New Study Reveals That Marketing is Still a Paper Chase

When it comes to IP intelligence, at Quova, we’ve got it nailed. When it comes to Marketing intelligence, we wanted to ‘check’ our thinking to make sure our assumptions were accurate.

A study we commissioned in April about the ways in which marketers are trying to engage consumers in their homes was quite revealing in terms of how important location is to most marketers, and taught us a few things as well.

What did we learn?

The good news we learned is that marketers love location. The bad news is they still love paper. The huge, forbidding bundle of paper delivered to your mailbox (that you ignored and probably never opened), is the preferred method companies use to reach customers at the local level, according to our research.

The survey helped us to get a sense of how marketers are adopting new technologies and tactics to reach target audiences where they live shows that fully 30% of the respondents, all of them marketing and advertising professionals, give local printed directories and direct mail the highest ranking among all the options presented. In case you’re wondering, billboards come in at 10%, fortunately far behind search-based advertising online or contextual social media, like Facebook.

Despite the myriad tools that marketers have at their disposal, there is a pretty entrenched mindset that still exists. It’s hard to reach people at their doorstep, and until now, direct mail was one of the only ways. This is wasteful and, expensive.

We learned that methodology among individual marketers still varies. Most of the survey respondents seemed to be familiar with newer strategies—not just social media but also local ‘flash’ sales through companies like Groupon and Living Social, and keywords used on search engines. Adoption of these channels has been slow due to lack of the ability to implement and measure. Only 5 percent of repsondents say local ‘flash’ sales are their most relied upon method, but nearly 9 percent say that geolocating across both standard and mobile channels is a top pick for marketing to new customers. This makes sense, because nearly 60 percent of the respondents also believe that marketing has become either somewhat or significantly more precise with the use of mobile technologies to reach consumers.

So why can’t marketers cross that digital divide?

The bottom line is that even in this increasingly digital economy, consumers spend up to 80% of their disposable income on businesses within 10 miles of their home. Every company needs to tap into that market. And, what the marketing industry clearly needs are initiatives powered by IP geolocation data that helps target digital campaigns down to a zip code, without being intrusive. That’s what will drive the message home, and reduce trash in the process.

*The online survey of 250 marketing and advertising professionals was commissioned by Quova and conducted by Market Tools in April 2011.