Is Traditional Marketing Still Relevant for SMEs?
The popularity of digital marketing might make you think that traditional marketing is dead. This is far from the truth because there are lots of businesses that see great success with it. SMEs can spend a lot of time and creativity crafting the perfect traditional marketing campaign, with the main upside being that it can drive a lot of revenue for businesses of all sizes. If you are worried about leveraging traditional marketing because it is no longer relevant, here are some reasons why it still is.
It Helps You Connect With a Local Audience
While there are ways to make it more targeted, digital marketing typically targets an audience that is as broad as possible. It is not particularly suited for reaching and engaging with a local audience at a personal level.
Modern customers love businesses with which they can build relationships. Traditional marketing channels such as newspapers, TV, and radio content put you at the center of the community as well as your customer base. This allows your reach to feel more organic, less corporate, and authentic.
It Has a Huge Potential When Used Right
Lots of businesses have ditched traditional marketing channels such as direct mail marketing, instead opting for options like email and social media marketing. As that has happened, they have left a huge gap in traditional marketing that savvy SME business owners can take advantage of.
In the past, people were bombarded with tens if not hundreds of mail and other marketing materials. Most of them threw away this marketing material without reading it. These days, people expect important information or documents when they receive physical mail.
They are, therefore, more likely to open this material, and a percentage of them will be interested enough in your products and services that they will get in touch. Your marketing, sales, and onboarding teams can then take it from there to turn these people into paying customers.
It is Cost Effective and Less Time Consuming
Digital marketing can give you greater exposure than traditional marketing, especially if you are selling to customers beyond your borders. The problem is that these efforts might be expensive if you run ads or hire a large marketing team, for example.
Traditional marketing still gives you adequate exposure, with many options cheap enough for most SMEs. Various forms of traditional marketing have become quite affordable over the years, which makes this a great time to start looking into them.
Traditional Marketing Keeps Working for You
Let’s say you put up a billboard on a busy highway. You can be sure that the people driving by will continue seeing that billboard until you bring it down. Now compare that to email, online content, or even social media marketing.
When you create content for these channels, you need to keep bringing people back to them so they can see what you have posted recently. This means you need to keep creating new content and then reaching out to your audience to consume it.
This is not the best use of either your money or time.
Conclusion
While digital marketing has eclipsed traditional marketing as the internet has become more important and useful for a lot of people, there is still enough space for traditional marketing to thrive. Numerous SMEs are using this channel to drive revenues, increase their reach, and attract new customers, and your SME can do so too.