POV

In this era of doing business online, it's easy to hyper-focus on popular digital marketing mediums such as email or social media. You might be missing out on profitable opportunities born from tried and true methods that many entrepreneurs have forgotten about. Once you learn about traditional marketing methods and how you can pair them with recent technology, you will have new avenues for reaching clients with your business.

Remember the Forgotten Marketing Options

Advertising is all about catching an audience's attention by putting attractive marketing material in front of them. Even when many people spend most of their time staring at screens, you can still reach them with old-school flyers, billboards or even yard signs. Purchasing advertising space is still a worthwhile investment, and you can work toward partnering with other local businesses to carry your flyers or business cards for customers to see.

These traditional mediums work surprisingly well in tandem with digital methods—if people like what they see, they may be inclined to follow your social media accounts if you mention them in the advertising. To get even more ideas on expanding your marketing efforts, consider asking your target audience how they discover your type of product or services and research those new options.

Craft Your Marketing Strategy

Before you run out to buy up the first physical ad space you encounter, it is important to craft a plan for marketing that dovetails with your business needs and budget. Straight away, you need to establish your marketing goals—that means asking yourself some probing questions. Are you trying to build brand awareness? Are you launching a new product or service to complement your existing offerings? Try to pinpoint exactly what you are trying to achieve with your marketing budget.

Next, you’ll want to try to understand as much as possible about your target market—who they are, what distinguishes them, and what they are looking for. This is where market research comes in. Market research is vitally important for marketing, but it is also useful for business forecasting; having a good idea of the size of your target market enables you to better forecast your growth potential.

Once you’ve established your goals and targets, you can begin the customer-facing phases of marketing. While traditional print advertising and social media advertising are the most common examples that tend to come to mind, there are other marketing activities that contribute to your overall objectives. For example, making you or your employees available as experts for professional speaking engagements can generate a significant amount of relevant brand awareness at little or no cost.

Create Eye-Catching Advertising

It's one thing to divert your marketing budget toward some traditional advertising methods, but it's another thing to make sure those efforts pay off. There has been much research into what captures attention and inspires people to interact with a product. Potential customers react well to catchy slogans, irresistible offers, and attractive graphics. Each of these eye-catchers is a skill in its own right that can only be honed through further experience or education in copywriting, business, or graphic design. For effective results in the short term, many entrepreneurs will find it worthwhile to hire professionals in the aforementioned fields.

Work With Professionals

Many skilled professionals can be hired on a freelance basis to aid your marketing efforts. Online job boards make it easy to search for copywriters who specialize in advertising or slogans and graphic designers who create brand collateral. As a business owner sharing design ideas with a designer or marketer, you might think that compressing JPG files makes them easier to email. However, this can degrade image quality, so it might be preferable to use a JPG-to-PDF converter instead. These tools convert multiple JPG files to a single PDF, so you won't have to attach numerous images to a single email.

Integrate Digital Marketing

An effective traditional marketing strategy pairs well with digital marketing. To get the most out of this hybrid methodology, you can hire professionals or influencers experienced in social media. You can use online job platforms to compare reviews and rates for various influencer marketing agencies that specialize in the services you'll need to run a successful social media campaign. The leads you create through traditional marketing will lead to more engagement if they point to an online presence with a well-planned content strategy.

The modern advancements of digital marketing have not rendered traditional methods obsolete. Instead, conventional advertising can now be used in new ways that pair with social media and other online marketing strategies. Incorporate some physical advertising into your business plan, and you'll reach the clients that you need for your ventures to thrive.