Nowadays, attracting as many audience members as possible and converting them into loyal customers is one of the most important factors that impact business success. With that in mind, modern marketers and companies alike focus on the digital approach to reach their target audience and promote their business, products and services. There’s no doubt that digital marketing is omnipresent these days. The main reason is that it’s effective, efficient and reliable at promoting a business, as well as capturing the attention of online consumers.
However, digital marketing may not be as effective in reaching audience members who aren’t as active online as others. In such cases, you will have to rely on a more traditional approach. Many people argue that traditional marketing is dead or dying. This debate has been going on since 1994. Although traditional means aren’t widely used as before, they are still here and they are still effective in attracting and encouraging offline audiences to engage. Therefore, if you want your marketing to encompass both offline and online audiences, in order to maximize both your efforts and your sales, you need to integrate traditional and digital marketing. Here are a few reasons why you should do so.
Extend your reach.
When focusing on digital marketing to reach your target audience, you can be sure that you’ll effectively manage to engage your active audience. But, as for your passive audience, it’s a gamble whether your campaign will reach them or not. It’s important to understand that passive audiences aren’t disconnected or disengaged from the online world. What’s more, it doesn’t mean that they never do online shopping as well.
What it means is that they aren’t spending each and every waking moment online or on social media. When launching a campaign, you’ll have to time it so that your passive audience can be reached as well, but you have no means of predicting when they will be active online. However, if you support your digital marketing campaign with traditional promotion, you can easily extend your reach to both audiences and ensure that every member is aware of you. After all, every customer matters.
Building brand awareness.
New businesses on the market will undoubtedly have difficulties when building a name for themselves. One of the key factors for success is managing to spread the word about your products, services or your company in general. The more people know about you, the greater likelihood of them doing business with you. In light of those events, many businesses develop a brand, but even a brand needs promotion to become well-known.
There’s no better way to achieve that than to promote your brand via both traditional and digital methods. For instance, you can sponsor a community event and promote it online, as well as via traditional means, such as direct mail or newspaper ads. You can live-stream the event for online attendees, while you hand out promotional items to those who come in person. In fact, branded items help 84% of people become more aware of your brand. Also, more exposure means better publicity and brand awareness.
Maximize your marketing efforts.
Attracting consumers is difficult enough, but it’s even more difficult to convert them into customers. The purpose of good marketing is to grab attention and encourage consumers to make a purchasing decision. That being said, marketers have to help customers make that decision on each step of the buyer’s journey. By combining traditional and digital marketing, you can easily maximize your efforts.
You can tailor your messages and custom offers to consumers even when they’re not online, while you actively promote your offers via your online marketing campaign. Convincing people to convert demands effort, time, and dedication, but with both approaches in place, you can improve conversions in a much faster and more reliable way. However, you’ll need a strategy that’s not too intrusive and pushy, so that you encourage your consumers, not drive them away.
Engage with your offline audience.
Traditional marketing methods, such as direct mail, can help you not just reach your offline audience, but also encourage them to become more engaged. You can ensure that your offline consumers are aware of your online promotions, sales and special offers. What’s more, you can lead them online to make purchases, you just have to approach them in a slightly different way.
The fact of the matter is that people get their inboxes filled with various promotional emails, due to the focus on the digital approach. This leads to 80% of emails being discarded before they’re even opened. On the other hand, people tend to open 80% of their direct mail, especially in the U.S. That means that you can approach your audience more easily via traditional means, but still manage to get them online via personalized offers. Moreover, this method doesn’t only work for offline consumers, but for online ones as well.
Gives you a competitive advantage.
Combining traditional and digital marketing doesn’t only mean you’ll be able to promote your business to a wider audience; it also means that you’ll be present everywhere most of the time, reminding consumers about your brand. This level of publicity and exposure can help you outrun your competitors in the long run. Online campaigns, live events, traditional advertisements and more all help contribute to your brand awareness and recognition.
You’ll be able to maximize your reach and establish a strong presence for your brand. In other words, your reputation will help improve your brand’s image and how your audience perceives you. Gaining good offline and online publicity will help you leverage recommendations and positive reviews from your customers.
In addition, the better your public relations are, the more effective and impactful your future marketing efforts will be.
Just because something isn’t used as much anymore and is considered outdated, it doesn’t mean that it’s any less effective. When talking about traditional marketing, it has its flaws just like digital marketing. However, when you combine the best of both worlds, you can reach a whole new level of effective marketing.
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