Traditional Vs. Modern Marketing
Article by Paul Noia

Many small start-ups suffer from the catch 22 of having to spend a lot of marketing dollars to generate revenue, but they are not yet generating the business or necessarily have the capital to invest in a successful marketing program. Well how the heck are you supposed to compete when you just don’t have the loot?! The answer is actually quite simple. What?! Yes, it’s not rocket science…

Don’t try to do things all at once. When I started PND, I had very little capital to work with and so I invested in the types of marketing that would yield the quickest return possible. The answer was networking organizations and the internet. The goal for me was to generate as much word of mouth marketing as possible. I knew that if I could create, build and leverage great relationships, and mirror those activities on the web, I could start seeing some cash pretty quickly. Well, I was right… whew!!!

What’s great about internet technologies is that compared to traditional marketing, it is far more cost effective and yields a better understanding of how well, or not so well, your money is working for you. This gives you the opportunity to make adjustments and tweak things here and there until you are getting the results you want. Measurable results are extremely important. The old days of throwing stuff against the wall and hoping that something sticks are long gone.

So which is better, traditional (print, radio, TV, etc.) or modern marketing (internet, eMail marketing, eMarketing, etc.)? The answer is that they are both just as important. It’s a matter of allocating the least amount of money to the marketing programs that will yield the best return the quickest and then investing a portion of the revenues in other types of marketing that can help boost sales even more.

Earlier, I stated that measuring results is important and is harder to do with traditional marketing efforts. This couldn't be more true. More time and energy has to be spent to manage and track how well your traditional marketing efforts are working. It is more difficult to understand, analyze and manage data without the help of electronically generated web analytics and a database to store data for further analysis; however, combining traditional marketing with modern marketing offers the best of both worlds!