Every business wants to make money, which is the goal of every company. To do so, you need to promote your business as much as possible. For a long time, marketing activities were quite limited because there were just not so many possibilities. They were using only traditional marketing like ads in a newspaper, billboards, sending letters and paper catalogs, cold calling, etc. But nowadays, digital marketing is opening new doors in front of brands. You can do so much more to reach new customers or engage with existing ones. Traditional businesses that take advantage of digital marketing in combination with traditional ones know that this is the path to success. We want to help you achieve the same. So, let's talk about how you can achieve that.
What is traditional marketing?
Traditional marketing existed long before the digital one, and most of you are very familiar with it. We are so used to it that we sometimes forget that those are marketing techniques that brands used to grow their popularity and make us buy their products. Traditional marketing happens offline and is all around us — in the newspaper, TV, billboards, posters, items, etc.
For years, this was the best (and only) way to reach people and promote your brand. However, it had quite some downfalls. It's much harder to gather data and analyze since you just can't know, for example, how many people exactly saw your TV ad, how many actively watched it, how they reacted to it, and if they were convinced to buy your product at the end. But since digital marketing came to play, this has changed drastically.
What is digital marketing?
Digital marketing is every marketing activity you perform to promote your brand and products online. The internet and technological advancement gave us access to so many more possibilities. Right now, you can reach people on different devices and platforms and give them a more personalized experience. Advertisement is based on concrete data that can track the user on each step of their journey. Digital marketing helps brands connect better with their customers, understand their needs, and provide better services and products.
The digital marketing activities that a brand can perform are various, and they can be organic or paid ones. All of them again have the goal to grow the popularity of your brand and get you new customers, but you have more channels at your disposal to achieve this. And since the internet is so powerful and vast, the number of potential new customers is just endless. Thanks to the detailed data you get for the performance of your activities, you can constantly optimize them, so you reach more and more people.
How can you integrate digital with traditional marketing?
Both traditional and digital marketing have their benefits and challenges. The best way to go for a business is to integrate both in their marketing strategy to complement each other and work together. If up until now, digital marketing wasn't a focus for your brand, we will share with you a couple of ways to start with it and integrate it with your traditional marketing.
Plan your marketing activities
If up until now you had a strategy only for traditional marketing activities, now is the time to plan your digital ones as well. It is essential to plan your activities to complement each other. Deciding on how you would like to position your brand and in what way you would like to reach your customers. Your marketing strategy should incorporate your unique selling points and how you will advertise each one of them. Research everything you can find about your competitors and the market — how they do things, what works, and how you can use it for your own brand.
Grow your digital presence
To make digital marketing work for you, you will have to grow your digital presence. Many activities will help you with that. Let's talk a bit about the most important of them:
- Build a website — Having a website that will present your brand on the internet. Try to make it beautiful but efficient as well. It needs to include the main facts about your brand, present your products or services, pricing, etc. While creating your website, always think about the user journey and how you would like customers to interact with it.
- Create social media accounts — Another aspect that will help you immensely increase your brand recognition, and awareness is being present on different social media accounts. Conduct research if your potential customers use more Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, or something else, and then open an account there. Fill it up with relevant and engaging content, so you can make people aware of your brand.
- SEO and content marketing — Only creating a website might not be enough since there is so much competition out there. You need to make everything in your power to make yourself more visible, and you can use techniques like SEO and content marketing to do so. Find the topics your customers and interested in and the keywords they are looking for. Then create content around it and optimize it in terms of SEO. For that, you have higher chances to rank in higher positions in the search results and be found.
- Email marketing — Many brands neglect this channel, but this is a big mistake. Emails are part of our daily lives, and every person regularly checks their mailbox. Sending highly personalized emails full of content that will intrigue your customers gives you a high chance to make them revisit your website and perform another purchase.
- Paid advertisement — You can use many channels to advertise your brand and products online. You might go for channels like Google or other search engines depending on your public. Or you might decide to combine it with social media ads. No matter which way you go, this will expand your reach.
Establish your brand voice and messaging
With traditional marketing is hard to know how many different people will react to your messaging and brand voice. You had to create focus groups and conduct surveys, and still, the results might not be very conclusive. With digital marketing, this is much easier. You can conduct different experiments and A/B tests, and the conversion rates will clearly show you which messaging corresponds the best with your customers. Like this, you can establish your brand voice and use it for all your digital and traditional marketing activities. Having the same messaging on both is crucial, so people don't get confused and your brand recognition improves.
Combine advertisement strategies
Here are just a couple of ideas of how you can combine a specific traditional marketing activity with a digital marketing one:
- Billboards and geo-targeted ads — Billboards guarantee you reach many people but are you sure they are shown in the right place? This type of traditional marketing is costly and not consistently as successful as we might hope. This is why you can either replace them or combine them with geo-targeted ads. Geo-targeted ads will help you pinpoint the right places where you can find the right people and, based on that, also decide where to place your billboards.
- Ads in the press and digital ads — Print media is still very popular, and having your ads in the newsletter or the magazine is still an excellent idea. But combining it with digital ads is even a better idea. Ads in the press lack some advantages of digital ads like flexibility, variety, bid adjustment, and others. Combining both will guarantee you engage with more people, and you can better manage your budget.
- TV ads and streaming ads — If you have already created some content for TV ads, it will be a shame not to reuse it. You can use it for a different type of video and streaming ads. Streaming is getting more popular because people sometimes spend even hours a day watching video content.
You can combine many other activities to reuse some content and make sure you reach as many people as possible. What is important to keep in mind is to use the right platforms, send the same messaging across all of them, and constantly explore new possibilities. Traditional and digital marketing work the best together, so use their power to take your business to the next level.
