How to leverage traditional advertising in a digital marketing strategy.

These days, everything is online. Digital marketing has become the most cost-effective way to reach your audience and I don’t see that changing anytime soon. So if digital marketing is so effective and revolutionary, what’s the need for traditional marketing methods such as print ads and direct mail? The truth is, while these methods of communication may not be as sought after or engaging as they once were, they offer a phenomenal opportunity to build strong connections to your audience outside of a search engine or social media platform.

Traditional advertising methods each offer their own unique benefits and can each be used differently to strengthen the performance of a digital marketing strategy. Let’s take a look at a few different examples.

Direct Mail

Direct mail offers a personalized, tangible item that consumers can physically interact with. It can come in many different forms and can offer a longer lifespan than almost any other advertising method. Especially in today’s digital age, receiving an envelope in the mail can be somewhat of a thrill and spikes curiosity out of wonderment for what it contains.

Sales Letters
Sales letters are the oldest form of personalized marketing and are still used as a part of the creative process by copywriters today. If you ever feel stuck while trying to write a Facebook Ad, start by writing a compelling sales letter and cutting it down to the basics. Many great copywriters began their career by writing a different sales letter everyday for a year, forcing them to learn how to illustrate the benefits of a product or service in the consumer’s mind. Sales letters allow brands a full page of paper to identify with, present, and persuade the audience of their product or service.

More on how to write a compelling sales letter here.

Brochures
Brochures are a less common form of mail and are often used for informational content. Receiving a brochure in the mail is similar to receiving a blog post or newsletter in your email inbox. The purpose of the content is usually to inform you of a topic and persuade you to trust the brand with that topic. It can also be used to highlight different product lines or services that a company has to offer.

Postcards
Postcards have become the quintessential direct mail campaign for small businesses. Postcard companies exist all over the internet, providing small businesses the opportunity to stand out against their competition and reach potential customers directly. While postcards do not offer the element of surprise, if designed well, it will most certainly stand out amongst other pieces of mail.

More on how to use postcards for marketing here.

Benefits
While direct mail offers some unique benefits such as customization, personalization, and piqued-curiosity, it also serves as a methodical advertising strategy. Direct mail was the first form of advertising that enabled analytical insights, as advertisers figured out how to track campaign performance. This came in the form of coupon cutouts with individual promotional codes. Customers would submit a code during purchase, enabling companies to accurately track how many purchases were the result of their direct mail campaign.

Direct mail also pioneered the concept of testing. Advertisers could segment smaller groups of their target audience to test out different creative materials, allowing them to determine the best performing one to send out to their mass audience. This revolutionized the way advertisers approached strategy development and paved the way for the more efficient advertising methods we use today.

Overall, direct mail campaigns provide companies a relatively inexpensive way to solicit a very targeted audience and increase awareness, promote an offer, or prospect leads.

When paired with digital marketing, marketers saw an average of 40% conversion rates with direct mail campaigns in 2020.

Digital Integration
Small businesses today can utilize direct mail to reach a targeted list of ideal customers who have most likely never heard of their brand before. They can send this audience marketing materials that drive website traffic, promote a sales offer, or distribute a lead magnet to encourage contact form submissions. Advertisers can also integrate technology by including QR codes for easy access to landing pages. Most importantly, the personal information necessary to launch a direct mail campaign can also be uploaded as a customer list to retarget that audience with social media ads and Google Ads.

Print Ads

Print ads come in the form of newspapers and magazines. While most entertainment consumption occurs online, certain audiences still prefer a physical copy of content to read. Much like direct mail, magazine publishers like Forbes can offer very specific target audiences. Media companies are able to provide detailed insights on their consumer, allowing advertisers to choose the perfect opportunity to reach their ideal audience and tailor ad content to relevant interests.

Since most publishers are now online, they also provide opportunities to reach an audience digitally. Display ads, sponsored articles, and banner ads can all be leveraged to reach an audience both online and on print.

Advertising in a magazine can be tricky. Much like on social media, it can be very easy to skip past a piece of content that is clearly an ad. Since consumers do not want to be sold to while they are enjoying entertainment, it is imperative that your ad is relevant to the context of the environment and provides some sort of value to the audience.

Benefits
Similar to direct mail, print ads also offer a long lifespan. This means that a print ad is not a one-time exposure. Often, a magazine or newspaper is read by several friends, family members, or patients in a doctor’s office. This means that an ad is not only reaching the magazine buyer, but on average 2 - 3 other people.

If written correctly, print ads can be used as an opportunity for small businesses to write an entertaining and informative article about themselves. They can also be used to promote individual product sales among a massive audience full of potential customers. While print ads can tend to range a little higher in cost, they are guaranteed to be seen by a brand’s ideal audience and shared among consumers.

While most companies stick to traditional print ads with a simple integration into digital, Kontor Records created an ad that with a vinyl record that can be played using their smartphone app.

