Advertising is a vital part of any business’s marketing process, and marketing (or the establishment of customer relationships and a customer message) is the force that keeps businesses in operation.
Regardless of what type of products or services companies are offering, they must allocate at least some of their budget to both marketing and advertising. Businesses must glean customer attention, a customer following, and have a well-branded product that clients can easily recognize and indentify with.
Becoming a well-established brand can take years, and involves integration with various communication mediums in order to achieve the broadest reach. This process can be both exhausting and expensive.
Businesses typically seek to target those populations or demographics that are most probably going to be receptive and amenable to their product or service. However, identifying the correct target market, and then generating the capital to continuously sustain this type of advertising can be extremely cost intensive.
There has been a marked shift away from traditional advertising and an emergence of non-traditional types of marketing. Traditional media costs have skyrocketed in the past several decades. Combined with the convergence of communication and entertainment, marketing departments have begun to turn to less traditional forms of marketing and advertising.
Less traditional forms of marketing include cross-promotion marketing (ex. movie product placement, shared coupon events), place-based marketing (adds featured in non-traditional places like school buses, food labels, and food trays), and sponsorship promotion, (associate brand with desirable but unrelated person, place, thing, or idea).
These non-traditional marketing can be much more affordable than typical commercial advertising campaigns, can be a form of entertainment, and can allow anonymity in advertising (making it stealth marketing), and can even create a grassroots trend that can eventually result in mainstream popularity.
Non-traditional marketing can increase exposure and visibility, generate buzz, encourage word-of-mouth advertisements, and even lead to a sale or purchase. Conversely, traditional marketing can raise awareness, improve customer product knowledge, and eventually lead to a purchase or re-purchase. Both techniques are fundamentally important to developing a successful marketing strategy overall, but traditional techniques are much more costly than non-traditional.
Interactive voice response applications can make non-traditional marketing methods exceedingly more efficient. When customers see an advertisement in a movie theatre, on their lunch tray, or on their food product, they can be directed along to an IVR that can provide them with additional information.
Many non-traditional marketing efforts are extremely confined by space (i.e. adverts on products), so integration with an IVR can be exceedingly beneficial in that customers can call in and procure additional information, while also allowing a company to maintain branding and marketing information.
