It’s almost that time of the year again, partridges are singing in pear trees (like that ever happened), the egg nog is chilling in the fridge and jolly St. Nick is making his annual rounds. It’s also the time of the year that sales and marketing managers have to evaluate their marketing tools; looking at which tools delivered and which ones didn’t meet expectations. They’ll bring out those interesting metrics that marketers love to talk about, impressions, traffic, click-through rates, conversions and most importantly leads.
While the US online advertising is burning it up and expected to double from $104.57 billion in 2014 to $213.89 billion by 2018 according to eMarketer, the offline ad or traditional ad market is expected to grow at by only 1% CAGR over the same period of time. Traditional marketing includes print advertisements, newsletters, billboards, flyers and newspaper print, TV and radio ads.
According to Ad Age, digital advertising represented 35.3% of US agency revenues last year and that number will continue to grow. Many verticals sectors are already spending more money online including insurance, entertainment, finance, and technology. This makes sense because that’s where their customers are – online.
While any company that wants to stay in business can’t avoid the importance of digital marketing from Adwords to Facebook posts, especially if they are targeting a younger demographic, traditional advertising can be more affordable and almost as effective. Print advertising is definitely less intrusive than digital advertising (have you ever tried to watch a video on YouTube?). Traditional advertising benefit from loyal audiences (watch the same TV shows, read the same newspaper etc…) which play into the marketing mantra of repetition.
The one constant in marketing is worth repeating, in order to succeed you have to be at the right place at the right time. For some products and services that may be on a search engine ad for others it might be in someone’s mailbox.