traditional offline marketing methods

Marketing – Respect Your Elders In Respect Your Elders, Stein and Delvaney (2012) make a case for traditional, offline marketing techniques. They predominantly make the case that these can serve as a complement to digital techniques, and they support their argument with a number of key points. The first is that while everybody seems to have fully embraced digital marketing techniques, this has left offline techniques less saturated than they were before.

The second point the authors make is that markets respond differently to different types of marketing, and there are certain advantages that offline techniques have over digital techniques. The authors cite in particular that fostering brand loyalty is easier with offline modes of reaching the customer. Digital versus Traditional Marketing Schwarzl and Grabowska (2015) provide an overview of some of the principles of digital marketing strategies, but in doing so they highlight a key factor in the importance of offline marketing techniques.

First, they readily admit that offline techniques are still widely used, despite the popularity and growth of online. But they also highlight the concept of the buyer's journey. The basic concept of attention-interest-desire-action implies a multi-stage process for the buyer's journey for many products and services.

While a company that is uniquely focused on digital marketing is generally going to assume that because all of these steps can take place online that they should, the reality is that for many brands, consumers engage with the brand in a number of different ways. In some cases, consumers are engaging with the brand in non-digital ways, and that provides an opportunity to incorporate more traditional marketing techniques into different stages of the buyer's journey.

Conventional techniques, for example, might prove more effective in gaining attention if you are in an industry where almost all marketing is conducted digitally. The rest of the buyer's journey might take place online, but attention is achieved through an offline, traditional technique.

The Role of Data in the Digital vs Traditional Discussion One of the perceived appeals of digital marketing, aside from its rapid growth and new means of reaching people (which often delivers a different audience) is the fact that digital usually also offers a lot of metrics that are easy to gather in volume, and at low cost. Measuring is just as important in offline transactions, but the lower degree of visibility with respect to interactions (i.e.

you don't really know who saw that TV ad) makes offline marketing less appealing in a world of data-driven marketing. This is perhaps one of the reasons why Stein & Delvaney feel that offline strategies can be highly effective. First, there are still metrics for offline, and they have been used for decades. Second, pricing something like an online ad is precise, so there is little room for a company to open up a huge gap between acquisition cost and customer net lifetime value.

Offline, there is more room for such arbitrage if the advertiser knows more about customer lifetime value and cost of new customer acquisition than its partners. Serpico and Ruggieri (2015) make a valuable point in discussing the differences between digital and offline marketing, that a mix can offer a blend of different types of metrics, and of course can serve two completely different markets.

Xu, Frankwick & Ramirez (2016) explore this concept of data, because there is an underlying preference in modern marketing for digital in part because of the lure of big data analytics. But for many smaller companies, they will never really have the data set that they need in order to achieve such analytics mastery. More traditional techniques for gathering and analyzing data are going to be just as effective.

The authors recommend what they term as a fusion approach, wherein traditional methods are combined with big data analytics, and insights from both are utilized to help make marketing decisions. By taking more of a fusion approach, either digital marketing is seen as a complement to more traditional techniques, or vice versa, probably depending on what business the company is in.

Brand Loyalty Circling back to the idea that Stein and Delvaney (2012) presented that digital marketing techniques were less likely to engender brand loyalty, the authors showed data that things like interpersonal interactions are important to brand loyalty, and therefore must be a part of the marketing conversation. Lewis and Ling (2017) present a counterpoint to this argument.

They argue that mass media marketing – the most visible form of traditional marketing – does little to foster loyalty, because there is often no direct contact between the company and the consumer, especially if the company retails through third party channels. In digital, there is often a much greater chance of direct, personal interactions between consumers and companies. Digital provides and invites such interactions.

This means that a company has more opportunity to build its brand, and thus brand loyalty, and is probably why many companies with a strong digital focus have people who are specifically in charge of the brand, as a sub-unit within marketing, as a means of managing all of these different touchpoints and delivering a strong, consistent brand experience across all interactions with customers. Pappas (2015) also notes that for many consumers, trust in online interactions is lower than for offline. This again has a couple of interesting implications.

Pappas writes that perceived risk for online transactions is often channel specific. For some industries, and some companies, there is greater trust. But trust in general is harder to earn online, especially when there is a lack of prior familiarity with the brand. This study highlights that offline strategies can resonate more, at least with consumers, and can be an effective means to build trust in a brand, even if ultimately the sale is going to be completed online.

Offline techniques can therefore be leveraged to build trust, even for companies that do most of their marketing in the digital realm. Know Your Market The old maxim of knowing your market should still hold true, which is one of the points that Stein and Delvaney are trying to get across. The rise of digital marketing is tied to the rise of digital media usage. Tiago and Verissimo (2014) note that this is simply meeting the market where it is.

But any company would be well-advised not to simply pursue digital marketing for its own sake, but to honestly evaluate what the best methods for reaching the audience are. If offline channels are the most effective – and for some audiences they might still be – then those are the channels that should be utilized. This does not mean that it is okay for a marketer to lag on digital adoption – one study showed.