If you’re a company that has a comprehensive marketing strategy, chances are you use both traditional and digital marketing methods. How do you make them work together for optimal success?
Traditional and digital strategy may seem like completely different worlds these days, but it would be a mistake to operate these entities separately. Marketing becomes most effective only when all activities are streamlined and work closely together towards achieving the common goal of funneling leads to sales, and growing your brand and business.
Seems self-explanatory, right? Unfortunately, it’s easier said than done. Follow some basic guidelines for integrating your traditional and digital marketing teams together for completely optimized strategy.
Outline your goals
As with any marketing initiative, start with outlining goals that you hope to achieve through traditional and digital efforts, or a marketing mix.
When you can put pen to paper and show the purpose you have for each activity, you can better see where they all fit together and can operate in harmony.
Each marketing campaign should have a result in mind, whether you’re talking about hard numbers that show leads or revenue generated, or a more abstract or general concept like creating brand awareness. When you can show the goal of each project, you can then also determine which activities are reliant upon each other, or which activities are redundant.
It’s important to outline goals so that you can also calculate the resource allocation for each activity based on perceived importance and urgency.
Goals should also be in the form of key performance indicators (KPIs) and return on investment (ROI). These are the metrics by which all marketing activities should be measured. If you have certain marketing activities which are not meeting the KPIs or have a positive ROI, then you know you need to change them, or cut them from your strategy.
Depending on your company and brand image, there is probably a place for both traditional and digital marketing initiatives, but in order to determine that, you need to know what goals you need to achieve for those activities to be worthwhile.
Create reports for processes
Consistency: It’s the not-so-secret ingredient that absolutely determines the success of a company and marketing initiatives.
Without it, consumers become confused, disinterested, or unable to find what they are looking for. By creating reports for processes for the traditional and digital marketing strategies that you have, you are more likely to achieve absolute consistency.
What should go into the reports? Start with outlining the tone of voice and personality you wish to convey in your content. Keep in mind this can vary based on your intended audience as well, but overall, your company should always be true to itself.
It’s important to have the same tone and energy in the collateral you compose for, say, a print mailing advertisement, as you do for a digital email campaign. If you have recipients of both campaigns, they won’t be confused as to what your branding is trying to achieve.
Differences and inconsistency can happen quite easily when you have traditional and digital marketing departments who operate separately from one another. It’s crucial to have open lines of communication to ensure your brand’s voice stays essentially the same.
Also included in report for processes are streamlined and efficient means of accomplishing outlined goals, and documentation. At any point in time there shouldn’t be a question as to how to go about making certain reports or documents that are important for the overall success of the business. By creating a report for how to accomplish getting these things done, it will be done the same way by no matter who heads the charge, and each team will be doing things the same way.
Open lines of communication
If you’re ingratiated into marketing communications, you know communication is essential to everything that we do. This goes double for companies who may have multidimensional or multiple marketing departments. Without open lines of communication, the whole operation falls apart. The best way to ensure this happens is by establishing active means for cross-collaboration and conversation.
Use inter-office messaging systems like G-chat or Slack. Create weekly or bi-weekly debriefings where everyone can quickly go over the tasks at hand so that everyone can be on the same page. Not only does this help streamline all methods of marketing, but it can breed some great opportunities for extra insight and input.
You’d be amazed at some of the secret talents people in your company may possess. It’s not often that a project will not benefit from multiple people throwing their hat into the ring. That’s often the beauty of inter-department communication and collaboration: you can come up with the best solutions to your most pressing problems when you are able to put your heads together.
Additionally, sharing results, data and insights collected through various methods of testing and campaigns, means you can better find the marketing solutions that work best for your company and audience members. If your traditional marketing department can provide some examples of images or verbiage or content types that specific demographics respond well to (or not), then you will be able to repeat a winning formula, or avoid making the same mistakes twice.
Just remember productivity and efficiency should always be the hallmark of all that you do, so keep meetings to a schedule and on task. You wouldn’t want your colleagues to feel that they’ve wasted their time in a meeting that could have just been an email.
Consider multidimensional campaigns
Despite what you might think, traditional and digital marketing activities can go hand-in-hand or rely on one another to move consumers through the sales funnel. Think about traditional methods of marketing: print advertising or commercials, sales promotional materials such as mailers and coupons, publicity such as press releases, editorial placements, or interviews, among others.
These can often be a first step for a consumer to discover you or a new product and become interested in what you have to say.
Then comes digital marketing: social media promotion, SEO strategy and PPC, digital banner ads, or video advertisements, remarketing campaigns and email campaigns.
Come up with various scenarios in which you can use a mix of your strategies to capture a new customer.
A mailer can lead to a customer searching for you online. Have a comprehensive SEO strategy in place, or Paid Search spots to ensure that person can find you. When they navigate to your website, you can then have a form or e-mailing list sign up for more information. Or have gated content or a feature for a potential customer to speak to a customer service representative, or an FAQ page. Then follow up with a phone call and direct marketing approach.
There are so many ways that traditional and digital marketing can work together to achieve the best results for gaining new customers, and retaining current ones. Don’t be afraid to work together, and don’t be afraid if things don’t work the first time around. Often it takes a lot of time and patience, testing and re-testing, to find the solution that optimizes your money and your efforts.
Achieving harmony is not as difficult as it sounds, but it can make all the difference in the effectiveness and comprehensiveness of your marketing strategy.
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