Among brands, digital advertising and media have slowly taken over as the most popular means of reaching their target audiences. In 2019, digital ad spending will pass traditional ad spending for the first time in the United States, with 54.5 per cent of the market share. Compared with other conventional platforms, such as TV, digital media can generate up to 10x the results at much lower costs. Based on these results, it is not surprising that many brands are spending more time online.
What is offline marketing?
In offline marketing, a company uses traditional offline media such as television, billboard ads, and radio to advertise. Unlike online marketing, which utilises social media channels on the internet, offline promotion doesn’t necessarily require an online connection to succeed. Several studies have shown, however, that multichannel marketing can be more effective when offline and online media work together than when they are kept separate.
Traditional offline media channels remain essential despite the increasing emphasis on digital marketing. Knowing which offline tactics are still valuable and allocating a percentage of the total ad budget is the key to offline media optimisation. To illustrate this, here are four top ways that offline media can work to benefit modern campaigns.
Build brand awareness
The importance of offline media in marketing remains, although digital media drives more sales than advertising. Many audiences’ daily lives are still dominated by television, radio, magazines, newspapers, and other offline media. According to Nielsen, American adults spend 11 hours daily interacting with media. Almost two hours of those 11 hours are spent listening to the radio, and over four hours are spent watching live TV. It’s around seven hours of non-internet related media.
Taking advantage of this opportunity offers you the chance to showcase the name and offerings of your brand to your target audience. Including offline media in your marketing strategy will allow you to reach users who aren’t on their phones or computers or aren’t actively using platforms you already target.
In addition to keeping a brand’s messages and products front of mind for consumers, repeated exposure can create a sense of trust. A brand’s slogan, logo, or jingle can have a nostalgic appeal, especially if it has been used for decades.
Going where customers are
Offline exposure also reaches consumers who may not be active online, such as the elderly or recently retired.
Older audiences are valuable because they often have the time and resources to continue making purchasing decisions. Additionally, they spend more in certain areas that brands might find interesting. According to research, seniors spend the most on transportation, clothing, and pensions/social security. Advertising to the older generation may be more effective for companies in the transport or clothing space.
Older adults are more likely to watch live TV during the day. It would be best to set commercials targeting seniors in the daytime and commercials targeting families in the evenings and weekends in such cases. Advertisers can make the most of their traditional media budget by following offline media optimisation best practices.
Testing new markets
The insights obtained from offline media can also be applied to digital campaigns. Offline media can be helpful when your business is looking for new markets or launching a new location.
Try running campaigns featuring different products or offerings to see what users are most interested in: the results may be surprising. Testing new markets is worthwhile, especially if they haven’t been tested by your company or industry. Since offline behaviour and interaction with media are different from online behaviour, comparing both results with ad campaigns is the only way to understand better what a particular market is interested in.
Converting offline customers to online
Offline media can be used to convert customers to online channels. In the days before the internet, businesses urged customers to visit a location or call a phone number to make a sale.
Although those options still result in a large number of sales for businesses, the web offers customers a greater variety of benefits. They can learn more about a product or service by visiting a company’s website or social media pages. In most cases, customers can purchase what they want or send a contact form anytime, even if the company is closed. In this way, offline media drives sales, raises brand awareness and grows their online audience even when the business is closed.
An offline media campaign can boost online sales, for example, by driving a larger audience online. TV positively affects a brand’s Facebook page reach, according to a study published in the International Journal of Advertising.
How to combine online and offline media
Companies can bridge the gap between their offline and online experiences regardless of the offline media used. A company’s website can be shared through radio or billboard ads, and magazines can promote product launches with specific hashtags or include call-to-actions to visit the company’s social media profiles. Online shoppers can continue the brand relationship and buyer journey virtually through these opportunities.
Brands can gain insight into how customers find them by providing information about their brand through a call-to-action. You can track the success of an offline media campaign by providing URLs. Custom URLs are a great way to see each type of offline media campaign’s impact. You can also use different coupons or promo codes for different campaigns to see which is the most popular. This will give you more information about customers who have come to your website but have not used a coupon code.
Summary
Traditional offline media will continue to serve as a successful tool for cross-channel marketing. The use of digital ads has overtaken traditional means, but this does not mean these methods are no longer worthwhile. Advertisers should tie offline advertising into their digital marketing efforts and continue to believe in its value. It would help if you used unified marketing measurement to measure the traction a cross-channel strategy can get across many different platforms. As a result, you will have a more comprehensive picture of how campaigns impact customer conversions and the broader customer experience.
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