Your brand may run marketing campaigns on a range of platforms, all to expand its reach – but are they connected? A cohesive strategy for integrated marketing both online and offline is absolutely crucial, especially if you’re trying to capture the lucrative millennials market. A study has shown that 60% of millennials expect a consistent experience from a brand no matter what platform they’re using.
What’s more, integration is key to the customer journey. A huge 87% of senior marketers realise that cohesion across online, offline and all platforms is essential to creating the right experience for the customer.
So, how do you link your physical advertising with your online and social media marketing? Here are just 6 pointers to get started with:
- Use physical marketing to point to your digital presence. One of the simplest ways to do this is with a competition, for example asking customers to upload selfies to your social media accounts using a particular hashtag. The details of this should be printed on every piece of marketing collateral, including product packaging.
- Use digital to point customers to in-store offers. Just like with the point above, you can use one platform to support another. Use your digital marketing and social campaigns to push customers into your stores, by using an irresistible offer only available in-store.
- Hold events. If you throw a launch party for a new product, you can promote it heavily in your digital campaigns and even use live footage, videos and photos from the event as it has happening in all of your social media feeds. Events can also be a powerful part of your marketing strategy, especially for B2C companies – according to the Content Marketing Institute’s 2015 B2C Content Marketing Report, 73% of business owners regularly incorporate in-person events into their strategies.
- Use tracking URLs in offline campaigns. If you want to track how effective your offline marketing is, use different tracking URLs on each of your print and outdoor ads to send visitors to one core page where they’ll find your central offer. This allows you to analyse the effectiveness of your offline campaigns in the same way as your digital ones.
- Collect email subscribers in store. It’s not just online that you can collect new subscribers for your mailing list. You can also do it in stores at the till, and in your offline marketing campaigns.
- Always, always include social media and website information in your offline materials. This seems obvious to most marketers, but it’s surprising how many times this vital info is left off. Even more importantly, make your online contact details prominent and use a compelling call to action to push people towards your digital platforms.
How do you link the online and offline arms of your marketing campaigns? What challenges have you faced?
