The age of social media and the Internet has given birth to digital marketing, where marketers utilize latest technologies to improve their efforts and deliver personalized content and promotions to their customers on the World Wide Web. However, traditional marketing methods such as TV ads, radio podcasts and printed advertisements still have their unique charm and are managing to attract customers.
Both marketing methods are effective, yet marketers prefer the digital method because it’s more popular and more commonly used nowadays. Nevertheless, the real potential for truly amazing marketing campaigns lies in the combination of traditional and digital methods, and marketers need to realize just how effective these two methods are when used together. Here are a few reasons why you should integrate traditional and digital marketing.
Increases your public relations
Awareness is important for every business, especially startups and small businesses that are still climbing their way to the top. That’s why publicity is important for the success of your business. By integrating traditional and digital methods of marketing, you’ll be able to deliver relevant information to a wider audience in a short period of time.
Whether you’re informing your audience about your business, your product or service or are simply delivering your company’s message, publicity will efficiently help you deliver that information.
Helps you reach both active and passive audience
Traditional marketing is best suited for a passive audience or people who don’t prefer to be online at all times, while digital marketing is best suited for an active audience or people that spend most of their time online.
However, the combination of these two methods allows you to reach both the passive and active audiences at the same time. Instead of creating two separate strategies, you can simply create one marketing campaign that will effectively reach both audiences.
Builds long-lasting relationships
Loyal customers are essential for business success and the best way to ensure loyalty is to establish relationships with your target audience. Both traditional and digital marketing methods have their unique ways of building long lasting relationships and most of them come from simple conversations. Traditional means of talking face-to face with customers at a social gathering is a good way to hear their opinion and leverage their feedback to improve customer experience.
On the other hand, digital marketing utilizes social media and emails to communicate with their target audience and leverage information that will also improve the overall experience. By improving your customers’ experience, you’ll be able to retain them and ensure their loyalty.
Spread your message across multiple channels
Focusing on a single marketing method will result in losing customers that won’t be able to, or simply can’t hear your message, and every customer is important in the business world. If you purely rely on digital marketing you’ll lose your offline customers and if you rely only on traditional marketing you’ll experience a loss of online customers.
So, in order to reach them all you’ll need to use traditional means and remind them to visit your website for a special promotion, or use your website to remind them to visit your retail store. The point is that by using both marketing methods, you’ll be able to spread your message and extend your reach across multiple channels, therefore reaching your entire audience with a single promotion.
Promote social channels via traditional media
The offline audience isn’t completely cut off from the digital world. They still use the Internet and have social media accounts. The only difference is that they prefer to spend less time online than the online audience. As a marketer you can’t know for sure when your offline customers will appear online, so you can’t time your promotions to catch them when they are.
That’s why traditional marketing is there to help you remind your offline audience about the happenings on your social channels. A printed flyer sent via mail should suffice, but other traditional means are also a reliable way of reaching your passive customers.
You can organize events through online campaigns
If you’re organizing social events such as conferences, business forums or product releases, then the best way to spread the word is through an online campaign. Social events are the best way to meet the audience and get to know them on a more personal level. You can gather all the needed information from your audience and use that feedback to work on your branding development strategies for the future. What is more, this is also a great opportunity for customers to meet their favorite brand in person.
The Internet provides the best and fastest way to reach your target audience, especially if you start your campaign a few months early. That way, you’ll be able to generate enough buzz about the event and get as many people to attend as possible.
Allows you to accomplish goals
You should set goals and milestones that will help you reach success. Every goal achieved puts you one step closer to the top. However, whether your goal is to increase revenue, boost sales, improve visibility, or simply attract new customers, combining digital and traditional marketing will help you reach those goals faster.
Each marketing method has its pros and cons but together they complement each other to maximize your marketing efforts. You’ll be able to attract more customers, cover multiple channels and reach your entire audience with a well-designed marketing campaign.
Traditional and digital marketing methods offer flexibility and innovation when creating amazing marketing campaigns. In addition, they offer means of reaching your entire target audience and eliminate risk of losing customers. If you truly want to maximize your marketing efforts, integrating digital and traditional marketing is the way to go.
