Content Marketing Today

3 Reasons Traditional Marketing Isn’t Working Anymore

 Marketers are just beginning to understand that they can’t take buyers–and the messages they send to those buyers-for granted.  Unless they rethink and rework their approach, they will fail to attract and retain loyal customers.

Here are the 3 primary reasons the traditional stuff just doesn’t cut it today.

Reason #1 –Advertising Is Easily Ignored

Every day buyers are ignoring advertising placed along side traditional media. Because it’s ignored, it’s not generating results. It’s all about having too much and too many:

•Too many media choices

•Too many competing messages

•Too much noise

•Too many distractions

The net result: It’s too easy and too tempting to breeze by all kinds of advertising without paying attention or taking action. Corporations must find a way to engage prospective buyers with content that is meaningful and relevant to their particular concerns.

Reason #2 –Traditional Media is Under Siege

For decades marketers could count on predictable results from predictable efforts in predictable media. That was fine when traditional media outlets had a monopoly on buyer attention and buyer trust. Today, everything has changed:

•We all know that print newspapers are facing dramatic drops in readerships & revenues

•Network TV has been clobbered by competition from dozens of Cable alternatives (the 2007 Emmy’s dropped 20% in viewership from the previous year

•B2B print media companies are retrenching as their readers and advertisers are looking elsewhere for relevance and results. Often they are providing less content to fewer buyers than they were just a few years ago.

•Word of mouth and referrals, always important, are vanquishing traditional media as a primary buying influence. Buyers trust one another more than they trust the media.

Suddenly vendor organizations are positioned to generate game changing word of mouth by providing relevant content to their target audience.

Reason #3 – The Buyer Is More In Control than Ever

The buyer can find everything the need to make informed purchasing decisions on the Internet. They don’t need to rely on old-fashioned marketing collateral. Nor do they depend on a salesperson to educate them about a product or service. Today, businesses that market only through traditional means don’t understand the importance of the fundamental changes in buyer behavior that make compelling content so critical to the decision-making process.