To improve the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns, traditional and digital marketing need to work together. While digital marketing is increasing its influence and popularity, tried and tested traditional marketing methods that have yielded successful results have their own sphere of influence and should be included in a comprehensive marketing campaign. As marketers, you should look at integrating both digital and traditional marketing tactics to help in maximizing your marketing results.
In this blog post, we will share three easy ways to integrate your digital marketing activities with traditional marketing efforts.
- Including digital coupons on your direct mail postcards
- Offering digital resources (white papers, eBooks, your presentation slides) to attendees when speaking at events
- Directing people to check out your URL for a special discount or offer on your advertising signage on billboards, subway cards, buses, etc.
You can integrate digital marketing techniques with these traditional marketing tactics by creating landing pages and directing your prospects to these pages. In all three of the examples above, the ad should send the prospect to a unique landing page, www.domainname.com/offer that is specific to the tactic and offer. This way you can easily track the performance of your offline efforts. It’s recommended that you set up the landing page, so it is unattached to your website menu structure. This helps to ensure that the only way someone will get to know about the landing page is through the unique URL included in the traditional marketing piece.
The landing page needs a small contact form with name, email, phone number, and notes fields. In this way, you can capture your leads. Here’s what we recommend for each of the three tactics.
- Direct Mailer: Provide a coupon code that your prospects can enter in a special coupon code field when they visit the landing page that you’ve created specifically for this tactic. Using this coupon should provide them some clear benefits.
- Speaking Event: Give out your resources after the interested prospect fills out the contact form. These resources like white papers, research results, and how-to-guides should contain valuable information that is not available to the general public.
- Advertising Signage: You must promote an offer that is of value to the interested prospects. It should entice them to go to the landing page to find out more and take advantage of the offer.
In all cases, you need to offer something of value to incite prospect action. These calls to actions (CTAs) have to be about your prospects and not about your company. If what is important to your prospects come first, you have a better chance of getting them to fill out the form you have requested.
Why are these landing pages important?
These landing pages will allow you to use Google Analytics to track and set up conversion goals. The only way for someone to get to the landing page is the traditional advertisement. This will provide a direct correlation between the reach of the ad (how many people saw or heard the ad) and how many people completed the call to action task.
If you carry out a finite tracking to capture people who became prospects, and people who became customers as a result of your offline marketing tactics, you’ll be able to measure various financial returns on investment as well.
- The number of people who went to the landing page but did not take the call to action/cost of ad campaign = Cost to acquire one “possible” prospect (or CPC – cost per click).
- The number of people who went to the landing page and took the call to action/cost of ad campaign = Cost to acquire one prospect (or CPL – cost per lead).
- The number of new customers as a result of the campaign/cost of ad campaign = cost to gain one customer (or CPA – cost per acquisition).
The beauty of digital marketing is that everything can be measured. On the other hand, results of offline promotions are difficult to track and can prove to be inaccurate. If you choose to integrate a digital element into your offline promotions, using the tips we provided you will render the latter more measurable. This way, you can tweak or enhance your marketing efforts to get the results you want for your business.
