Promotion:
Promotion refers to raising customer awareness of a product or brand, generating sales, and creating brand loyalty. It is one of the four basic elements of the market mix, which includes the four P’s: price, product,promotion, and place.
Marketing:
The action or business of promoting and selling products or services, including market research and advertising.
People often forget why they are promoting their products and focus more on simply getting some advert in front of the masses, but looking at that definition I feel there is a part missing and I would add this:
the goal of promotion is to communicate your services and products in such a way as to create a full duplication and reality of it in your client’s eyes and thereby creating the utmost affinity too.
Now taking my last statement in mind can you see that we not only have to get the ads out for the millions to see but they must be appealing and communicate reality properly. So let me pose this question to you: What is more real to you, a digital image or a piece of paper with a printed image? Why is the piece of paper more real? When you switch to a different tab on your computer and don’t see the image anymore then it’s as good as gone in terms of your reality. the same applies on a cell phone. The piece of paper will still be there on your desk, until you decide to chuck it that is. You can pick up the paper and touch it and feel it and really look at it carefully.
Have you noticed that when you draw money instead of using your card every day you tend to be more careful about how much you spend? Using the paper money makes the money more real to you, and makes you more aware of it and also increases your affinity for it. If you use the card you don’t even look at the totals usually and simply enter your pin and poof!…its gone. There is a reason why money went digital and it’s not just convenience, it’s simply this fact that the less real money is to you the less you worry about spending it.
So you can see that offline or non-digital marketing already has a huge advantage. It’s only real disadvantage is cost and its ability to reach the masses, but in terms of it’s effectiveness it will always be no 1. Digital marketing has the advantage of reaching millions of people for much less, but it’s effectiveness will be less.
Now you might say that I am crazy and that digital marketing is way more effective and might use companies like Google as an example, but we are basically just looking at a quantity vs. quality argument. Digital marketing can give you the quantity, whereas traditional and especially printed or other physical forms of marketing will always have the quality(that is if you created at least a quality design or print). If Google had to go and create a physical marketing flyer for every add that you run with them and got it into the hands of exactly the same amount of people that saw your digital ad your response would be 5-10 times more than using only digital ads. Unfortunately though this would cost you far more than the digital ads, because some actual production would be required.
Now lets look at another interesting universal rule:
Outflow = Inflow
Now this is very interesting and the way it works is as follows: When you create an outflow of matter in this universe you create a vacuum right behind it. Something has to fill that vacuum.
Now businesses have long ago noticed that the exact same rule seems to hold true for their marketing efforts. When they create a lot of outflow, they create a lot of inflow in the form of leads and inquiries as well as cash. The even more interesting part was they were not getting all of the inflow directly from the people they marketed to. Deals would flow in from random sources as long as they kept marketing.
So bearing this in mind, which form of marketing do you think would leave the greatest physical vacuum? Digital or physical? You would have to say physical simply because although digital communications still have some physical footprint, it is much less than that of a physical object like a flyer’s.
My Conclusion
Although digital marketing is has its place and many benefits especially in terms of cost, I still believe that businesses should always do some kind of physical marketing as well if they really and truly want to create lots of inflow and effectively communicate their products and services to their clients.