile newspaper ads sell for a fraction of the cost they once did, temptation sometimes trumps good judgment just for the momentary thrill of dominating the newspaper page for pennies. Any response is considered serious.
This leads me to conclude that we are in a period of marketing limbo: some strategies are coming out, but the door hasn’t slammed shut yet. The new strategies are a bit intimidating, but the old ones are much less effective. If you can strike a balance between the two until time explains survival of the fittest, marketing budgets will be preserved a bit longer and perhaps maintain a semblance of success despite the need to navigate seas of confusion, unease and obsolescence.