In 2014, Use PPC & Inbound Marketing instead of Traditional Marketing

If you haven't noticed, we've been sharing a lot of information on sponsored search engine advertising lately. One reason for this is because we see way too many businesses that are stuck in an 80s and 90s mentality, where they are more than willing to spend a fortune on old marketing tactics that have fallen off in effectiveness over the past 15 years.

I want be clear. There are certainly limited uses for newspaper, phone book, magazine, radio, etc... advertising. Limited uses. Again, it's almost 2014. I don't care how much smoke your newspaper advertising rep blows your direction. Or what story your radio advertising rep tells you about prospects repeatedly needing to hear your spot. These old tactics do not have the conversion-generating potential that modern, inbound marketing tactics do. Use PPC, Inbound Marketing instead of Traditional Marketing.

Old School, Interruption Marketing Tactics Don't Stack Up

Do you honestly have any idea how many calls/sales you've gotten from your phone book ad? Highly doubtful. My guess is few to none. Why? Because it's almost 2014 and people use phone books to start campfires. Why leaf through a phone book when you can quickly search online?

Modern tactics are supported by solid data. Data that you can monitor every single day. Real impression and visibility numbers, along with actual conversion data that can be tied to each tactic. With web marketing, we know exactly how many visits to your website were a result of a social media post versus pay-per-click click-throughs versus organic search engine traffic.

With the prevalence of mobile devices, your sponsored advertisements can now be click-to-call ads. With all of the data available, we know exactly how many times an ad generated a phone call.

We can also gain solid insights into which tactics most positively impact your bottom line, and how to improve the others. They also allow for much greater flexibility. Want to feature a new product or service? No need to arrange a script to be written, recorded and scheduled into the radio lineup, and umpteen plays of the spot before someone notices. With inbound marketing tactics, you can make a decision to push a product and start getting leads online 5 minutes later.

Please Consider The Following:

• The volume of interruption marketing messages in our life has increased exponentially
• Consumers are getting really good at mentally blocking out these marketing messages
• Satellite radio and online music services have drastically impacted the effectiveness of local radio advertising. Additionally, radio ads are darn expensive.
• DVR makes watching TV commercials a thing of the past
• Physical newspaper subscription numbers continue to drop and the readership is aging
• Billboards are expensive and are too easy to ignore
• Phone books = door stops. It's almost 2014, people search online.
• Consumers are more proactively looking for products and services. Not by driving around looking for billboards, listening for radio ads, or leafing through newspapers.

A Client Success Story

One of our clients is a home builder that's been building houses for almost 20 years. In fact they have built over 200 homes. For years they advertised in the many phone books, newspapers and and radio stations in their region. These tactics worked when they were getting started. Over time, their costs kept growing and the results kept declining. They got to the point where they had to build a house a year just to pay for their phone book advertising. The worst part was, they couldn't tie a single lead to their phone book ads.

Finally, they had had enough. We developed a website for them and within the 1st 6 months, they had more highly qualified leads than they had gotten for years through traditional marketing tactics. They now average 1 lead per week, and they don't do pay-per-click, social media or email. Those leads come from good old SEO and an effective website. They no longer waste money on interruption tactics that simply don't work in this day and age.