Over the past decade or so there has been an aggressive shift in the marketing world towards digital channels.
Everyone…
Over the past decade or so there has been an aggressive shift in the marketing world towards digital channels.
Everyone from multi-million dollar organisations to the local baker now place some form of emphasis on the web and digital marketing. Consequently this has led many to ask whether or not traditional forms of marketing, such as banner marketing still have an impact in business.
In the following paragraphs we’ll delve deeper into banner marketing and identify whether or not it has a place in a modern day marketing campaign.
Now we aren’t talking about digital banners that you place on a website to advertise your products and services. Banner marketing refers to physical pull up banners, flags and signage that would be displayed at events and outside local businesses.
The big reason so many businesses are shifting their focus towards digital channels is three fold. Ultimately you can track and target your ads much more effectively than traditional techniques and they tend to be far more affordable. Let’s face it, a set of digital banners are cheaper to produce than designing and printing a series of physical banners.
Channels like Facebook allow you to target people by age, gender interests and so much more and you’ll also be able to see metrics like visitors and sales generated at the click of a button. Such information is much more difficult to determine from traditional banner marketing.
That being said, with the power of digital is there still a need for traditional banner marketing or should businesses focus their attention more on digital?
When it comes to any form of marketing there are always three key elements that will dictate what channels you utilise – Your goal from a particular campaign, budget and what type of business you are.
For example, a web based business that is looking to increase downloads of their latest app will likely be interested in more digital forms of marketing that provide people with an instant route to be able to download their app.
Now you may instantly think that means that digital routes such as social media advertising and ppc are all that need to be utilised, but that isn’t the case. Whilst such digital routes have their benefits, traditional banner marketing could still be used to provide a direct route to an app download through QR codes. All banner printing companies can add a QR code onto banners that users scan with their phones and as soon as they perform this action the app starts downloading automatically. Essentially we are adding an element of digital to the traditional method!
With this in mind there are other factors that companies will need to take into account. Most notably, you can’t just place a banner anywhere on the street, most likely you’ll need to be hosting or sponsoring an event or have some form of physical premises, so if there isn’t an option for your business, banner marketing might not be the best route.
Ultimately there is still a place for banner marketing within business, but it isn’t necessarily the best channel for every business. Consequently, if you are thinking about using banner marketing as part of your next campaign it is essential that you think about placement and messaging. What messaging will you have on your banner(s) and will your target audience be likely to see it?
With traditional methods such as banner marketing being more difficult to target you’ll need to do a great deal of research to ensure that wherever you place your banner is somewhere that the right eyeballs will see it.
