Has Traditional Advertising Simply Changed or is it Fully Deceased?

Speak with to almost any advertising company or Fortune 500 company exec about advertising and promotion and you will almost certainly hear the buzz words "fragmented advertising" and "consumer-centric campaigns" and long discussions about the numerous perils and complications of designing energetic promotion campaigns today.

Simply put, fragmentation is the rise in the totality of ways that you can get your point across to your market.

The evolution of promotion over the last few years (like skipping commercials with the TiVo remote) is one of the prime complications that any business owner of executive is faced with.It now includes visual, audio and electronic media.

Go to Google and do a search for "promotion" and you will get over 450,000,000 results (that's 1 1/2 times the amount of people in the US) and results like local promotion, prize giveaways and pay-per-click advertising. It's enough to make a person feel astonished.

So is traditional promotion -- which includes billboards, radio, television, newspaper and magazine -- dead?

Hell no! Traditional promotion methods are still around because they still work according to one top promotion mogul.

The trick is to figure out who your target market is, what they want, and how they look for that information.

"Many a small thing has been made large by the right kind of advertising," Mark Twain once said.

If you know your customers, you can spend your promotion dollars on the mediums they use to look for answers.

If your customers are people that are much less likely online, like senior citizens or the poor, then you should focus your money on the newspapers and magazines that they are reading, the television shows that they are watching and the radio programs that they are listening to.

If your typical customer is a working parent, then you need to ask how they get their information, where they get their information and when they get it. Is it on the Internet? What radio stations do they listen to? What magazines are they reading? Do they watch television? When? How? Why?

In your attempt to create an effect promotion campaign, what are your best ways?

Here are four ways simple methods:

1. Know your client. What do they desire? Where do they dine? What do they play? How old are they? Where do they like to go for fun? Do they need your product or services? Is your product or service affordable enough for them?

2. Know the competitors. Be prepared to do a bit of detective work. What are your three top competitors doing to promote their business? How often and where are they promoting their business? Have they been running their promotion for very long? Are you trying to reach the same customers? Do you have the same point as your competition?

Uncover what your competition is doing right and discover original ways to make their promotion slightly more energetic so that you set yourself apart from the crowd.

3. Next take a look at what the "big dogs" in your field are doing and see if you can adapt some of their methods to your target market and your budget.

4. Know your message. What is it that you want your customers to get from your promotion? What do your customers want to hear? Why should people buy from you rather than another company? You need to make every single word pay off.

It is highly likely that your customers are more tech-savy than they were just even one year ago. The World Wide Web has made what seems like infinite amounts of data and information accessible to your customers. However, the #1 problem that your customers now suffer from is an overwhelming overload of information.

Another problem that the web has created is that it has groomed your customers to expect "instant gratification". They want the product and they want it now. Are you giving your customers what they want, when they want it?

If you want to have an energetic promotion campaign, don't try to be everything to everyone. Keep it simple. Your promotion should address one person... your ideal customer. If you want your customers to see your promotion as a wonderful service instead of a nuisance, simply give them what they want.

Traditional promotion is far from dead! It's alive and well. Just remember that it still adheres to the #1 rule of business: know your customer and give them what they want!