With all the excitement over the internet in the marketing world, you’re often left thinking that if your marketing plan doesn’t include a Facebook group, a ‘viral’ YouTube video or a Twitter campaign you might as well not bother. Apparently, people aren’t interested in traditional marketing anymore, and printing off brochures and direct mail is a waste of trees.

So, is traditional marketing a waste of time? Are people so engrossed in looking up old school friends and online shopping that they don’t have time to read anything you print?

Well, you’d certainly think so based on recent Advertising Association research, which found that one in five marketing pounds are now being spent online, whilst traditional budgets appear to be in freefall.

Last year, spend on press advertising fell 11.8% and TV ad budgets fell 4.9%. But spending on the web grew 19.1% to £3.6 billion, which means it’s now snapping at the heels of the wheezing £4.4 billion TV ad market.

Nearly 60% of web budgets are spent on search

According to an eMarketer report, 59.3% of online budgets were spent on search marketing in 2008 – an increase of 4.9% on the previous year. Whilst growth has since stalled to 0.9%, the proportion of web budgets being spent on search shows that driving traffic is top priority.

But is this the smartest approach? Is investing in search the best use of your shrinking budget? Or are there other methods of driving traffic that marketers are missing out on?

60% are most likely to visit a website in response to print

Bastions of the print world, Pitney Bowes recently reported that it’s actually good old traditional direct mail that might be the most likely medium to trigger a visit to your website.

In fact, 60% in the survey said that addressed mail was the most likely to trigger an online purchase, whilst only 24% believed emails and sponsored links would send them to a website they hadn’t visited before.

This follows on from previous Pitney Bowes research in which 73% said they’d prefer to receive special offers and product announcements in the mail rather than in digital form.

Print can be the trigger for digital marketing

It’s easy to get carried away with all the excitement on the web’s potential: people are spending more and more time updating Facebook, looking up product info and shopping for the best services. So it’s easy to see why shifting your budget from print to search marketing seems to be the smart thing to do.

But as the Pitney Bowes research shows, print still has a vital role to play. It can act as the introduction to your digital marketing and trigger people into visiting your website.

Just remember that direct mail can be binned as junk as easily as an irrelevant email. So make sure your printed offers are relevant, personalised and delivered to the right person at the right time.