Marketing is the key to success in just about every business venture. Whether you’re running a small startup or a multinational corporation, the right marketing strategies will help maximise your limited budget and encourage people to buy your products and services.
With the rise of exciting new marketing avenues, it’s easy to overlook traditional advertising strategies. In 2025, the best marketers know how to utilise a mix of brand-new, cutting-edge tactics and more tried-and-tested approaches to win new customers and build loyalty among existing ones.
If you’re a marketer seeking tips on how to utilise traditional marketing tactics that are still cost-effective in 2025, you’ve come to the right place – keep reading to learn more about some time-honoured strategies that can help you grow your business.
Out-of-Home Advertising
Despite the increased popularity of working from home and home-based hobbies due to the COVID-19 pandemic, people still spend plenty of time outside. Out-of-home advertising is among the most effective ways for businesses to reach their target customers – and the title says it all. OOH involves posters, billboards and digital screens that the public interacts with outside of their home or personal devices. It catches folks in the wild. While this form of marketing used to be expensive, digitisation has made it accessible even to small businesses. To run a simple out-of-home campaign, all you need to do is print posters online and find suitable places to post them.
These days, there’s plenty of discourse around people’s decreased attention spans when viewing ads. While this is a major concern for digital marketers, it’s also relevant if you want to run physical, out-of-home promotional campaigns. Whether you’re using posters, billboards or other mediums, make sure to pique the interest of passersby with striking visuals and hold their attention with succinct, relevant messaging.
Print Advertising
Print advertising has been a marketing staple for many years, and it’s not hard to see why. No matter how prevalent smartphones and computers become, print media will always have a role to play. In order to take advantage of the time people spend reading print materials like newspapers and magazines, you need to master print advertising. This involves knowing how to create promotional material that is optimised for your chosen media and working with print publications, either directly or with the help of a marketing agency.
No matter the size of your business, reliable graphic design software is among the most important tools you can get your hands on. Tools like Photoshop allow you to easily create attractive documents that you can then simply send to the owners of print publications. This allows you to catch the eye of their readers and get your message across at nearly the cost of publishing the ad – the rest can be done in-house!
Word-of-Mouth
The most trusted brands in Australia have one thing in common: they all have loyal brand evangelists. If you want to spread the word about your business, you need to make use of word-of-mouth marketing. This involves encouraging current customers to tell their acquaintances about your brand.
What makes word-of-mouth marketing so powerful is the fact that most people trust friends and family more than a random advertisement they see online or in person. This is especially true in the modern day, given that authenticity is more important than ever. Referral marketing is also among the most cost-effective methods of customer acquisition. Rather than having to win each new buyer on your own, you can naturally outsource some of this responsibility to your existing customer base.
The most crucial factor to getting the word-of-mouth effect to work for you is simply to have a quality product or service. It’s human nature to tell friends and family about a particular product if we’ve enjoyed using it, so ensure that everything you sell is worth writing home about. Besides this, you can also employ strategies like referral discounts and incentivising social media posts featuring your products to nudge people to spread the word about your brand. When used in the right way, referral marketing helps you grow your business without emptying your coffers.
Running Physical Events
Knowing how to run a successful in-person event is a traditional skill that all modern marketers need to master. Whether you want to host an industry conference, a VIP event or a product release, many of the same principles apply, like choosing the right location, incorporating aesthetic visual elements and creating audience engagement.
There are plenty of benefits to running promotional events. First, giving existing and potential customers a memorable experience will create a positive association with your brand in their minds. The next time they have a purchasing decision to make, your product will likely be among the first to come to their minds. These events are also a great opportunity to put branded merchandise in the hands of more people, which builds brand awareness.
While digital events are becoming increasingly popular, there’s nothing like a physical event and the true connection that instantly comes from them. These are usually more memorable than their online counterparts, and it’s much easier to encourage audience participation in person. Start running in-person events if you aren’t already doing so to build your brand and boost your sales.
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Although there are plenty of exciting modern ways to build brand awareness and grow your sales, there are some marketing tactics that will never go out of style. These include out-of-home advertising, print advertising, referral marketing and running in-person events. Whether you’re a member of a large marketing department or are in charge of a small business, it’s important to be well-rounded. Master the traditional marketing tactics we’ve covered in this article to grow your business and keep your costs down.
Image: Supplied
In collaboration with Digital Next.
