Integrated marketing: mixing on and off

Until recently, most businesses fell into one of two categories in their attitude toward marketing media:

1. Those who only marketed online and didn't consider using traditional (offline) methods, mainly because they were concerned about the expense of traditional marketing or the length of time to see results. Many of these businesses were home-based and they used internet marketing alone as a means to attract customer.
   
2. Those not (yet) using online marketing. Usually they would mention the learning time or expensive software required as their reasons for not being online.

But in many instances, especially those businesses selling physical products or offline services, can benefit from both worlds. Integrated marketing has developed over the last years and a number of advertising solutions and strategies are now available and more are on the way. These integrated marketing strategies are not only useful for marketers working online and offline, but are useful for online marketers looking to expand their internet marketing services into the growing local marketing consultancy industry.

According to Forrester’s Interactive Advertising Models. integrated marketing is expected to grow from 12% of all advertising spending in 2009 to 21% in 2014. While this is impressive growth , it still means that even in 2014, only about one marketing dollar in five will be spent online! As an example, Pepsi recently decided to invest 1/3 of their efforts into online marketing, but that still leaves a huge budget for traditional methods.

With so much money still being spent on offline marketing, companies are at a minimum learning to use web marketing techniques to optimize their advertising campaigns. For example, setting up a email marketing or social network campaign allows marketers to easily and cheaply split test ad styles and copy. With these results in hand, a more optimized offline campaign can be launched.  

To be successful, on and off - line campaigns need to be integrated so that they project the same message. For instance, the style and copy of a landing page needs to be similar to that of an offline marketing campaign, so that a potential customer should see the landing/subscription page as a continuation of the flyer, TV ad or billboard advertising. It’s as if you are starting a conversation in one format and then continuing it in another. Don't send people from a newspaper or direct mail campaign to a generic home page; they will get lost and you will need to resell them all over again. Research suggests that when moving to a landing page from an offline ad, customers spend about 5 secs in re-orientation. So if they do not connect immediately, you may well loose them.

Make sure your that URLs in the offline ads are easy to remember. Four words is probably the limit. Also they should not be too complex as people may not remember all the details and may then just go the internet to search for a website that is different from the one you want to promote.  Also, don't forget to coordinate changes in your advertising campaigns so that the details appearing  online and offline are the same. This may seem trivial but it is amazing how often this is missed.

If you're not yet convinced that online marketers should re-examine the benefits of offline advertising, a recent iProspect study looking into offline influences on online search behaviour found that nearly 40% of online searchers make a purchase after being influenced by an offline channel such as newspapers and billboards.

Integrated marketing is a growing trend and the technology to smoothly align TV ads, RFID-enhanced mobile phones, electronic billboards and laptops is not too far off. 

Online marketers, expand your lateral thinking!

Hope this post was useful. Your comments are always appreciated.

To your success,

Mike Firer

NimdX Admin