The Biggest Lie – Why Traditional Marketing Will Kill Your Business

A week ago, the Rocky Mountain News finally closed its doors forever. Everyone knew it was coming. They merged with the Denver Post many months ago. And the rumors have been flying for a long time. death of newspapers

And they aren’t the last to close their doors. Traditional newspapers are closing down week after week, from Philadelphia, to San Francisco, and beyond to many different countries around the world.

I’ll admit I don’t read traditional newspapers. I get all of my news from online sources, and Twitter has become a big resource for me. The last time I took the time to look through a newspaper, I was amazed at the amount of news versus the amount of ad space.

In 10 pages, I counted two stories, and the rest was full sized ads from several large companies here in the Denver area.

Two questions came to mind:

Is there really so little news to fill up a paper?
How long are companies (any companies, it doesn’t matter the size) going to be willing to pay for this kind of advertising?

Last night when a friend talked about putting a classified ad in the newspaper, the response was an immediate “no”. Use Craigslist instead.

And when another friend talked about a yellow pages ad this morning, again it was an immediate “no”. Why not try a blog?

Instead of spending hundreds or even thousands on a dying form of advertising, invest in something that has a huge potential. Something that’s growing and reaching out to a ton of potential prospects.

Traditional marketing and advertising methods are what they are because they’ve always been a preferred method. But things aren’t changing slowly now – they’re moving incredibly fast. Even if one form of marketing worked wonders just six months ago, it may be completely useless today.

Technology is changing incredibly fast. To put things in perspective, for students starting a four year technical degree, half of what they learn in their first year of study will be outdated by their third year of study.

So as a business owner, if you’re using the same form of marketing you did a year ago, how do you know its still the best method?

As long as you can still tie sales to it, I wouldn’t recommend abandoning that method. But now more than ever its time to try new things.

Many of the things I talk about here in this blog are free or very low cost. Mainly it’s an investment of time at this point. And it’s also an investment of learning on your part. It does take time to learn a new system, a new form of marketing, or a new way of doing business. You can’t rush it. And you don’t want to spam the system by trying too hard at the beginning.

But if you get started now, and build over time, imagine where you’ll be in just a few short months.

We’ve only been on Twitter about one year. We have a couple thousand followers combined, and sales directly attributed to relationships on Twitter.
We’ve blogged for several years. Blogging now contributes to a majority of contacts for prospects and for sales.

We’ve seen the future, and we’re heavily investing in the knowledge it takes to succeed.

We’re changing our business model to make sure we use all the tools readily available.

We’re following others to learn all we can.

How about you?

image source Carlo Nicora

Comments

One Response to “The Biggest Lie – Why Traditional Marketing Will Kill Your Business”

Jared O'Toole on March 13th, 2009 4:42 am

I feel as though so many people want to continue with traditional advertising because its the easy way out. You may spend a lot of money but all you have to do is come up with a catchy picture.

social media/network advertising takes time and effort. And for this reason it is way more effective. But as more people learn this more companies big and small will catch up…it will be to late for many.

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