Think about the costs of a television ad or even a yearlong spread in the Yellow Pages. The fees that you pay for these marketing solutions are only good for a short time. Once that commercial is no longer aired, or the Yellow Pages is outdated, your advertising expenditure is virtually wasted.
Customers are becoming tired of being marketed to, and this will likely only become worse. Customers fast forward through commercials using their DVR’s and use ad-block software to keep from seeing ads online. You need to avoid being a nuisance to you potential customers.
With the old methods of advertising, you have a short time to grab an audience’s attention. You may have to resort to attention-grabbing headlines, aggressive sales tactics, and persuasion. Is that the message you want to send?
The Yellow Pages, local business guides, and even your local classifieds are simply a dated form of advertising. There is little space to provide information about your business. What if you instead, you created a blog that addressed fundamental questions of your target audience?
When you advertise with a billboard, for instance, it is impossible to know when you get results from that billboard. On the other hand, an eBook or article marketing campaign offers a much easier way to analyze your results.
You’ll find that with traditional marketing it is easy to fall into the trap of “one more directory” or “what about a radio ad?” Before you know it, you may have a collection of fragmented marketing campaigns in place that provide a small return on investment—costing you money AND business.