Both digital marketing and physical marketing have their place in any marketing campaign. While many will focus on one or the other, especially when everyone wants to be the first to try the newest innovation, a combination of the two makes for some of the best marketing strategies.
Here are our top five reasons why you should be combining digital marketing with physical marketing.
Helps customers move through the buyer's journey
With the combination of physical and digital marketing, you can move your customers through the buyer’s journey when they’re on and offline, bringing them closer and closer to the conversion stage.
An example would be someone from your target audience seeing a flyer or poster, then googling a question and finding your blog or whitepaper to help them answer it. This is what we classify as the awareness stage of the buyer’s journey.
The searcher may then review case studies or look to see if you have a free webinar for further information on the topic or how your business has solved the problem for others. This is what we classify as the consideration stage.
Finally, the individual participants with free trials, consultations, demos and other free offerings to help the audience finalise their decision to convert. This is known as the decision stage.
Both bring great value to your business and get customers moving through the buyer’s journey. Through the initial physical marketing asset igniting the search query, the targeted audience was able to transition through the buyer journey smoothly.
You can make a better experience for your customers
Many only think about marketing to new customers, but many forget that marketing to existing customers is key, especially with e-commerce companies, as 50% of their business tends to come from repeat sales.
Many B2C companies will focus on physical aspects of marketing to existing customers, such as freebies to thank loyal customers or making the most aesthetically pleasing packaging they can, but there are many ways to do this with digital marketing too.
Has a customer shared your product on their Instagram or sung your praises on Twitter? This is where you can place yourself where the buyers are instead of waiting for them to come to you by liking the post or commenting, or re-sharing it to your page. Is somebody a frequent customer? Set up an email with a discount code to thank them for their loyalty.
You’re adapting based on what your potential customer wants
Some audiences want to see the physical flyer you hand out; others want to subscribe to your content on social media. Some will walk around with a free tote bag for their shopping and increase your brand awareness wherever they go. Others google a question and find your blog organically (due to SEO work), giving them advice and keeping you in mind when they purchase.
Everyone has their preferences, and while some people refuse to embrace technology, others are constantly glued to their devices. While it might be easy to say, ‘but my target audience is a demographic that doesn’t use much technology at all!’ there’s always going to be an exception.
Our world is using technology for more and more uses; for example, many restaurants have scrapped physical menus and are switching to QR code menus. Many who aren’t already tech-savvy are quickly learning to keep up. With these demographics quickly adapting technology into their everyday lives, the audience reach for digital marketing is quickly growing and creating a holistic marketing strategy combining physical and digital marketing is imperative for engaging with target audiences.
You get Instant Marketing with Digital Marketing
While there are many pros to physical marketing, one big con is that it can take a lot of time and effort to do. For example, if you want to put up a poster somewhere, you’ve got to plan where your design will be, get permissions to get it installed, and arrange how long it will be about, and even then, there’s no guarantee it will be seen by the right people however much you research. Not to mention the large budget which will be needed for effective and seamless implementation.
With digital marketing, as soon as you have your promotion designed, it can be used within marketing campaigns instantly across paid platforms. Not to mention the large budget which will be needed for effective and seamless implementation with physical marketing.
It’s Worldwide
One of the biggest drawbacks of having a campaign based purely on physical marketing activity is that the more places you want your marketing to be seen, the more it costs. To set up a physical promotion, you must allocate a budget for each location you’re going to run it, and that can add up fast.
With digital marketing, as soon as you begin a campaign, you can set it up to include a global audience reach. Of course, you can still make targeted campaigns for specific locations, but unlike with physical marketing, it just takes the click of a button to do so. Although you’re paying for ad spend, it’s still much more cost effective to do with digital marketing than it is physical.
To see results and success in your marketing campaign, Digital marketing is just as, if not more important than, physical marketing.
If you’re looking to see what results you can get from digital marketing or expand your online persona, get in touch with our expert team. We cover a range of ways to boost your online marketing campaigns and can come up with a plan to meet your specific needs.
