What Is Traditional Marketing? 4 Traditional Marketing Examples

Traditional marketing encompasses any type of advertising or outreach unrelated to digital media. The vast majority of successful large and small businesses use a hybrid form of both digital and traditional marketing strategies to stay competitive in today’s world.

Prior to the advent of the internet and its rapidly ensuing ubiquity throughout culture, the only type of marketing that existed was traditional marketing. If you’ve ever handed someone a business card, paid for a print ad, or even advocated for your business face-to-face with another person, you’ve engaged in traditional marketing.

The main difference between traditional and digital marketing is the former does not use digital channels for outreach while the latter does. Traditional marketers are more likely to rely on print media, television, radio, and so on, whereas digital marketing prioritizes email content marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), and the like in marketing plans. Most of the time, companies prefer to use a combination of both styles in their marketing campaigns.

There are numerous types of traditional marketing you might find useful for your own advertising purposes. Here are four examples to consider:

1. 1. Billboards: Entrepreneurs can reach an entire local audience by setting up a billboard in the right location. In a high-traffic area, hundreds or thousands of new people might see your ad every single day. The same goes for companies who offer sponsorships to sporting venues—every fan who comes to see their favorite team will come to associate the brand with them, too.
2. 2. Cold calling: Telemarketing or cold calling can serve as the basis for some of your marketing efforts. Face-to-face interactions with potential customers also count as traditional marketing, for that matter. Some people find a cold call too pushy, but it ultimately comes down to personal preference on the part of both the seller and the buyer.
3. 3. Print ads: More traditionally minded advertisers might use direct mail marketing (i.e., sending catalogs and other forms of outreach to people’s houses), newspaper ads, and more to connect with prospective customers. Print advertising is especially useful for getting in touch with older generations.
4. 4. Television ads: Although television was once a radical innovation, it’s now firmly part of the traditional media sphere. Both TV commercials (and radio ads) can reach wide swaths of people at the same time.

Contemporary advertisers can still profit from traditional marketing in a litany of ways. Here are just three pros to giving this form of marketing a go:

1. 1. Prominence: It’s much harder to ignore some types of traditional marketing than it is to cast aside digital advertisements. People will inevitably notice a billboard, but they can use popup blockers and other software to disable many methods of online marketing.
2. 2. Trustability: Potential customers typically feel less apprehensive about certain traditional marketing techniques than digital ones. Compare email marketing with seeing a TV ad, for instance. Opening a link in an email can feel nerve-racking—it might be a phishing scam rather than an actual ad—whereas a TV ad is incapable of doing any harm to one’s computer (or television set).
3. 3. Wide reach: Traditional marketing tactics can increase lead generation substantially due to their extensive reach. They cast a wide net when cultivating a target market rather than aiming for more specificity and segmentation.

Traditional advertising also has some shortcomings worth taking into consideration. Keep these three cons in mind when pursuing this type of marketing:

1. 1. Difficulties in quantifying: Traditional marketing campaigns are harder to quantify than digital ones. Digital ads often come with inbuilt tools to track their own efficacy. For example, in a pay-per-click (PPC) campaign, you can see how many times targeted users actually clicked through your ad. By contrast, it’s harder to track the same metrics via a billboard.
2. 2. Elusive targeting: The wide scope of traditional marketing channels makes it harder to target specific demographics and niche communities. It’s far easier to use digital ads to reach a hyperspecific target audience than it would be to do the same with nearly any form of traditional advertising.
3. 3. Expense: Business owners might find traditional marketing methods more costly than digital ones. While this might not always be the case, only using digital advertising rather than physical materials for ads is generally more cost-effective. Create a marketing budget first and then ask which type of campaign makes more sense.

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