How to Integrate Your Traditional Marketing with Your Digital Marketing

Andrew Carnegie defined teamwork as the ability to work together toward a common vision, allowing you to attain uncommon results. In order to reach uncommon results for your business, so too do your traditional marketing efforts need to complement and work together with your business’s digital marketing efforts and vice versa. Sticking with just one kind of marketing can limit your business and potentially hurt your cash flow. Here are portraits of two different businesses focusing their marketing completely on one type of marketing:

1. The first portrait is of a long-established local business in a thriving city. For decades, they’ve had steady work and regular clientele thanks to the ads they placed in the phone book, the billboards they have purchased, and even the radio jingle they paid for many years ago. With the advent of new technology, the internet, and social media, the business looked on with amusement, but didn’t see a need to try in regards to digital efforts – their traditional marketing was working just fine! However, as time has gone on, the business has slowly started to slow down. The phone book ads don’t seem to be bringing in the customers anymore. The radio jingle isn’t catching anyone and the billboards aren’t providing a return on investment either. All of their marketing efforts that have worked so well for decades don’t seem to be working anymore.
2. The second portrait is of a brand-spanking new local business in the same city. They’re young, tech-savvy, and know exactly how they want to spend their marketing dollars – Google AdWords and Facebook Posts! They’ll use AdWords Express for their pay-per-click (since they don’t want to hire anybody to do it for them) and the founders will each ask all their Facebook friends to like the company page so it gets popular. Who needs old-fashioned marketing? And they’re off — they’re getting clicks to the website! Sort of. They are getting clicks, but nobody seems to be converting. The Facebook page is doing okay, but only a few friends and family members are interested in liking the page. The business is struggling to get customers even though they’ve invested heavily in digital marketing.

No matter if you specialize in traditional or digital marketing, the best marketers today know that your business has to have a blend of traditional and digital marketing strategies. It is crucial to continue with tactics that have historically produced results for your brand but also to invest in newer tactics as the market changes. That’s why the best marketing strategies take traditional and digital strategies and blend them together. This way, both strategies build off of each other to create better and larger results than either effort could make on their own. Here are the three main ways you will want to join your traditional and digital strategies for the best results.

#1: Make Them Look and Sound Similar

Here’s a silly question: if you’re watching a football game, how do you know who is on which team? If you said anything other than “they wear the same uniform,” you must have x-ray vision and know each player’s face. A regular football fan can recognize their team or another team easily because of the colors and branding of that team’s uniform. But those brand colors, the logo, and the font don’t just stop on the uniforms – it’s plastered on all of their marketing materials, their home stadium, their website, tickets, the scoreboards, and not to mention hats, shirts, jerseys, scarfs, and blankets for purchase. This reason for this is simple – the fundamental brand elements are what help people recognize the team. The consistent method of using those brand elements on every single piece of their marketing reinforces recognition of the brand while also making the brand appear strong due to the consistency. It’s a signal to fans and potential fans that says “hey, we understand that it can be difficult to pick things out in all of the marketing noise – we’ve made it easier for you to find us and recognize us.” This consistency creates positive brand awareness, even to fans of a rival team. This brand consistency is a large part of what glues your traditional and digital marketing together. It’s what will make your company look like you’re strong, confident, and professional. It’s the brand equivalent of looking put-together. Take a look at your traditional channels and your digital marketing with an analytical eye – do you use the same colors, fonts, and logo on both traditional and digital or do they differ? Does the tone sound the same? If you took your company name off of both of them, would you still think that they go together?

#2: Only Use the Platforms that Work

Instead of throwing jargon-y words around like “buyer persona,” let’s talk facts: who buys from you? If you’re really lucky, you might only have to say one demographic. “45 to 65-year-old men who are professionals” or “women aged 20-30 who own their own business” or even “shoppers that are browsing the mall” are each one demographic that you should be thinking about when it comes to your marketing. That being said, it’s likely that your customers aren’t just one kind of person. That means that it’s necessary to think hard about who buys from you and where to reach them. While it might be easier to focus on just one demographic, we no longer are limited by static marketing channels. Certain demographics tend to frequent different platforms, whether they’re traditional or digital – and some channels help you get your marketing in front of the right customers. Older people don’t use digital spaces as much so traditional methods can still work for them, but a lot of older women are expert users on Facebook, Etsy, or Pinterest. The 18 to 25 crowd don’t really have TV or pay for magazines, but they will pick up copies of the free city paper. Tapping into smaller markets like this can have big effects on your business. You shouldn’t limit yourself to either traditional or digital marketing, but don’t limit your audiences either! You’ll be able to reach them if you look in the right places.

#3: Make Them Point at the Same Spot

We’ve talked a lot about how your traditional and digital marketing strategies need to work together to produce great results, but what are they working towards? Knowing exactly what you want your customers to do is critical to your marketing’s success. Do you want your customers to call you? To fill out a form? To visit you in your store? For convenience, you should give your customers more than one way to get in contact with you, but you definitely need to ensure that the way you want to be contacted is the clearest — and that starts with both kinds marketing. For example, suppose you have a business where you want potential customers to contact you for a quote, so they need to fill out a form with some personal information and explain their situation and needs. For your traditional methods, your print ads, business cards, and car wrap should all have the website clearly and prominently displayed with “Request a Free Quote” clearly written. All digital media should point not just to the website, but to the specific page where a user would fill out a form. When both the traditional and digital marketing point towards the same place and the same goal, everything looks consistent. On the other hand, suppose you have a business that understands that they need marketing but doesn’t feel the need to connect anything or point at one thing in particular. The billboards advertise the business name but don’t have the website or the phone number. The digital marketing points to the website but doesn’t say anything in particular. The social media doesn’t even link back to the website but has the phone number on it. This business has many signals about itself but is pointing to several different places or to nowhere at all. A cohesive, directed, integrated marketing strategy that uses both traditional media and digital will produce powerful and uncommon results – unlike separate, uncoordinated marketing.

Tags: Digital Marketing