For any business, a marketing strategy can either make or break your chances of success. Any company, from the fledgling startup to the well-established big brand, knows just how essential picking the right strategy is. With improvements in technology and a quickly growing online culture, for the past few years many businesses have started investing more in digital marketing.
As technology improves, so too do the techniques we use in online marketing change. In a previous post on the blog, we talked about 'The Rising Popularity of Voice Search and Its Impact on the SEO Landscape'. Digital marketing techniques like SEO continue to develop and change alongside new technology and the correlating changes in consumer habits. But while it's important for companies to keep their fingers on the pulse and make use of online channels in reaching out to their markets, digital isn't the only path a marketing strategy can take.
Despite the advantages that digital marketing techniques can offer, there's nothing quite like the impact of offline marketing. Companies who are eager to make the most of online marketing should be careful not to disregard the benefits of traditional marketing techniques. Offline and online marketing techniques, while seemingly disparate, can actually support each other and overall strengthen your marketing strategy.
Here are some benefits to the online-offline mix below.
Expanding Your Reach
Recent years have seen a growing shift towards relying on digital marketing, and while that's certainly understandable, it should be said that the benefits of offline marketing are still stronger than ever. HE Group founder Bruno Mirchevski collected statistics on offline marketing and found that including newspapers in ad campaigns strengthened effectiveness by 5.7 times in the finance sector and 2.8 times in the retail sector.
Putting together online and offline techniques actually helps expand your reach, enabling you to connect with customers who you might have otherwise missed. Offline marketing campaigns can strengthen your impact on a local, community level, while online can help you reach out to a global market. Not everyone reads the local paper, and not everyone spends all their time online. Mixing digital and traditional methods can help you get the best of both worlds. Additionally, incorporating a modern touch, consider supplementing your offline materials with a URL to QR code, providing a seamless bridge between your physical and online presence for enhanced engagement.
Increasing Your Effectiveness
Despite digital marketing's advantages — and there are many — the fact of the matter is that the online marketing world does have its weaknesses. Competition in the online world is fierce, and although digital can mean lower costs, it doesn't always mean higher engagement. Mixing your online advertising and marketing strategies with more traditional methods can help with that, simply by reinforcing calls to action.
According to Triadex Services, traditional methods like direct mail marketing still yield some of the highest conversion rates among marketing techniques. Marketers can take advantage of this by connecting the customer to a brand's online presence through information about that brand's website or social media in the offline campaign materials. Simple strategies like mailing out coupons that can be used on your company's ecommerce platform can help increase customer engagement and drive traffic to your website, as well as provide a clear link from offline to online.
Stronger Data
Offline marketing techniques are effective, despite what the recent shift to digital may imply. But they do have their downsides, and one of these downsides is that it can be hard to measure the effectiveness of a campaign. In an increasingly data-driven world, that can be a problem. After all, how can you measure the strengths and weaknesses of your campaign if you have barely any information to go off of?
Mixing offline and online marketing can help with this. In contrast to traditional marketing, the responses to digital marketing are easily tracked and traceable. Entrepreneur writes that data analytics can help increase the effectiveness of a campaign by helping segment and organize data and enabling businesses to adapt quickly to customer responses. By blending traditional and digital marketing, it becomes easier to track responses to your campaigns through unique calls to action such as QR codes, special offers that can be accessed online, and unique hashtags in your print materials.
