In the past, most businesses (large corporations and small mom and pop shops alike) marketed their products and services with recourse to traditional marketing strategies. Popular marketing strategies included planting print advertisements in newspapers, magazines, and small business magazines. Other popular marketing strategies included word of mouth advertising. Still other popular marketing strategies included showcasing their products and services at annual or semi annual conventions; the most successful businesses ensured that their products were represented at conventions which attracted thousands (if not millions) of potential investors and customers.
Today, however, the internet has obviated many of these traditional marketing strategies. So many users learn about new products and services through Google searches, or through the ads that are posted on social media websites such as Facebook and Twitter that companies who rely exclusively upon print advertisements and word of mouth buzz are practically doomed from the start. Marketing experts, many of whom write for business magazines, urge corporations to develop strong internet marketing campaigns; if these writers who work for business magazines can be believed, a company’s failure to develop a strong internet marketing campaign will generate less than half of the revenue as their competitors (if they’re lucky). According to these experts who write for business magazines, strong internet marketing campaign will focus on developing an online or social media presence. It will also focus on developing an easily navigable website for the company’s products and services, and if possible, it will build a website which allows customers to bypass the brick and mortar stores altogether; instead, they can order products directly from the company itself.
However, these experts who write for small business magazines don’t by any means encourage companies to abandon traditional marketing strategies altogether. Just because these strategies are becoming less effective in the age of the internet does not mean that they are completely worthless. For example, some companies who are eager to jump onto the digital bandwagon forget that many customers (especially senior citizens) are not as technologically literate as the younger generation. According to these experts who write for business magazines, companies who forget this fact and market their products and services exclusively through online services risk alienating a large potential market. Consequently, these experts encourage companies to balance internet marketing with traditional marketing strategies.