What is traditional advertising?

When we talk about “traditional” advertising, we are talking about advertising that appears in the traditional media. This includes things like:

• Direct mail marketing (such as brochures, postcards, flyers, and other printed material)
• Print ads in newspapers and magazines
• Radio ads
• TV commercials
• Billboard ads 

A common misconception is that many of these traditional marketing strategies are “dead” or “irrelevant” in today’s digital world. However, the reality is that there still very much remains a place for this type of marketing.

How does traditional advertising differ from digital advertising?

Before we get into the benefits of traditional advertising, let’s first look at how this differs from digital advertising. 

In today’s increasingly digital world, digital marketing is often one of the first things that comes to mind when people think of “advertising”. Digital advertising (or online marketing) is a type of advertising where you market your business online through various platforms and channels, such as:

• Search engine optimisation (where you improve your website’s ranking in search engines, so that your site shows up as one of the first results for relevant keywords)
• Paid search engine marketing (where you pay for your website to appear at the top of relevant results in search engines)
• Social media marketing (where you post on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, TikTok, LinkedIn, YouTube, or other social media platforms to promote your business)
• Paid social media ads (where you pay for your posts to be displayed to certain demographics on social media)
• Influencer marketing (where you pay an “influencer” in your niche to post about your product)
• Digital ads (also known as “display ads” or “Google ads”, where visual advertisements are displayed as either banner or sidebar ads on websites that are similar to yours)
• Email marketing (when you send promotional emails to customers who have subscribed or signed up to receive marketing emails from you)

Arguably, digital marketing is one of the most popular marketing tools used by businesses today. This is because it allows you to reach a large number of potential customers for a relatively low cost, making it accessible to most companies regardless of their marketing budgets. You can find out more about digital marketing here.

Why is traditional advertising important?

Traditional advertising shares many of digital advertising’s benefits – for example, that it can help you to generate new leads, and find new customers within your target demographic. It also plays an important role in building brand awareness, increasing sales, and turning first-time buyers into loyal repeat customers. 

Traditional advertising also has several benefits over digital advertising. For instance, it can be personalised and tailored more closely to targeted audiences (for example, by taking out a print ad in a local newspaper or distributing mail-outs within the specific area you want to target). By comparison, digital marketing is often more generalised within the demographic you are targeting.

Many also view traditional advertising as being more trustworthy than online advertising. 

The main downside of traditional advertising is that its success can be more difficult to measure, as you do not have access to the same in-depth metrics and analytics that you would have with digital advertising. 

Traditional advertising can also sometimes be slightly more costly than digital advertising, depending on the type of media you are using. 

What does the traditional advertising process look like?

At Tomedia, we believe in the value of both traditional and digital marketing. That’s why we specialise in strategies that incorporate best of both worlds, whilst offering you the best possible bang for your buck. Whatever your marketing budget, we’ll help you to maximise your results for the lowest possible spend. 

Here’s what the traditional advertising process looks like at Tomedia:

1. Initial consultation

During our initial meeting with you, we’ll start by talking about your current marketing strategy. For example:

• What does your marketing strategy looks like at present? 
• Are you completely new to traditional advertising, or do you do some kind of traditional marketing at present?
• If so, what types of traditional marketing do you currently use, and what kinds of results are you achieving? Are there any you’d like to improve upon? 
• Are you wanting to integrate digital marketing into your marketing strategy at all, or are you wanting to keep it strictly traditional? 

We’ll also talk about what your goals are for your traditional marketing campaign. For example, are you wanting to attract new customers, increase sales, improve your customer loyalty rates, or something else? 

We’ll also look at your target audience. This will help us to understand who you are wanting to target, and what the best way will be to target your ads to ensure you are reaching them (e.g. by location or age group).

We’ll then provide you with a bit of a rundown of the different traditional marketing techniques available – including direct mail marketing, print ads, radio and television ads, and billboard ads. We’ll also discuss how each one might work for your business. 

At this point, we’ll also ask you about your preferences – for example, are there are any techniques in particular that you’d prefer to try, or any that you’d prefer not to use?

Finally, we’ll talk about your budget, and how much you’re wanting to spend. We will always work with this budget in mind, and find the best way to get you maximum value for your money.

2. Strategy development

After our initial meeting, we’ll go away and start building your traditional marketing strategy based on your goals, preferences, and requirements.

We’ll put together a plan, which will detail our recommendations for the traditional marketing strategies you should be using, and the kind of results that you might expect from each. We’ll also prepare a timeline for implementation.

We’ll then ask for your feedback on this, and make any adjustments required.

3. Asset creation

Once you’ve approved our strategy, we’ll get started creating any assets that will be needed to execute your marketing campaign. 

The assets that we create will depend on the type of traditional marketing strategy that you have chosen. For example, if you’ve decided to focus on direct mail marketing, we will create brochures, flyers, postcards, or other printed materials for you to distribute. If you’ve opted for a radio or TV commercial, we’ll start working on a script for this. 

We’ll always come back to you for your feedback on these assets before implementation. At this stage, you’ll have the opportunity to give your feedback, and we’ll make any changes needed until you’re 100% happy with them.

4. Implementation

Once your assets are all ready to go, it’s time to start implementing your traditional marketing strategy. At this point, we’ll start distributing your ad (for example, by arranging for your flyer to be mailed out if you’ve opted for direct mail marketing, or booking air time for your radio or TV ad).

Then, it’s time to launch!

5. Post-launch

Once your traditional marketing strategy has launched, we’ll continue monitoring it to see how well it’s performing over time. This part of the process is ongoing, and will be repeated by us on an ongoing basis to ensure that we are achieving the best possible results for your campaign.

Each month, we’ll prepare a detailed report for you. This will outline how your traditional ads are performing (for example, has an increase in sales, new customers, or engagement been noticed since launching the campaign?)

In this report, we’ll also identify any shortcomings (for example, if part of the campaign is not performing as well as we expected), and put together a list of recommendations for improvements. We’ll ask for your feedback and thoughts on this as well.

If you agree, we’ll implement these changes to refine your marketing strategy, optimise the performance of your campaigns, and enable continuous improvement moving forward. 

Get started

For marketing campaigns that combine both traditional ads and digital ads, Tomedia is your one-stop-shop. Whether you’re a large or small business, we can help you to develop a targeted marketing strategy to put your business on the fast track to success.

Get in touch with us today to find out more about how we can help you with your traditional advertising needs.