Two years ago the traditional media sector was dealt a double blow. With the recession forcing marketers to cut their budgets, spend on channels such as print and direct mail plummeted. At the same time a digital revolution was in the offing. Email marketing, viral marketing, interactive websites, virtual events; all of these and more were already being hailed as the future weapons in a savvy marketers armory before the credit crunch even took its hold. Once it arrived, use of digital media techniques sky rocketed, leaving more traditional formats trailing in their wake.
When this happened, it would have been easy to deduce that traditional channels were on their way out, to be replaced by all things digital. But this isn’t the case. Two years on from a time when every marketing journal and forum seemed to be telling us to think email rather than DM and e-zines over magazines, traditional marketing mediums show few signs of dying out. They’ve grown up, become more sophisticated and learned to sit alongside, rather than battle against, their digital counterparts.
Multimedia messaging is key
When the recession took hold traditional channels were already suffering something of an image problem. They were generally deemed hard to measure and just plain out of fashion. As sexier (and cheaper) digital forms of marketing took over, DM volumes dried up and many print magazine did go out of business. For the DM industry in particular, the fact that the banks ran into such deep trouble was a major problem.
According to Alex Walsh, associate director of membership services at the DMA, banks are the biggest users of DM and many put a complete halt to their marketing spend at the recession’s height. “Now, there is some evidence that banks are returning to the use of DM but the key difference is that nobody these days is doing DM as a standalone activity” it’s always going to be linked to other channels. The issue is how to best understand how these channels can work together,” he says.
And this is generally how traditional media channels have found their footing in the digital era. “Traditional marketing is not dead,” argues Robin Collyer, regional director UKI at Aprimo. “The digital revolution just made it more complicated, with a proliferation of new channels that need to be effectively integrated alongside traditional marketing channels to ensure engaging messaging and value for money.”
“The very definition of traditional media appears to have moved with the times. “If you consider what exactly is meant by traditional marketing you realise it’s a definition that shifts continuously,” says Andy Taylor, head of sales and marketing at Infogroup UK. “In the end, there’s no such thing as traditional or non-traditional. A mail-based campaign can be alternative, and online campaign can succeed because it adheres to traditional principles. B2B marketing in 2010 is about combining the best of traditional approaches with new technologies, without falling for the temptation of hype over substance.”
There have been many examples of how traditional and more modern practices have fused recently. Now, it is not uncommon for press ads to have video content or QR codes (2D bar codes that readers scan with their mobile phones to be directed to a website) embedded into them. On a more simplistic level, much DM nowadays has a specific call to action driving receivers to a company website or personalised micro site. And technology is now helping marketers to have two-way conversations with prospects via materials they send in the post – the same sort of two-way interaction you would already expect from online campaigns. The Royal Mail’s new Personal Integrated Mail (PIM) product can link the recipient of a DVD directly through to online content tailored to their own preferences. PIM technology also allows all interaction to be captured when the recipient inserts the DVD into their computer – allowing marketers to learn more about customer behaviour for future campaigns. The Royal Mail is calling PIM a ‘new benchmark’ for DM.
“Our research suggests that campaign ROI increases by up to 62 per cent if a combination of mail and digital is used,” says Antony Miller, head of media development at Royal Mail. “It’s up to marketers and the industry as a whole to get the best out of new media, prevent spam and use the best combination of available channels to achieve campaign objectives.” You might have expected Royal Mail to be ‘digital bashing’ but it’s not – last year it even put together its own direct mail campaign designed to show marketers how DM and digital could get the best out of each other.
DM is appearing in new formats too. Recent research by Pitney Bowes suggests that ‘Transpromo’ – a term given to the practice of adding marketing messages to bills and statements, is now being recognised as a profitable B2B marketing tool. To date it has been used mainly in B2C circles but an online survey of 1000 B2B marketers in the UK, USA, France and Germany suggests that a third are now adopting this DM strategy.
