Double Trouble: Combining Traditional Advertising and Digital Advertising

It’s not uncommon to supplement traditional advertising with digital advertising, or vice versa as the results of doing so, speak for itself.

Marketers today often operate with a digital-first approach, leaving traditional advertising efforts often ignored and, sometimes, forgotten.

After all, given how the pandemic tore us away from our offline interactions, it was digital platforms that allowed us to stay connected with audiences.

Communications saw took place in digital venues, and so did transactions for acquiring necessities. Advertisers turned a bit of attention away from out-of-home advert placements to digital advertising and pay-per-click management.

But with the world opening up again, traditional advertising is seeing a resurgence. And it’s thanks mostly to how consumers would now sooner suffer an hour’s drive to the mall than spend another minute facing a desktop.

Marketers are now again made to think: Should you redirect efforts towards traditional advertising again? That we caution against and rather advise combining traditional advertising and digital advertising to get the best results.

With the right marketing mix and expertise in marketing experimentation, you can trust that you and your audiences both will see more gains in a combined and balanced approach.

Digital marketing is here to broaden your reach

Digital marketing, often known as online marketing, is the delivery of advertising materials through digital channels. It leverages the power of the internet and digital spaces to reach and talk to potential customers, allowing you to span various audiences without the hindrance of physical borders.

Digital advertising has a number of advantages over traditional marketing, the most important of which is its cost-effectiveness. Apart from that, here are some other important benefits of digital advertising you should note:

1. Digital marketing has global reach

This is important especially if you want to cater to audiences outside of your localities. As a business, you can leverage this to target audiences outside of a regional or even international scope.

While traditional advertising is localized and often restricted to a population of a specific city or town, digital marketing can talk to audiences in countries far and wide. All this is at around the same cost you would spend for a billboard that has a few hundred thousand local, vague audiences in a given area.

2. It allows customer interactions and feedback

Through digital advertising, you don’t just communicate in a one-sided manner with your ads. Once your advertisements reach your intended audience, they can also interact with you immediately after seeing your ad.

This encourages transactions to occur instantaneously, especially if your audience is hooked by and impressed with your ad. To caveat this, however, you will also need to ensure that your campaign landing pages are optimized. For that, make sure to collaborate closely with your website developers to ensure that customers are not turned off by poor page experiences.

ALSO READ: 4+ Examples of Social Media Landing Pages to Boost Conversions

3. Performance is easily attributable

Though challenges in attribution rose with the advent of recent iOS updates, performance tracking for digital advertising efforts is still tremendously easier compared to traditional channels.

This is the convenience afforded us by technological developments. Through digital advertising, you can bid goodbye to the guess-work in identifying which ads are bringing in the conversions.

What’s even better is that, because it’s easily attributable, this data is bankable and can be used to inform future campaigns. Through performance tracking, you can easily identify campaigns that worked better than others and, hence, may want to repeat or reiterate in the future.

4. Efforts are sustainable and cost-efficient

A big part of the reason why digital advertising efforts are cost-efficient is that they are sustainable. In that: You don’t throw money into printing varying versions of your advertisements without even knowing if they work or not.

Sustainability in digital spaces is easily achieved through minor tweaks in targeting for the same ad asset. Or, in other times, you can also pause ads while audiences recover from ad fatigue, then resume them at a better time.

What it all boils down to is you have more control over when your budget is used, and for what and how it is used.

With all the benefits that digital marketing provides, balancing it with your traditional efforts is imperative. While the need for traditional advertising remains unquestionable because of its unique value in offline interactions, it could still do much better with a little boost from online efforts.

You’ll find that, by combining them, you get the best results from both as explained further below.

Reasons to combine traditional advertising and digital advertising

Every marketer’s ultimate goal is to attract and convert as many individuals as possible. Consequently, relying solely on digital or traditional marketing will not yield the optimum results. Instead, it will only reach a subset of the online or physical population.

Both traditional and digital advertisements operate on the same premise of attracting diverse clients, yet, neglecting one for the sake of the other may be detrimental to business. More specifically, here are some reasons why you should seek harmony in your traditional and digital advertising efforts.