Digital Integration
Primarily, the purpose of print ads is to sell a product that is relevant to the category of the magazine. However, if your product is sold online, a company could easily include a QR code that provokes immediate action. Those who are interested in the product no longer have to wait until they are at a computer or shopping in the area to check the product out. The consumer can simply pull out their phone, scan the QR code, and view the product instantly.

After accumulating website visitors from the print campaign, a retarget audience can be built. Ads can be run on social media and search engines that promote your brand to the same viewers who took action on a different platform; a physical platform they interacted with in real life.

Print ads can also be used to share educational information. If you owned a small business in the real estate industry, you could write a print ad about how to find the perfect home and place it in a relevant magazine. You could then use this ad to promote the informative content on your website and allow you to gather subscribers for your content.

These subscribers can then be re-engaged with email marketing campaigns. Everytime new content is published, they can receive an email notifying them and encouraging engagement. With time and due diligence, these subscribers can be nurtured into full-fled loyal customers that were sold not through advertising, but through consistent, trustworthy content.

Out-of-Home Advertising

This term most often refers to billboards, but can also include signs and flyers. Out-of-home advertising has been around since the stone ages (literally). Skilled laborers would sketch a unique character into stone and place it outside of their workshop as a way for consumers to identify the services that were provided there. This is now known as branding and is much more complex, but out-of-home advertising still serves as a necessary way to drive more business.

Billboards
Billboards allow companies to capture the attention of a consumer for a split second and tell an entire story with just a few words. They are commonly used as a constant reminder of the brand’s existence and help associate words and images with the brand. While billboards are not usually engaging enough to provoke an action online, other forms of outside marketing can be.

Signs
Signs on the street, in store windows, and in yards can help convey a quick, concise message. They often promote a discount or sales offer, encouraging passersby to “come on in” and take advantage of this limited time offer. They are also used in certain industries to increase phone calls. Driving by a sign or a billboard plastered with targeted message can easily provoke a consumer to take out their phone and call the listed number.

Flyers
Flyers are also an inexpensive form of marketing and are most effective in congested areas. They are most common across college campuses and city telephone poles where heavy foot traffic guarantees constant exposure. They are often used to convey a message for a cause, offer an educational course, or promote an organization. These often have websites, phone numbers, and QR codes listed.

Benefits
Depending on placement, out-of-home advertising guarantees constant brand exposure. It can provoke an immediate action such as deciding where to eat, visiting a website, or calling a phone number. This form of advertising is often inexpensive, providing an often overlooked opportunity for a local business with limited marketing spend.

This method of advertising can illustrate a brand story and increase brand awareness throughout an entire population, allowing brands to leverage that recognition online. Companies can set up several different displays throughout a city, each one contributing to a story that can be referenced later on down the road.

Budweiser’s “Tagwords” campaign was an instant hit at The One Show’s 2019 awards.

Digital Integration
Small businesses with a brick and mortar store can use signs to promote limited time offers and encourage more foot traffic during slow hours. Signs can also be used to promote a website built for online orders. Billboards and flyers can be used as a way to increase brand awareness or provoke more phone calls and website traffic.

Phone calls can be tracked using external events on Facebook, allowing local businesses the opportunity to retarget anyone who calls their business with ads on social media. Just like the other forms of traditional advertising, any website traffic can also be retargeted through digital ads, allowing brands to stand out amongst competitors on all platforms.

Brands like Budweiser have been able to effectively use an out of home campaign to tell a story and cross integrate it with a digital platform. This unique, clever combination provoked immediate curiosity with millions of consumers around America searching the keywords from each ad on Google to see what came up. Each phrase prompted a picture of famous musicians holding a Budweiser, causing the brand to go viral almost instantly. It’s innovative cross-platform campaigns like these that really launch massive brand success.

Key Benefits

Traditional advertising allows local businesses to pursue other inexpensive marketing channels and not have to rely solely on one or two digital platforms to reach their potential customers. Using multiple advertising channels also allows them to build a retargeting audience for digital campaigns. This connected ability allows brands to be relevant to consumers both online and offline. This step of retargeting consumers and building a retargeting audience is vital for optimizing Facebook Ads for better performance and increased results.

Traditional campaigns also provide consumers a real life experience with a brand, rather than a digital interaction. This cross between virtual and reality does wonders for improving brand loyalty and customer acquisition. The constant exposure and targeted messaging across multiple platforms helps keep a brand fresh in the consumer’s mind and makes it easier to convert customers. They also make retargeting easier, since website traffic and other trackable events accumulate from several different sources rather than just a couple.

Local businesses that use integrated digital marketing strategies have been proven to increase their ROI, increase conversion rates, drive more leads, and see significantly more long term success. Integrated strategies scale a business quicker than relying on just one or two channels and make it easier for the consumer to decide to choose your brand over another. Consistency and exposure are key for growing a business and utilizing every tool and platform available to you will allow your business to increase and establish its local market share quickly and strategically.