Digital Inbound & Media: How They Work Together

For companies which rely on online leads and sales, few marketing strategies work better than a strong mix of inbound digital marketing tactics paired with carefully-placed online and offline advertising designed to drive your best prospects to a conversion-focused website.  When managed properly, these tactics work together to guide the consumer through the pre-purchase – or consideration – phase of the buying cycle.

Marketing through the pre-purchase phase is important. Without a proper strategy, acquiring new customers and generating new revenue is extremely difficult.  Here’s how the tactics work together

1. Inbound digital marketing tactics engage customers with interesting content and targeted messaging. These tactics include search engine optimization (SEO), pay-per-click (PPC) ads, blogging, social media marketing, and email marketing.
2. Multi-channel advertising strategies build awareness and attract customers. Advertising mediums like online banner and video ads, TV and radio spots, billboards, print ads, signage, displays, and out of home experiences are but a few examples of advertising tactics that work.
3. By engaging and attracting our target audience to well-designed websites and landing pages, we build trust and interest.
4. When our target audience is interested and trusts us, we use techniques to begin converting them into customers.  Subsequently, leads and sales increase.

In a perfect situation, all of these marketing activities are unified and guided by a clear vision.  Since all messaging is guided by that vision, your customer’s journey is consistent.

Each time you consistently deliver the same messages about your brand, you’re shaping the customer’s impression of your product. If they find interest in that product and what it can do for them, their curiosity will lead them to learn more about your product.

When properly planned and executed, a combined digital inbound and advertising strategy offers the best changes of success.  Yet, despite the desire to maximize marketing ROI, few organizations properly leverage the combined strengths of these two unique marketing approaches.

If it Works, Why Isn’t Everyone Doing It?

Here’s why. Small businesses believe (often incorrectly) they can’t afford both strategies.

Growing companies often change direction quickly and may find it challenging to manage sophisticated strategies without taking resources away from important projects and core business functions.

Large corporations have money and resources, yet their strategies may still fall short when relying on multiple agencies, vendors, and media companies, each focused on niche responsibilities instead of holding overall accountability for campaign performance.

Here’s Why That Thinking is Wrong

There are solutions to each of these organizational challenges if you’re open-minded.  And why wouldn’t you be?  The stakes are high.  We already know that a tightly-integrated digital inbound and placed media strategy is critical if you want to get the most out of your marketing budget.  So what holds companies back, and what can be done?

 

Choices

When it comes to implementing a coordinated strategy, you really have four choices.

1. Manage digital inbound & media in-house.

2.  Manage multiple partners and vendors.

3.  Partner with a full-service Digital/Media Agency.

4.  Do nothing.

 

Considerations

What’s the Best Solution for Your Company?

What are the Right Tactics?

What ROI can I Expect, and What Should I Invest to Get it?

Consider these questions when deciding if your overall marketing strategy should be audited:

It is especially important to understand the correlation between traditional advertising and digital marketing investments. For example:

SEO/PPC/Website/Traditional Advertising: What’s the correlation?

• Traditional advertising, branding and direct response campaigns, generate increased direct website traffic and branded search activity (i.e. when a user searches using a phrase like “Joe’s Shoes Harrisburg PA”). Your digital marketing provides a way to show up well in the competitive online environment.  As a complementary strategy, your traditional advertising supplements those efforts by eliminating the clutter, making sure you are also sought out directly.
• When well-tailored messaging drives consumers to a website optimized for conversion, each message optimized for the medium and targeted consumer but tied together by the brand’s vision, your advertising and digital marketing will create an accelerated journey from initial contact, to point-of-purchase (and beyond with remarketing efforts)

“One delivers ROI, the other not so much.”

• False! All marketing investments should be governed by the same metrics to understand how the various “moving parts” generate bottom line costs.  For certain companies this metric may be “What does it cost to get a lead?”  Other companies may seek to understand “What does a new customer REALLY cost?”  Large consumer brands tend to look more generally, “What does a pair of eyeballs cost?”
• When you tie everything together strategically and run it through holistic analysis, you gain a true understanding of customer acquisition. This becomes critical as you make decisions to grow… now you have the tools to establish goals and plan your brand’s path forward with incredible accuracy.

What to Do if You’re Unsure

In a marketing environment that offers hundreds of ways to bombard consumers with messaging, it’s of great importance for your marketing team to lead a unified charge when taking your brand to market.  When “Big Data” and “Big Picture” perspectives align, synergies emerge, creating heightened marketing ROI.  This is only achieved when one over-arching strategy governs the execution of both.  Much like your corporate culture and day-to-day operations; your marketing requires a reliable team capable of executing your vision through collaboration and specialized knowledge.  Are their inefficiencies in your current approach?  Contact us to receive an assessment at no charge.