Stop Doing 'Digital' Marketing. Just Do 'Marketing'.
You're missing out.
Welcome to Above The Fold! Your weekly dose of business development for SMEs.
For the past decade and a half or two, the term ‘digital marketing’ has been thrown around a lot. And I really do mean, A LOT.
Everyone wants to do digital marketing, regardless of its effectiveness, simply because it's easy.
In fact, starting a digital marketing agency (or a marketing agency that only does digital) has been the most popular thing for about 5 years now, because it has little to no overhead.
Brands and businesses have been pitched digital marketing services to the point of exhaustion, by absolute amateurs who don't know the first thing about business, let alone marketing.
Companies have been scammed out of millions of dollars in the name of ‘bespoke marketing strategy’, only for them to get $5-100 services from Fiverr and Upwork.
All because of the not-so-new hype; digital marketing.
Here's the thing.
Marketing, is about getting attention.
Digital or analog. Or even alien or paranormal, if it makes money for you.
By engaging in a digital-first, or digital-only marketing strategy, you miss out on a lot of much cheaper and easier ways of getting attention to your brand and gaining more business.
Also, you miss out on a lot of creative marketing tactics, if you limit your marketing as digital-only.
While people are equal to Goldfish on the internet in terms of their attention span, in offline world (aka IRL) they're much easier to get hooked on something, simply because of lack of noise, if nothing else.
Bus stop ads, billboards, newspaper ads, and the like, still work for a lot of brands and businesses. Even though many sources claim that they're a dying breed.
Heck, there are luxury magazine ads slots that still go for six figures, and some of law sector's best lead gen methods are offline ads. Same goes for home improvement, real estate, and a lot of other sectors.
In my professional opinion, it's much easier to ‘capture’ locals’ attention with offline marketing, than digital marketing. This is very good news for local businesses, and/or franchises trying to establish a local presence in somewhere.
So if you're a SME, or a startup that's location specific, or working with specific demographics, offline marketing can help you more than a digital marketing campaign.
Furthermore, even if you're an online brand, you can slowly spread your market dominance and increase market equity by using low cost offline marketing strategies, by targeting one region at a time.
Just know that digital marketing will never replace offline marketing, not entirely.
Yes, digital marketing is the best, most effective form of marketing ever. But, it’s not the only form of effective marketing.
So stop following the herd blindly, while writing checks for people who can't deliver, and start focusing on doing some actual marketing.
Till next week.
-Jay.
You can always reach out to me via replying to this email, or at abov@post.com.