Is Traditional Marketing on Its Last Legs?
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Recently, we’ve had conversations with business owners concerned they could be missing out by not entering the social media universe with guns blazing. Should we carry on with what’s working now or, move away and embrace the shiny new shoes of social media?
We are not being helped in our decision-making process neither by the social media hype merchants – the ones that are telling us if we are still using direct mail and, writing press releases well frankly we are laggards.
Thankfully there are a number of reputable sages (including Seth Godin and Drayton Bird) joining the debate with a hefty dose of much-needed expert commonsense.
Let’s look at this through an objective lens.
Yes, social media is breathtaking. Businesses can reach out in seconds and touch customers and prospects with a richer, more frequent and informal dialogue. Provided the etiquette of social media is followed namely, ‘don’t sell to me, don’t broadcast to me, engage with me; build a relationship where we both benefit’ the relationships between buyer and seller can be enhanced.
However, in the business to business sector, it’s not quite so straightforward. We may be able to reach some of our audience through social media, provided they decide to find us and stick with us that is, but we are highly unlikely to reach all of them, in the right quantities and at the right time and to get them in the mood to talk business with us when we do find them. It’s a long haul exercise where any hope of an imminent quick win has to be abandoned in favour of a long-term relationship building process.
If traditional marketing is the cake, social media is the big fat cherry on top. By way of example, face-to-face networking is a traditional marketing channel that is often crucial in building trust. Are we going to jettison face-to-face networking in favour of clattering on a keyboard all day long pushing out a stream of messages in the hope that our followers, ‘likers’ and fans are poised to receive them? It’s unlikely, but we may be able to advance that potential relationship further by hooking up with our prospect on their preferred social networking site after that initial meeting.
Traditional marketing is not on its last legs. It’s just found some new friends to play with…
I agree. The new trends such as social networking are one to get in on with both feet in the water. They are too popular and user friendly not to. Definitely keep traditional marketing methods, as the saying goes, in terms of communication channels, “the more the merrier”. Some still read the flyers coming through the door, the emails, television ads, radio and telephone calls. The idea is to capture your audience through a channel they do use, so where one channel fails to work for one person, another might work for another.
Never rely solely on one form of marketing, especially those that are in trend. There is already evidence of social media forms such as Facebook showing some decline in popularity:
“Facebook, known for its meteoric rise in popularity, lost 1.5 million users in Canada in May. Facebook also reported a loss of approximately 6 million users in the United States in the same month.
Overall, Facebook gained 13.9 million users in April, and 11.8 million users in May – compared to a typical month in 2010 where the company gained 20 million users per month on average.”
Is Facebook losing popularity? Will another social networking site replace it like it replaced MySpace?
This is the question that suggests that trend are good while they last but never depend on them. Always keep traditional forms of marketing.
Working as a sales & marketing consultant, I can completely agree you Cliff. I have a number of clients who are not in the loop when it comes to online marketing and social networking, even though they know that it can be a successful strategy if used properly. More often than not, the main reason for this is lack of knowledge and practice. People with successful businesses who in the past have been market leaders have witnessed a decline in sales and competitors aggressively moving their way up. This is not necessarily because their product or service has changed, but simply because they are no longer reaching their full potential market.
As a consultant, it is my job to think laterally and build marketing strategies for individual businesses, but I am certainly finding that there is an increasing need for a mixed tactic plan in order to reach as many customers as possible.
There is lots of online and social media training with tools to aid people without little computer knowledge. Social media is not the key to success by any means, but it is definitely becoming more of vital strategy for businesses of all sizes. I think it’s interesting to be part of and to watch it continually grow and develop.