Paper advertising only reminds us of our college years, when we would distribute flyers to people on the street, so that you'll earn the money you needed for the next weekend getaway. Also, can you even imagine going back to poorly and unprofessional produced videos? Us either, that looks like a one way street nowadays.
Advertising and marketing have gone a long way before coming to this exciting point. Today, the techniques evolved, the empathy for audiences is more important than ever and positioning your brand as an educator, an expert and also an authority to look up to is the best you can do. But things aren’t that easy, when it comes to practice. For start, you must say goodbye to those obsolete tactics that could weigh you down:
One dish to serve them all
There’s no universal recipe for all your potential customers. That’s why we now use segmentation and personalization. The shopping experience must be unique for each one of your clients, must tackle their specific needs, must address them in their own language - and we’re not only talking about the dialect, but also about niche speech. You have the opportunity to book out of home advertising, but you must also need to know how to use it best. So get to know your audience and put your marketing efforts at work by collecting relevant and precise data about them. Then, you’ll find the right words to express.
Print advertising
Let’s pretend you’ve got mail. A flyer from the new pizza place in town, a brochure from a non governmental organization, a catalogue from the nearest supermarket. What are you going to do with it, read it or recycle it before even thinking about the sender? Prints are expensive and irrelevant nowadays. Why would you even bother with this technique, when cryptocurrency friendly billboards are just a few clicks away?
Outdated video stories
Colorful background, happy people dancing, talking to each other, smiling to their ears, while a jolly song fills the air between them and animates the room. Sounds familiar? Because that could be any commercial before the 2000s. Toothpaste, insurance services, cars, toys or beer - it could have been any of these. But today, outdated video stories don’t sell anymore. Today, your audience would only watch your commercials for a real story, one they can identify with, one they can find themselves within. So you'd better offer them a great, empathetic story or nothing at all!
Promotional content only on social media accounts
It takes a lot to build a strong social media presence and promotional only content just won’t do it. It’s the same story - your audience knows themselves and they want you to get to know them too. They won’t consume your promotional content, if it brings nothing for them. They will even stop following you on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Pinterest and LinkedIn, if your accounts provide nothing useful for them. So, before using these accounts to promote your business, think about how they could help you build communities, drive engagement and grow organically, just because they’re cool, human and insightful.
Intuitive strategies
Mad Men was a great series and, as far as we know, the 50’s blooming advertising was the big bang that brought us all here. But this doesn’t mean we should do things the same. Great ideas, out of the box perspectives and powerful taglines won’t do the work as they did before, because they’re missing out on what's most important: your customers. So please come with us in 2022, leave the past behind and stop allowing yourself - as a brand - to be ignorant, by starting to make full use of data. Analytics provide you the best insights for your future strategy, so start relying on them heavily and forget about those Mad Men fantasies.