1. Give you a more targeted and measurable approach to reaching customers.

By combining Traditional and Digital Marketing, you will have a more targeted and measurable approach to reaching customers. This is because traditional marketing allows you to connect with your local customers on a personal level through print and broadcast media, thereby targeting a specific niche of customers. In the same vein, digital marketing allows you to target a broader scope of the audience through the use of the internet and thus helps you advertise to as many people as possible. 

It’s also crucial to think about who you want to reach. Digital marketing is fantastic for reaching a younger demographic that uses smartphones and computers but focusing too much on the digital side of things can alienate some of your target audience. Traditional marketing may be more appropriate for an older population, as well as potential clients who do not spend a lot of time on their computers or cell phones.

2. Broaden your reach to locations beyond your physical presence.

Indeed, thanks to the advent of technology, there are no geographical or country constraints on where you can sell your business thanks to the advancement of information and technology. This allows your company to have a global reach, thus increasing its visibility of your company online.

Through digital marketing, the world becomes your market, thereby increasing prospective buyers and clients. Without spending a lot of money on marketing and making millions of people aware of your business, you may effortlessly access the worldwide market.

3. Ads personalization makes them more efficient in speaking with customers.

Customers expect businesses to understand their particular interests and preferences and to interact with them as individuals rather than customer kinds or segments. A personalized customer experience enables this by delivering individualized messaging, offers, and products to each individual. 

By combining digital and traditional marketing, you are able to have more leeway in personalizing your advertisements as you can use the strategies available to both digital and traditional marketing. Indeed, personalization gives your customers the impression that companies and marketers truly understand them as individuals. 

4. You can iterate effortlessly to make sure you maximize returns on investment (ROI).

When launching a marketing campaign, you want it to be as successful as possible. Whether your aim is to grow sales, attract new consumers, or improve brand awareness, the correct techniques are required to maximize your return on investment.

There are several methods of increasing your ROI, among these is to “try different marketing channels” to determine which one works best for you, whether it be through email, social media advertisements, direct mail, digital advertisements, content marketing, newspaper, radio, and television advertisements. 

All of these modalities are available by combining digital and traditional marketing, as the latter offers offline modes of advertising (radio, newspaper, and television). In contrast, the former offers online modes of advertisement (email, social nedia advertising). 

5. Provides continuity of the offline experience of your brand.

It is a good idea to market both online and offline to achieve the greatest, most effective outcomes. Marketing both online and offline is a smart concept as it will attract and convert more people than just marketing in one medium. And since not everyone is always online, this is where traditional marketing steps in to fill the gap.

6. You access a more cost-effective solution to capturing the audience’s attention.

Using only traditional marketing can, in most cases, be rather costly. Thus, augmenting your traditional marketing with digital marketing can save you from costly advertising expenses coming from offline methods of advertising. This is because digital marketing allows you to retarget your advertisements. Retargeting is an important audience-building strategy. Retargeting will display advertising in front of folks who want to work with or buy from you based on parameters you select about your target audience’s online habits, interests, and demographic information.

Key takeaways

Indeed, combining traditional marketing with digital marketing is beneficial to your company as it not only increases the reach of your business but also allows you more freedom to personalize your advertisements as you now have access to offline and online marketing strategies. With that said, let us discuss some key takeaways that you can take note of as we close this article:

• Augment your Traditional and Digital Marketing to acquire the benefits of both marketing mediums. Using both marketing strategies to bring customers through the sales funnel will give organizations the best conversion and sales results. When a firm creates a marketing strategy, they must ensure that they are grabbing the customer’s attention, such as with internet and social media commercials, and then holding that interest, such as with promotional coupons or billboard ads they see on their daily commute.
• Combine Traditional and Digital to increase the scope of your audience. While traditional marketing offers a more restricted yet niche audience, whereas digital marketing offers a global audience, thereby increasing the reach of your business and/or product. Thus, by combining the two, you will not only cater to a local audience but also to a global one.
• Increase your ROI through traditional and digital marketing augmentation. The main purpose of every business is to generate profit. However, in doing so, you must incur some advertising expenses. That said, augmenting traditional and digital marketing strategies allows you to maximize your ROI since you are able to use the strategies available to traditional and digital marketing. 

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