If there’s one thing that’s become the cornerstone of marketing in the 21st century, it’s digital marketing, and with good reason. The Digital 2019 report by HootSuite and We Are Social found that the average person spends about 6-7 hours a day online — fully a quarter of our lives, in fact. This new shift into the online realm has spurred a change in habits and ways of life, including the ways we communicate, the ways we connect, and especially the ways we purchase and consume goods and services.
Digital marketing has only grown in scope in response to this. It’s evolved far beyond the simple email mailing list, and has now grown to include digital advertisements, geofencing, AI, and algorithms. The last decade and a half have seen exponential growth on the part of online marketing, and the tools and concepts will only continue to grow and become more essential as time passes.
This new era has spurred a ton of changes in approaches to marketing. We cover a little about that in our article on ‘Talk Like a Human – The 2020 Digital Marketing Strategy’, which talks about the common pillars of social media strategies and new approaches. In the same vein of new approaches, digital marketing’s importance doesn’t mean that we should give up on traditional methods. Offline marketing can be important for strengthening and improving digital marketing campaigns in a myriad of ways. Here are only a few of them below.
Offline Techniques to Strengthen Your Online Marketing Campaigns
Flyers
Flyering may seem like an outdated approach to marketing, especially when compared with infinitely faster and more efficient methods like email newsletters. However, the sun hasn’t set on the method yet, and it can actually be a great way to bring your business out from the digital space and into the real world. A survey by FedEx Office found that 9 out of 10 consumers believe that there will always be a need for print materials.
Flyers can be a great way to reach out to the market when SEO and other digital marketing techniques aren’t pulling in enough leads. It’s affordable, simple, and can be incredibly impactful depending on your materials. It’s also fairly simple to link flyering to your digital marketing work. Simply insert a link to your website, sign-up sheet, or email list in your flyer, and you’re already reaching out to a previously untapped market.
UTM Codes
You might agree with the idea that offline marketing techniques can help online campaigns, but what about tracking results? After all, in the information age data is king, and without straightforward information like clicks or views how will you know if your campaign is working?
UTM codes are one solution. UTM codes, as explained by Search Engine Journal, are short text strings appended to URLS that help businesses and marketers track who is visiting a site, and how. UTM codes can be included in your offline marketing materials, thus enabling you to accurately track who is responding to your campaign. By using these codes in your custom landing pages, you can then easily track your results using Google Analytics, and use that to further refine the other aspects of your campaign.
Direct Mail Retargeting
Generating a new lead is incredibly important, but getting them to come back is even better. Retargeting, as this method is called, is especially important in digital marketing given the vast amount of competition in digital ads and posts online. Sure, you might be able to get someone to visit your website, but will you be able to pull them back a second or third time? The answer is, you can— especially with direct mail marketing.
Direct mail marketing might seem like a lackluster approach, but the results are actually fantastic. A feature on direct mail retargeting on Triadex Services found that it can yield 8 times the response rate of digital remarketing. You can use your direct mail pieces to follow up efficiently and stand out from the crowd. Customized mail pieces are more likely to be memorable in the eyes of your customers, and have the benefit of longer shelf life. This is because rather than glimpsing yet another ad online and forgetting about it, your customers are holding tangible materials that never expire.
Conclusion
While digital marketing has certainly proven that it’s here to stay, there are dozens if not hundreds of different ways you can improve responses to your campaigns. Traditional marketing is still as relevant as ever, and can be used to strengthen and improve campaigns more efficiently and affordably. If you’re looking to boost your responses, offline might be the way to do it.