The cold and bleak winter months are finally behind us and on the horizon is spring, with new beginnings and opportunities all around, now is the perfect time to start thinking about how to advertise your brand or business.
Advertising is split into two categories: Traditional and Digital. It is vital that your campaigns combine both into what is called a blended marketing campaign.
What is Traditional Marketing?
Traditional marketing is ‘old school’, think newspaper ads, billboards, posters, flyers, TV, Radio and mail.
While most of these are print and may be seen as old fashioned, they still generate a large amount of sales and customer connections for a number of reasons. Firstly, think about the volume of social media we consume vs the number of posters of flyers you receive. The more personal approach of handing a flier to someone, giving the opportunity for conversation and personality still makes such a difference. Or how about your future customer noticing your poster in their local town at the perfect time for them, they need exactly what you offer and it's right there physically in front of them, giving them that nudge to call or drop in.
What is Digital Marketing?
Digital marketing is broader than you might think. As well as all the opportunities for clever and inspiring social media campaigns, there is email marketing, and the wonderful world of SEO: search engine optimisation.
SEO is a series of actions which you can do to get your website to rank higher on search engines like google. Google, as well as all search engines, look at the key words in a search and find the best matches in websites to bring up as answers, the more your website matches the search, the higher it will ‘rank’ and appear on these searches. Some of these things could include keywords or phrases on your page that customers would search for, for example, if you’ve won awards, mention it on your website, then if a customer searches for ‘award winning’ your page will rank higher than others on the search.
Social media is algorithm based, think the TikTok for you page, therefore your ad is already being directed at your target audience for you.
Email marketing is vital if done correctly, emails with purpose updating your customers, reminding them of your best sellers, new products or services and keeping them in the loop with a monthly newsletter keeps you and your business up to date with your customers hopefully producing repeat business.
Why do you need both?
Different target audiences will be more exposed to one strand of marketing than the other. There are those people who, for whatever reason, are less likely to see an ad on the TikTok ‘for you’ page than to see a poster in a local shop or listen to a radio ad. However, they might see the ad on a local facebook group. It is all about thinking about your customers, who they are, what their lifestyle is and how you can use that to target your advertising to them.
How can you achieve the blended campaign?
A blended campaign is a mixture of traditional and digital advertising, across the same campaign.
For example if you were advertising a new product or service you would create a campaign with the same house style: same colour scheme, style and branding. And change the ad slightly depending on the format, as different social media platforms prefer different aspect ratios. However the language used in the caption may be slightly different as different age groups tend to prefer to use different social media apps.
Traditional ads would then use the same house style as the digital ads to create uniformity and recognisability, customers may see both digital and traditional or one or the other but the trick is to create more exposure for your business which will result in more brand awareness, but will create continuity through all advertising campaigns.
Next months blog post is all about how to analyse the success of your campaign using analytics.
Get in touch by emailing me at contact@mollymcguinness.co.uk.
I look forward to hearing from you and seeing how I can help elevate your brand or business.
If you have any suggestions for future blog posts or need any quick advice, please feel free to contact me with your suggestions or questions.
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