Magazines ads are a traditional advertising method still effective today.
Princeton's WordNet defines "effective" as "able to accomplish a purpose." One of the key questions many marketing department personnel forget to ask themselves is: Just what is the purpose of their particular marketing campaign? Most marketing campaigns have the general goal selling a product. In some cases, getting something brand new out in the public eye is enough, but in others a more stringent focus needs to be placed on getting shoppers on the website, through the door or in the seats.
Direct Marketing and Interpersonal Networking
Direct marketing always has been a modestly successful approach to moving products, even as far back as the pre-industrial markets of ancient Egypt and Rome. Direct marketing involves any situation whereby a merchant representative personally engages a potential customer. This can take the form of a sales representative chatting with a prospective buyer or a door-to-door salesperson pounding the pavement. Adding an interpersonal networking aspect to the time-honored approach helps secure inter-business sales. For example, an office stationary salesperson might casually meet with an office manager at a publishing industry event where they exchange cards. After that initial exchange, there is a chance that either of the two parties might remember the positive interaction and use the card to follow up, forming a mutually beneficial business relationship.
Effective Examples of Traditional Advertisement
TV, print media, and to a lesser extent radio advertisements, are all fine examples of popular sounding boards for advertising campaigns in the past century. Each of these approaches to brand building and bolstering sales are still in use, which is proof enough for even the most ardent proponent of new media knows that sticking to the basics works. The downside of traditional media advertising is that getting the word out about a company typically takes a fairly substantial budget. One often overlooked form of traditional advertising is the use of well-placed posters, both on large billboards in heavily trafficked areas and inside of public transit, where a captive audience has little else to look at.
Taking a Marketing Campaign Online
Marketing goods and services online brings a new level of targeted media advertising into play, something that was virtually inconceivable to most business people before the digital revolution of the 1990s. Each human interest website offers a platform to serve advertisements directly to readers on subjects that interest them in a targeted way previously reserved for specialty magazines.
Tracking the Effect of Advertisements
A number of similar programs are able to track the effectiveness of online ad campaigns, with the most widely used tool for the job being Google Analytics. Individual website hosts often have proprietary traffic and referral monitoring software. Tracking the impact of a direct or traditional media campaign can be a little more difficult and typically requires a combination of consumer questionnaires and internal sales record keeping with spreadsheet applications such as Microsoft Excel or OpenOffice, an open-source equivalent.
Tags: Direct marketing, media advertising, traditional advertising, traditional media