Written by Mike Thursday, April 01, 2010

Successfully integrating online and offline marketing

Thoughtful integration of all of your marketing efforts – both online and off - will produce better communications and deliver better results.

You can greatly enhance your marketing success by effectively integrating all of your marketing communications efforts – including both online and offline activities. Integrating traditional tactics in a marketing program has long been recognized as important if not critical. Today, the array of tactical choices continues to grow as online and interactive communications continue to expand and evolve. Carefully crafting and coupling your offline tactics with your online elements, can significantly enhance your results.

The key starting point is an encompassing strategic approach that is the basis for all of your selected activities, with a clear focus on your target customer. It’s critical to dig in and dig deep to understand your customer, and from a marketing point of view, their communications vehicles and channels of choice – what they like, use, accept, trust and respond to.  Where and how do they get information?  What do they read, what events do they participate in, what Internet sources do they value? What do they believe in? By gaining this understanding you’ll be able to select the combination of online and offline vehicles that will broadly and effectively reach your target.

This understanding will also help you put together messages that will resonate with your customer audience.  Most marketers have a handful of core messages that are essential to get across – by coordinating them within and across multiple delivery mechanisms you create a coordinated, unified “voice”.  Keep in mind that with the hundreds of messages that your customer sees every day, you compete for attention in a very noisy environment. Coordinating your messages increases the chance for your customer to connect the dots and remember yours. You do have to make your messages creative and attention grabbing to stand out, but also quickly and easily grasped and believed. Recognize that your customers are all individuals and that what is effective with some won’t necessarily be effective with all. Therefore you need to make your tactical mix as broad as you can to get the greatest reach. And don’t forget that communication is a two-way street – sending and receiving – so build response opportunities and mechanisms in as you put your messaging in together.

Online efforts such as e-marketing, digital advertising, search engine marketing and social media can be seamlessly integrated with traditional offline efforts such as print and broadcast advertising, direct marketing and event marketing. The key is to take full advantage of what each tactic uniquely offers, so that the messages and concepts are not simply mirror images that repeat the same things in different deliveries, but rather unique deliveries that embellish the central theme and expand the messaging. A couple examples: effective print ads deliver tightly focused but 2-dimensional messages – the more concise the better – but can also steer readers to websites and landing pages where the core message is expanded with additional detail, as well as digital and interactive imagery; social media provides a great platform to communicate, position and promote events and related activities, and can be easily fed by other advertising, promotion and publicity efforts. Online activities offer additional opportunities to enhance messaging through interactivity and the ease of connecting to additional online vehicles, through embedded images, videos and links. Events and trade shows offer a wealth of pre-show, at-show and post-show integration opportunities, by utilizing and integrating nearly every other tactical element in your mix.

The benefits of integration remain essentially unchanged: better and more coordinated delivery, greater reach and more memorable messaging, greater ultimate connection with your customer base. And the new, evolving tactics provide more effective ways to dramatically bring your messages to life.  Taking advantage of the interactivity afforded by new technologies and delivery mechanisms - along with the traditional – combined with thoughtful and creative integration can help you get the most out of your marketing efforts.