The perfect storm
Meanwhile in the print arena, the digitised formats that sounded the death knell for many trade magazines are now helping those that are left to thrive. Jerry Gosney, head of business media at the PPA describes a ‘perfect storm’, whereby survival of the fittest has meant great new opportunities for marketers to take advantage of print media. “The recession and major changes in technology have rooted out a lot of the weaker magazines, but some of the bigger [ones] have been very successful in offering a richer range of content in the digital space alongside journals.”
Gosney sites trade title Farmer’s Weekly as a case in point. It now offers a digitised classified service – so a formerly static ‘for sale’ ad can now include moving footage, multiple images and one-click ways to connect buyers and sellers. “These days people aren’t just picking either print or online to advertise – big brands like Farmers Weekly and the Grocer are offering integrated solutions to clients,” says Gosney.
“B2B budgets are returning, but the media mix deployed seems to have changed permanently,” says Mike Colling, managing director at media agency Mike Colling & Co. “Multimedia schedules are again becoming common,” he adds.
Despite talk of how integration has kept traditional media thriving in a digital age, there are still some elements of the ‘good old-fashioned’ channels that digital cannot recreate – for example, sensory mail and pop-up pages.
“Traditional media – and in particular direct mail – provides advertisers with the opportunity to reach intended recipients with targeted, relevant communications and not a scattergun approach,” says Miller. “Not only can mail offer the physical, tangible qualities that digital media cannot yet compete with, including stimulating all five senses, it is also scalable and flexible in terms of type of creative and size of campaign.”
Beyond digital
Not all B2B brands have actually jumped on the digital bandwagon over the past few years – plenty still have customer bases that don’t sit in front of a PC all day and are therefore much more likely to respond to an item of direct mail. Consumer online takeaway service hungryhouse.co.uk relies on attracting takeaway and restaurant owners to its database in order to grow. As marketing manager Graeme Horne explains, “We don’t use digital marketing for lead generation, because our audience are very late adopters. Only about 60 per cent of our clients are able to provide us with an email address – most still prefer to conduct business on their mobile phone.”
“There is no clear destination website for our audience, and email lists have proven ineffective for our industry. Decision makers are not widely using email as a business tool, and for those who do, ownership churn rates mean that the data becomes out of date very rapidly. Traditional media methods such as direct mail and trade media have allowed us to laser-target our audience and build our brand in a way that digital media has been unable to do up to this point.”
Digital media cannot help marketers physically connect with their customer bases either, at least not yet. Greig McCallum, strategic managing partner at Balloon Dog thinks there will always be a place for ‘actual, physical interaction’ with customers. “In times of increased austerity, the value of hosting and meeting customers and prospects is invaluable,” he argues.
“We’ve become much better at leveraging the value from events with video capture, web casting and podcasts etc so that those that couldn’t make the show can share outputs,” he continues, adding weight to the argument that traditional combined with digital channels are helping the former to stay alive rather than die.
Events manager, Madeleine Johnson, agrees. Johnson co-ordinates Lunch, a trade show for caterers in the food-to-go (sandwich) market that is about to enter its third year. Despite launching in the thick of the recession in the autumn of 2008, Lunch still managed to increase visitor numbers by 28 per cent by the time it ran for the second time in 2009. Johnson is a big advocate of using digital to enhance the power of events.
“Visitor numbers [across some events industries] have been down by about 20 per cent as a result of the recession,” explains Johnson. “But those who have marketed their events better have succeeded. So more intelligent websites and recording your seminar content to put online for free – that kind of stuff – can help to really set you apart and establish you as a market leader.
“There is a lot to demonstrate. If you can cater to the personal taste of your target audience and give them a meaningful experience, which can then be followed up by interaction with a website or other digital forms, that brand penetration is so much more effective.”
Traditional channels, it seems, are far from dying out – the digital explosion has simply breathed new life into them and helped them to revolutionise. “All marketing is evolutionary,” concludes McCallum. He continues, “What we consider ‘new media’ today will be ‘traditional’ tomorrow – it’s all a learning curve, continually testing and refining best practice as individual media mature.
“Traditional is always a relative term and we must always look for new ways to use all media to reach and engage our customers and prospects: that’s the fun of marketing today.”
