Why You Need Traditional Marketing Tactics

Companies that add traditional marketing tactics to their marketing mixes achieve exponential results over companies that only do digital marketing.

The world is enamored with digital marketing. Digital marketing tactics are the default tactics in clients’ consideration boxes. Companies like the ease of trackability and the seeming lower cost of digital marketing, and they don’t want to consider doing anything else.

For these reasons, the FrogDog team has grown adept at explaining the importance of including traditional tactics in your marketing mix if you want to amp up your marketing’s results.

Don’t believe us? Read on.

“Traditional Marketing Tactics” Defined

First, let’s define “traditional” marketing tactics. Digital tactics no longer need definition, after all: Social media marketing and advertising, web banner ads, search-engine keyword advertising, e-mail marketing, webinars, and the like have come to seem like the only marketing out there today.

And yet: Traditional marketing tactics are all around you and are working quite well. Traditional marketing tactics include broadcast advertising on digital and terrestrial radio and television, out-of-home advertising (posters and signs and billboards and the like), direct mail, flyers, conferences and events and meetings, in-hand advertising on promotional items and frequent-use materials, and so forth.

Of course, we should pause here and point out that though it seems like we’ve created a hard divide between traditional and digital marketing, the two disciplines connect in a way that makes them utterly interdependent. Advertising provides URLs that drive people to their web browsers. Posters provide QR codes that take people to phone apps and mobile sites. Events gather information from attendees via tablets that then links them into the digital marketing funnel. And the beat goes on.

Digital and traditional marketing cross-pollinate, and the combination of the two is far more powerful than either discipline used alone.

Traditional Marketing Tactics Work

FrogDog has achieved stand-out results from mixing traditional and digital tactics. For example, direct mail campaigns that we undertook recently tied into digital assets that we had built to ramp lead generation far beyond what digital tactics alone could have achieved.

These results align with industry data about direct mail: It’s one of the highest performing marketing tactics by response rate available today. (Read our article on the topic for details.)

Direct mail is just one of the high-performing traditional marketing tactics. Broadcast advertising on digital and terrestrial radio and television is going strong (and getting stronger, even). Out-of-home advertising—posters and signs and billboards—succeeds so well that there isn’t enough legal space to house it all.

And again: The beat goes on.

The Importance of the Marketing Mix to Success

Marketing works best when you create a “surround sound” of frequency and repetition around your target audience. The only way to create this surround sound effect is to appear in multiple formats and in multiple ways and through addressing multiple senses.

When your marketing takes on a multisensory factor—when it engages visual and auditory senses, yes, as well as emotional, tactile, olfactory, and physical-space senses—it becomes exponentially more powerful. Scientific research shows that the more senses you engage in your marketing, the more powerfully your message will stick and the longer it will stick.

Digital marketing alone—which can engage emotion, but which takes place entirely on a screen in pixel-form—is not multisensory and it will not achieve your desired marketing results. (Assuming that you expect your marketing to pay the dividends it could, based on the time and money you’ve planned to invest.)

“Surround Sound” Marketing is Complex

True: It’s a lot easier to execute a few digital tactics and call your marketing “done.” Revving up and keeping spinning multiple tactics across the digital and traditional spectra takes planning, coordination, and skill.

Therefore, FrogDog rarely recommends going it alone if you want marketing that sings, unless you have a massive internal marketing staff. (And if you do, you’re a rarity!)

Think you could use some help? Schedule a consultation with FrogDog today.