Traditional marketing techniques still work, and still have their place, especially for traditional brick-and-mortar businesses. However, both fully-online and brick-and-mortar operations as well as hybrid business models can get a lot of attention and gain plenty of hot leads as well as direct sales from SEO campaigns.
Traditional Marketing
This includes all the classic techniques of addressing large audiences, completely or largely untargeted, to educate them about your goods and services, your brand story, or some other commercially relevant message. This might be via billboards, television adverts, direct mail campaigns or simply making sure the car blown up in this summer’s big superhero movie bears your badge proudly.
These techniques are often called ‘interruptive marketing’ since they interrupt the content your audience have turned up to experience – the TV show, the radio music, even that superhero movie – to deliver your message.
Does traditional marketing work? It can, but it is very expensive. Because it is so poorly targeted, you may end up telling your brand story to a thousand people who will never be in the market for your type of product for every potential customer you hit. In the end, the ROI for many traditional marketing techniques is actually negative, at least in the short term. In the long term, it does establish brand awareness pretty effectively.
SEO Marketing
SEO, and its closely related cousin content marketing, work to change the nature of your website itself. This is done so that Google and other search engines 1) detect your website, 2) understand what it is you do and what products and information you offer and, ideally, 3) put your website high on the list of results when people search for something you would like to sell them.
SEO is, above all else, targeted. It works by delivering your site (among many others) to the screen of someone who searched for a particular term or phrase. It also tends to build up over time, delivering results for years with very minimal upkeep, where traditional advertising usually has to be renewed often.
Isn’t SEO only effective for online purchases?
Not precisely. It would be more accurate to say that SEO can only be effective when part of the purchasing journey includes the internet or social media. The thing is, there is no such thing as a fully-offline purchase journey nowadays. If you are going out to eat later, you might check Google to see what is open nearby, and to get the number to ring for a reservation. Buying a car? Better check the reviews to find out which of this years’ models have the best ratings. Buying a TV or washing machine? Same.
People can, and therefore do, research almost every purchasing decision before they buy. They might not actually buy off your website, but if you used good SEO practices, they heard the story you wanted them to hear when they looked up your products.
In the end, traditional advertising techniques work well in their place, and SEO works well in its place…. But SEO’s place is virtually everywhere, while traditional methods become more and more isolated from people’s everyday lives… well… every day.
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